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I just finished a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie and other books in that series. In one of her books she had a line describing her part of the West as "a land that had no people in it". In the 1950s, shortly before she died, a young fan wrote to her and pointed out that there were, in fact, people in it: the Indians. To her credit, Wilder wrote back that she had made a mistake and of course Indians were people, and she had future editions of the book edited to say "a land that had no settlers in it".