Gene Stratton-Porter Live at the Indiana History Center

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Thank you, Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are recording this episode live at the Indiana History Center, and I'm figuring out the best place to put my papers, which I thought I had figured out earlier. One of the current exhibits that's running here until October twenty sixth of this year, twenty twenty four, is called Limberlost and Found, and it's about Jean Stratton Porter. She was one of the best selling authors in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and an illustrator and a nature photographer and a naturalist and a film producer, so so many things we are going to be talking about, among other things in this episode, farm life and the world of nineteenth century naturalists. So there's gonna be some harm to animals that comes up in this episode. This is stuff that Jean Strattonporter was trying to prevent. Also, I didn't write this on the outline, but you know, we're in in Indiana and probably there are folks in the room that are very fond of Jean Strattonporter. If you don't know about the books that she was writing in California, brace for that part of today's episode. Not all was awesome. That's okay though, Yeah so yeah, But there's plenty of fun so. Geneva Grace Stratton was born on August seventeenth, eighteen sixty three, on a farm in Wabash County, Indiana. Her parents were Mark and Mary Stratton, and she was their twelfth child. She was born six years after the birth of her next oldest sibling, when her mother was forty seven and her father was fifty. Little bit of a surprise baby. They really thought they were done having children before she came along. Here is how her father described her mother about the time they got married, which I find lovely. A quote, ninety pound bit of pink porcelain pink is a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman, Mary. He also said that God had fashioned her heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her special gift of grace, he put flower magic into her fingers and that flower magic, of course, was a green thumb, and both of her parents, both Mary and Mark, really loved nature and art. May we all have such things written about us. It's a right, I'm so sweet. But Mark's description of his wife wasn't entirely true regarding her health. By the time their youngest daughter was a toddler, Mary contracted while nursing some of the children through it, and she was chronically ill for the rest of her life as a consequence. So Geneva's care and upbringing were left mostly to her father and her older siblings, who I said that oddly like I was choking. I'm fine. Her father was a farmer and a minister, and at least until it was time for Geneva to start school, this upbringing was simultaneously very religiously devout and also kind of haphazard. So later on, Jeane herself described it this way quote By the day, I trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of made up phrases about everything I saw while I waited, catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak. Much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for a woman child frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets. Or, in the words of an early biographical sketch that was printed along with some of her books, quote, this youngest child of a numerous household spent her waking hours with the wild. She followed her father and the boys afield, and when tired out, slept on their coats in fence corners. Often awaking with shy creatures peering into her face, She wandered where she pleased, amusing herself with the birds, flowers, insects, and plates she invented. So Geneva developed a deep affinity for all the birds that lived on the farm, including the ones that her father thought should be destroyed because they were predators or because they ate the crops. So when he said that the woodpeckers should be killed because they ate the cherries from the trees, Geneva offered to stop eating cherries so that the birds could just have her share. Right When her father shot a chicken hawk because it was a predator and she found it injured but alive, she begged to be allowed to rescue it because it was never going to fly again, it wasn't going to hurt the animals on the farm. She took it into the barn and she tended its wounds, and it survived, and afterward it followed her around the farm like a pet. Right. I mean, I can't be the only one envisioning foghorn like horn, right, like I and his little chickenhok friend. Eventually, though, her father told her that he was giving her the quote personal and indisputable ownership of all of the birds on his land. She tried to learn about all of these birds and where they lived, and then, charmingly, she chose sixty four of the nests on the property that she visited every single day, carrying pockets full of tidbits to feed the babies in them, after having figured out what each species ate, and the family started calling her little bird woman. Right, that's my response to everything in this episode. When Geneva was nine, though, the family experience as a series of tragedies. Two of her older siblings had previously died of illnesses while they were still children, and then in February of eighteen seventy two, her sister Maryanne died