Laddie: A True Blue Story by Gene Stratton Porter. Gene Stratton-Porter was an American author, early naturalist, nature photographer, and one of the first women to form a movie studio and production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, Inc. She wrote several best-selling novels and well-received columns in national magazines, such as McCall's. Her works were translated into several languages, including Braille, and Stratton-Porter was estimated to have had 50 million readers around the world. In addition to writing works of natural history, Stratton-Porter became a wildlife photographer, specializing in the birds and moths in the Limberlost Swamp, one of the last of the wetlands of the lower Great Lakes Basin. The Limberlost Swamp and Cabin at Wildflower Woods of Northeastern Indiana were the laboratories for her studies and inspiration for her stories, novels, essays, photography, and movies. There is evidence that Stratton-Porter's first book was The Strike at Shane's which was published anonymously. Her first attributed novel, The Song of the Cardinal, met with great commercial success. Her novels Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost, and The Harvester are set in the wooded wetlands and swamps of the disappearing central Indiana ecosystems. She knew and loved these, and documented them extensively. Stratton-Porter wrote more than 20 books, both novels and natural history.