Near the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, lies this restored prairie. I am bound for this landscape again in July. It is here at the Hoover Library where many of the papers of Laura Ingalls Wilder, frontier author, lie. I am trying to find the real Laura Ingalls Wilder, pioneer. What kind of a woman was she in real life, when she was working on her famous “Little House” books?

I will spend lunch hours walking through these grasses (perhaps a half-mile loop, mown) It looks something like the prairies of Minnesota and Kansas (but not South Dakota, which was covered in thick buffalo grass or marsh grasses).

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