after an accident, and then on July sixth of that year, her brother Leander, who was known as Laddie, drowned while trying to swim across the Wabash River, and then another boy named Wallace Kurnitt, who had tried to save him, drowned as well. This was of course completely devastating for the entire family. Geneva had really adored Laddie and almost kind of idolized him, and she was absolutely inconsolable. But he had also been the only one of her brothers who had any interest in taking over the family farm. Her father was turning sixty at this point, and this meant that he really no longer had the help that he needed on the farm, and he also no longer had a plan for its future. Ultimately, the Strattons sold a lot of their possessions and they rented out a farm, and they moved to the town of Wabash to live with Geneva's older sister Anastasia and her family. This gave her mother Mary, some more consistent access to medical care than they'd had back on the farm, which was about ten miles out of town. But Mary died on February third of eighteen seventy five, at the age of fifty eight, and that was just a few months after making this move, and then after her mother's death, Geneva became a bit more rebellious. It had taken her a very long time to reconcile herself to having to put on layers of dresses and underclothes and shoes that hurt her feet, just as she could go to school every day, and once she got there to not contradict her teachers even when she knew they were wrong. She continued to struggle, and she didn't really fit in with her peers, who made fun of her. She was a farmer's daughter, and for a lot of the eighteen seventies the nation was in an economic recession, which meant she was also particularly poor in addition to feeling like an outsider at school. She wanted things, but for a long time they just couldn't afford, like lessons in music and painting. By high school, though, she'd become a better student and a lot of the subjects that she was taking, except for math, and according to her own account, which I have some questions about, but we're just going to take it at base value, she learned that she had a knack for writing after turning in a paper on her favorite novel instead of the math paper that she had been assigned. But this paper was so good that the teacher summoned the school superintendent to hear her read it, even though it was not even the assignment. After this success, she spent more and more time writing and pursuing her own interests, less and less time on her actual schoolwork. Later on, she said that she had left school to take care of her dying sister, Anastasia in the last months of her life, which she did take care of her sister, but her grades were really beyond repair before that happened. She did still really like to learn, though, and she made regular summer visits to the Island Park Assembly, a Chautauqua gathering on sylvanlink. Did I say that correct? You did good? It's not something I encountered as a child. The Chautauqua movement was an adult education movement in the US, although different communities arranged these assemblies and gatherings in different ways. Indiana's Western Chautauqua had started out as a conference for Methodist Sunday school teachers before expanding into both religious and secular lectures and activities, as well as posting social events. So when Geneva Stratton attended the Island Park Assembly in July of eighteen eighty four, when she was twenty, she was using a cane and wearing dark glasses part of the time because she had slipped on the ice and cracked her skull the winter before. While there, she caught the attention of Charles Dorwin Porter, who was about thirteen years older than she was. They did not actually speak to each other at this assembly, but he noticed her from afar. They kind of passed by each other at various points, and in September he wrote her a letter, and we're just going to read a couple sentences from it, but it is indicative of the tone of all of it. Quote, having been rather favorably impressed with your appearance, I venture the forwardness to address you, barring the rules of etiquette and asking your pardon, I would respectfully solicit a correspondence from you. So the idea of a young, unmarried woman writing letters to a strange man that she and her family had never been introduced to was scandalous, but Geneva was really not one to care about such rules, and so she wrote back. The two of them exchanged letters over the next several months before for meeting and actually having a conversation in person. They did that at the next Chautauqua gathering in eighteen eighty five, and within a few months of that first in person meeting, they were engaged. So these letters do seem to like they genuinely grew very fond of each other. She had reservations about the idea of marriage, though before her correspondence with Charles, she had never shown any particular interest in boys or men, and in one of her letters to him, she spelled out how she thought marriage meant something different for men than it did for women. Quote. I regard the pure and lovable wife as the best safeguard for a man's honor and purity, the comfortable and happy home as his rightful and natural resting place, and every loving environment that springs from sessa tie one step nearer the heart of Earth's dearest