A Midwesterner’s Ventures onto the Plains

started a chain (two) of coffee houses in Seattle during the Depression. Starbucks it did not be come, so a few years later we returned home to family in Decorah, Iowa, settling in the longstanding family home on 5th Avenue. It was, in my estimation, the best place one could find to grow up. With a lively interest in nature, stimu lated by my mother and grandmother, the rocky parks, cold springs, and the wandering Upper Iowa River of that unglaciated corner of northeast Iowa quickly became a part of me. Out of enthusiasm for my surroundings grew an awareness of and appreciation for the Native Americans, who had lived there before the English