"To outfit a wagon to go West with all the supplies necessary cost the inflation adjusted equivalent of about $100K. Wagons, livestock, supplies to live on while travelling and when homesteading before the first harvest came in were not cheap. That’s without considering the materiel you’d need to set up a farm when you got to your homestead."

This may be true, generally, but it was not true of the Ingalls family that your grandparent refers to. Their travel and settlement plans were not the most well thought out ...