and best that's for the man and for every such home. Some woman is the sacrificial flame that feeds the altar. I take notice that my girlfriends who have been engaged a year and those who have been married a year look vastly different, and it sets me to pondering all the differences between a man's engaged love and his married love. So, even though she was suspicious and thought marriage might be shady, they did get married on April twenty first, eighteen eighty six, and they had that ceremony at her sister Ada's house. And by this point, Geneva had started going by the shortened form of her name, Jean. That was even the name that was printed on the calling card that was sent along with the invitations. And although she published under the name Jean Stratton Porter in her day to day life, she was more often known socially as missus Porter. We will talk about her life more about getting married. After a quick sponsor break. After her marriage, Jean Strattonporter and her husband, Charles moved to Decatur, Indiana. Charles I think my read on it is that he genuinely loved Jane and he wanted her to be happy, and he thought this would be the best place for her to make a home. He was a druggist and sort of a self made businessman. He owned stores in Geneva, Indiana and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Decatur was kind of in between them approximately, so it was also the county seat. It was somewhere that he thought she would find friends and have a social life. But Jeane had never really fit in. According to a biography that was written by her daughter, in her youth, she always had some particular intimate girlfriend, but the other children often made fun of her clothes and her demeanor. They didn't really know what to make of this girl who looked after a continual stream of orphaned and injured birds and so tromped around in the woods and swamps. She just didn't fit the social marase of the day. And then as a grown woman and decaturs, she didn't know anybody and she didn't really relate to the social standards for women in the nineteenth century. Charles was also away most of the time, commuting to Geneva or Fort Wayne to look after his businesses. And then things got a little bit better after she gave birth to their only child, Jeannette, on August twenty seventh, eighteen eighty seven. Jeane loved being a mom. She delighted in her daughter, and this gave her something to focus on, but she still struggled a little bit. In eighteen eighty eight, Jane convinced Charles to move to Geneva. That was where the larger of his two stores was. He also had other businesses there, and this drastically reduced how much time he spent away from home. He was no longer spending all of his time commuting by train to one of these two cities. It also meant that Jane was surrounded by a natural landscape that was a lot more like what she had grown to love in her youth. They moved into a cottage that had a chicken coop and an orchard, and it was close to the Wabash River. Then soon she had a whole new collection of pet birds. A lot of them were ones that she had rescued or rehabilitated after some kind of injury. And then they also had a pet parrot. She played the piano and she tried to teach all of these birds to accompany her on it. She also did needlework and painted. She had finally gotten some art lessons as a child back in Wabash. Sadly, Jean's father, Mark died on January tenth, eighteen ninety and he died without a will, and his estate was not settled for almost two decades, and that whole process involved a huge amount of family and in law drama, and there's a big focus on how Jean Strattonporter defied gender expectations. But she was also very devoted to her family and she was often the first person to show up when there was some kind of problem. So the ongoing issues with her father's estate were just one of many things that was pulling at her attention over the years. Another thing was money. As the child of a farmer and minister, Jean had grown up without much of it, and then marrying Charles had definitely been an economic step up, but he also didn't have as much money as she'd sort of expected based on his track record as a successful businessman. Often the money existed, but it wasn't like liquid cash he had access to. He would invest it into other things, like he invested a lot of money in starting a bank. That was something the town of Geneva really needed, but it meant that they didn't then have a lot for luxuries, not a lot of liquidity. In the wake of her father's death, Jean started writing, both to try to deal with her anxieties and with the hope that maybe she could maybe earn a little bit of money of her own. It's possible that she was the author of an anonymously published book called The Strike at Shame, which was written for an American Humane Education Society contest in eighteen ninety three. That story bears some similarities to Stratton Porter's life and the people that she knew, but all of the evidence that she wrote it is really circumstantial. We don't know for sure. The family's financial situation also changed with the oil boom in the area. There was oil under land that Charles owned, and that land would ultimately become home to sixty oil wells. The income from all of this oil meant they were able to start building a new home, which they