Plum Creek is a real town in Minnesota.All of the other places in the books are also either based on real places or are themselves also actual places in other parts of the Midwest.If I am remembering correctly the Ingalls family lived in such states as Michigan,Kansas,Minnesota,Nebraska and South Dakota.

Yep - the stories are altogether thinly-fictionalised versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder's real experiences, actually.

Funnily enough, the TV series actually picked up on a couple incidents the books left out - the death of the infant Charles Jr., for instance, and the year spent as hotel caretakers in town (in real life Burr Oak, Iowa).