There is a town named Salem in more than half of the states.

In the lyrics included in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the narrator sets off from Salem City, not Alabama. The only problem is that there are dozens of towns in the United States named Salem.

Since Wilder’s books were based on her childhood near Independence, Kansas, a first guess might be that the Salem referenced in this line is either Salem, Oklahoma, or Salem, Missouri. They are both more than 300 miles from Independence, but they are the closer than any of the more than 20 other Salems.

A landlocked Salem, however, would be a poor guess, as the gold seeker of the song traveled to California by boat. Clearly a miner setting off from the Midwest would have taken an overland route to the West Coast. This logic also allows us to cross off the Salems in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin. Salem, Kentucky, and Salem, West Virginia, would also seem unlikely.

That leaves us with the Salems located in Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, and Virginia. We can probably eliminate Oregon; the city was founded in 1842, less than a decade before the Gold Rush, and the dramatic lines in subsequent verses would hardly describe a quick sail down the West Coast.

Among the remaining candidates, Salem, Massachusetts, is the safest guess. Thanks to the witch trials of 1692, it was the most famous Salem in America. It is also a port city, and Salem port records (kept for a time by ) reveal that ships did leave the port filled with prospectors headed for California in 1849.