called Limberlost Cabin thanks to its proximity to Limberlost Swamp. Construction on this home started in eighteen ninety four, and they moved in in eighteen ninety five. Not long after their move to Limberlost Cabin, Stratton Porter once again demonstrated how she was just not what people expected a woman to be. A fire broke out in Geneva one night, and since there was no fire department, she was the one who organized the bucket brigade she was wearing her slippers and a skirt that was thrown on over her nightgown. She did not stop even after embers burned through her slippers, and she was later commended for her actions. That fire was a major disaster for Geneva, and most of the buildings were both wooden and underinsured, and that meant that they burned and Charles's money was a major part of the town's recovery. Jean's daughter, Jeanette, gave her a camera as a Christmas gift in eighteen ninety five. Jean became an avid photographer, developing her pictures in the bathroom with towels shoved under the door to block the light. Apparently, she became so good at developing pictures and her cobbled together set up that one of the manufacturers of photographic paper sent somebody out to her house to see how she was doing it. That camera turned out to be just an extremely fortunate gift. Stratton Porter had been trying to publish articles about nature and wildlife in outdoor magazines, but her work had been rejected because it wasn't illustrated and people wanted to see pictures. Overwhelmingly bird illustrations that were done at the time were based on dead taxidermy birds, and Jean Strattonporter hated that entire idea. She both didn't like the fact that the birds were dead, and she also thought it resulted in just poor quality illustrations. For example, she said that John James Audubon's bird illustrations looked like they had been cut out with a scroll saw a big fan. We can all hate on John James Audubon. A camera, though, meant that she could photograph the live birds she was writing about, and a few years later she described her process in her book What I Have Done with Birds, Character studies of Native American birds, which, through friendly advances I induced to pose for me or succeeded in photographing by good fortune, with the story of my experiences in obtaining their pictures. Uh are you like Tracy? Were you in love with this woman? At this point? I sure was quote The greatest thing possible to do with a bird is to win its confidence. In a few days work about most nests the birds can be taught. So to trust me that such studies can be made as here are presented of young and old, male and female. I am not superstitious but I am afraid to mistreat a bird, and luck is with me in the indulgence of this spear. In all my years of fieldwork, not one study of a nest or of any bird has been lost by dealing fairly with my subjects. If a nest is located where access is impossible without moving it, and exposure is not attempted, and so surely as the sun rises on another morning, another nest of the same species is found within a few days where a reproduction of it can be made. Also addressed the criticism that because she was a woman, she should not be doing this kind of field work, and her thoughts on this are an example of simultaneously defying and also reinforcing gender roles. She wrote quote recently, in summing up the hardship's incident to securing one study of a brooding swamp bird, a prominent nature lover and editor said to me most emphatically, that is not women's work. I do not agree with you, I answered, in its hardships in waiting, swimming, climbing, in hidden dangers, suddenly to be confronted in abrupt changes from heat to cold and from light to dark. Field photography is not a woman's work, but in the matter of finesse, in approaching the birds, in limitless patients, in awaiting the exact moment for the best exposure, in the tedious and delicate processes of the dark room, in the art of winning bird babies and parents. It is not a man's work. No man has ever had the patience to remain with a bird until he secured a real character study of it. A human mother is best fitted to understand and deal with a bird mother. This is the basis of all my field work, a mute contract between woman and bird. You can find various papers about how gender works in all of their writing about her work and what she thought about men. A lot of this field work took place in Limberlost Swamp, and that's something that Charles was really upset about when he learned she was doing it. The swamp could be dangerous and disorienting, and according to legend, it was named for a man known as Limberjim who had gotten lost there. To kind of give you a sense of its reputation. For a while, Jeane promised to stay out of the swamp, but then she heard that someone had found a black vulture's nest deep within the swamp. Charles went with her to find it. I think he understood that if he did not go with her, she was gonna go anyway. And like we said, I do think he wanted her to be happy. And they found the nest. Day after day went back as she photographed the nest and the egg in it, and the baby vulture that hatched out of it, which they named little chicken. That sounds cute, and in fact there's a picture of the baby vulture in the exhibit upstairs. It is very cute. But this was also not pleasant. This was way deep in the swamp. There were a lot of bugs and dense underbrush, and since vultures feed on carrion, it smelled horrible. Both of them wore hip waiters to do this, and they carried firearms in case they ran into any venomous snakes. Stratton Porter's first published essay came out in the magazine Recreation in nineteen hundred. It did not include pictures, but it was about birds, specifically the wildly popular nineteenth century practice of wearing bird feathers, bird wings, and entire taxidermy birds on women's hats. She wrote, quote, all my life. I have worn birds and parts of birds as hat decorations, and have given the matter no thought. Had I thought on the subject, I should have reformed long ago. For no one appreciates the beauty of the birds, the joy of their songs, or the study of their habits more than I do. And few have spent more time in the woods and along the water studying and photographing them. The war recreation has waged against the slaughter of birds for millinery purposes has so impressed me that I have decided never again to buy a bird, or any portion of a bird, for hat or bonnet trimming. She started to have some success after publishing her nature writing and wanted to move into fiction, but she wrote of this quote, being so afraid of failure and the inevitable ridicule in a community where I was already severely criticized on account of my ideas of house key, being, dress, and social customs, I purposely kept everything I did as quiet as possible. It had to be known that I was interested in everything afield and making pictures, also that I was writing field sketches for nature publications. But little was thought of it, save as one more peculiarity in me. She got a post office box so her publishing correspondence wouldn't go to Charles at the bank, and she intentionally submitted her work to magazines that he did not subscribe to. Her first published work of fiction that we know about for sure was Laddie, the Princess and the Pie that was in Metropolitan magazine in nineteen oh one, and it was of course inspired by her late brother. She continued to publish both fiction and nonfiction in magazines, and her first novel, The Song of the Cardinal, came out in nineteen oh three. This was the story of a loving pair of cardinals that had grown out of a short story she had written after finding the body of one that had been shot. She dedicated this novel to the memory of her father, who had once said that he would rather have one of his children write a book that he could be proud of than to sit on the throne of England. And this book was generally well reviewed, with one reviewer even saying that it might do for birds what Black Beauty had done for horses. But it just didn't sell very well. So her next book, which was titled Freckles, was about people and it had a lot of the traits of most of Jean Stratton Porter's novels. It was set in the Limberlost Swamp area, and it was heavily infused with the natural world of this part of Indiana and her experiences there, including the discovery of that vulture nests that we talked about a moment ago. It featured a very sentimental story with a happy ending, including an orphaned boy who turns out to be the nephew of a lord. That brings up some complications though since it raises class issues with the book's other primary protagonist, who is a brave teenage girl known only as the Swamp Angel. Freckles became a bestseller, and eventually Jean Strattonporter worked out a deal with Doubleday, Page and Company to alternate writing non fiction books on nature with works of fiction, with those novels also including a lot of nature in them. Sometimes these alternating books kind of dovetailed into each other, like A Girl of the Limberlost, which was another bestseller, tells the story of el Nora, whose mother is a widow, and Elnor earns the money to pay for clothes and books so that she can go to school by selling moths specimens. A Girl of the Limberlost came out in nineteen oh nine, and people were so interested in all these moths that Stratton Porter followed it with Moths of the Limberlost with watercolor and photographic Illustrations from Life in nineteen twelve. And this book included extensive studies of moths that she had made in her conservatory, starting with the cocoons that she collected out in the swamps and the woods and the fields, and she would observe and photograph them through every stage of their life cycle. Jean Stratton Porter's books made her both famous and quite rich, and we're going to talk about all of that after we first have a sponsor break. By nineteen fourteen, Jean Strattonporter and her husband moved from Limberlost Cabin to a new home that she'd built in Rome City on Sylvan Lake. She had paid for this with her own money. She had wanted more privacy as she had become famous, she was facing endless interruptions from curious readers who kind of showed up at Limberlost Cabin to meet her. Don't do that. On top of that, by this point, a lot of Limberlost swamp had been drained or cut down, and she was deeply saddened by this loss, and she wrote about it in her book Moths of the Limberlost, expressing gratitude for how much time she had spent in the swamp immediately after moving there. Quote, it was a piece of forethought to work unceasingly at that time. For soon commerce attacked the swamp and began its usual process of devastation. Canadian lumbermen came, seeking tall, straight timber for ship masts and tough, heavy trees for beams. Grand rapids followed and stripped the forest for hardwood for fine furniture, And through my experience with the lumberman freckles story was written. Afterward, hoop and stavemen and local mills took the best of the soft wood. Then a ditch in reality a canal was dredged across the north end through my best territory, and that carried the water to the Wabash River until oil men could enter the swamp. From that time, the wealth they drew to the surface constantly materialized in macadamized roads, cozy homes, and big farms of unsurpassed richness. Suitable for growing onions, celery, sugar beets, corn and potatoes, As repeatedly has been explained in everything I have written of the place. Now the lumber loss exists only in ragged spots and patches. But so rich was it in the beginning, that there is yet a wealth of work for a lifetime remaining to me in these and river thickets. I asked no better hunting grounds for birds, moths and flowers. The fine roads are a convenience, and settled farms of protection to be taken into consideration when bewailing its dismantling. It is quite true that one man's meat is another's poison. One of the things that Strattonporter did at her new home, which she called the Cabin at Wildflower Woods, was to try to save as many plant species as possible from destruction. She worked with a tree surgeon to restore the forest on their property, and then also transplanted wildflowers and other plants from Indiana's rapidly diminishing forests and swamps, going from swamp to swamp ahead of drainage plans and bringing back as many plants as she possibly could. A number of species that she replanted at the cabin at wildflower woods are endangered today. She also protested against the ongoing draining of swamps and other wetlands, which had become widespread after the passage of the Federal swamp Land Act of eighteen fifty. This law gave states the right to reclaim and drain swamplands, including allowing the sale of federally owned swampland to private owners. She protested legislation passed by the Indiana General Assembly in nineteen seventeen which allowed the drainage of state owned swampland. That legislation was repealed in nineteen twenty. Aside from that success, the nineteen teens were pretty difficult for Jean Strattonporter. There were a number of deaths in her family, including her brother, whose name was spelled Lemon, but he might have said it Laman. He died of heart disease in nineteen sixteen. Jean took in his teenage daughter, Lee Mary, who she loved, but this meant she was going back to being a parent, years after her own daughter had gotten married and had children of her own. Paramount released a silent film adaptation of her book Freckles in nineteen seventeen, which she really did not like. Then, after the United States became involved in World War One, her employee, Bill Thompson, who had been sort of part driver, part handyman, part chauffeur, and part field assistant, he went off to war, and because of the war, she couldn't really replace him because Jean Strattonporter couldn't drive. This meant she was stuck at home a lot of the time, but once again people had figured out where she lived. She not only was annoyed by all of these unannounced intrusions into her privacy, but also a lot of these visitors seemed content to just trample all over her carefully transplanted and well tended plants. In nineteen eighteen, at the age of fifty four, Jean went to the Clifton Spring Sanitarium and Clinic for the sake of her health, and this had become a retreat that catered to the wealthy and famous. She went with her secretary and she stayed there for about a month and seemed to be feeling better when she left. But then in nineteen nineteen, she contracted the pandemic flu. Perhaps unsurprisingly, once she recovered from the flu, she wanted to make a change, and in the spring of nineteen nineteen she went to California. She had siblings who already lived there, and this also put her in proximity to the silent film industry. She kind of went back and forth between the two places for a while, but she eventually moved there permanently, and her husband, Charles didn't come with her. He wound up living in a boarding house in Geneva. None of the sources used in this episode really shed much light onto the state of their relationship at this point. My just sort of gut sense of it is that it seems like he was really supportive of what she wanted to do with her life, and she kind of got left behind at this point. Eventually, her daughter did come to live with her, along with her grandchildren. That was after Jeanette's own marriage had ended in divorce, and Stratton Porter found that the things that had made her feel like an outcast in Indiana really did not seem to raise eyebrows very much in California. She had more friends there than she had had at any point in her life. She also loved the light and the flowers, and she started to think about how to make a California version of her cabin at Wildflower Woods, complete with its own nature preserves. She also continued writing, and in nineteen twenty one she published a novel called Her Father's Daughter. Unlike her previous novels that were mainly set around Limberlost Swamp and really drew from her deep knowledge of the natural landscape there, this one was said in Los Angeles, where she'd only been for a couple of years. She dedicated it to her niece's husband, James sweetsir Lache, and she said, quote to whom I owe all that I know about the flowers of California. So one of the plot lines in Her Father's Daughter is about its protagonist, Linda Strong, and her white classmates and their antipathy for a Japanese student who is at the top of the class. Linda talks a lot about the so called Yellow Peril, the idea that Asians presented a threat to white society, and starting on the first page, she repeatedly references her Japanese classmate using a slur that was in widespread use at the time, and she makes unquestionably bigoted statements about people of other non white races as well. Eventually, in the story, the Japanese student is revealed to be a grown man who has pretended to be a high schooler for nefarious reasons, and after being discovered, he tries to kill Linda and some of her classmates by crushing them with a boulder, but instead he falls from a cliff and dies. It just keeps getting worse. It's like every sentence of the synopsis is worse than the one before it. Jean Strattenporter wrote this book at a time of intense and escalating prejudice and racism against Japanese people in the United States. This was particularly pronounced on the West Coast. This is something we have many episodes referencing in the archive. And overall, this book, which sounds horrific, was really well received in this climate. Her Father's Daughter reached number two on the publisher's weekly bestseller list, and ads for the book that ran the following year said that it had sold a million copies. A number of reviews by white writers were really positive. They described the book and the character of Into Strong as her best one so far. The one exception that was found by various sources used for the episode was in the Bookman, an article titled the Why of the best seller by Yale English professor William Lyon Phelps. He described the book as quote sadly marred by anti Japanese propaganda, continuing quote, somebody in California has been stuffing our novelist, who is more gullible in international politics than in the study of nature. An article that was published in nineteen seventy one speculates that Stratton Porter took inspiration from a real Japanese student who was a commencement speaker at his graduation in Riverside, California, in nineteen oh five. His speech was on his birthplace of Japan, which he had recently visited. Meanwhile, one of the other speakers was a white student named Nelly, who spoke on the so called white man's burden to carry the load of inferior races. And there are a couple of later publications that have picked up this speculation, which is just that as though it were fact. Yeah, a Japanese student with good grades and a white girl being racist seemed to be the extent of the similarities between this high school graduation that happened in real life and Jean Stratton Porter's novel. And there's not really like evidence to back up the idea that this could have been her inspiration. It's not clear how she would have known about it, that graduation ceremony in Riverside that had happened for real. That was almost fifteen years before Jean Strattonporter moved to California. Stratton Porter had also started writing and publishing more poetry while she was in California, and in nineteen twenty two she wrote a book in Verse called The Firebird that was inspired in part by the photography work of Edward S. Curtis. Curtis published photographs of Indigenous people between nineteen oh seven and nineteen thirty. Eventually this total twenty volumes and was thousands and thousands of pictures. Curtis has his own complicated legacy. He was working from the perspective of someone who thought he was documenting vanishing peoples, and to that end, he staged photos that used cultural objects and items without regard to whether they actually belonged to the communities that he was photographing. This had some similarities to The Firebird because Stratton Porter seems to have intended this as a sympathetic depiction of Indigenous people, but she was appropriating their stories and intermingling aspects of different indigenous traditions into one work. By nineteen twenty four, Stratton Porter had started her own movie production company, Jean Stratton Porter Productions. This was one of the first movie production companies in the United States to be owned by a woman. One of the directors she employed was James Leomeihan, who had married her daughter Jeanette in nineteen twenty three. Here is Jeannette's description of her mother's efforts to get her books made into movies. Quote. Mother encountered the same difficulties with her first pictures that she did with her first books. She was assured by producers that they would not be popular because there was not sufficient action. There were no hair raising thrills, there were no violent sex problems, and there was too much nature and too much sugary romance. But mother went serenely on her way with her same old motto of be sure that you are right and then go ahead, and she trusted people to like the pictures just as they liked the books. Time has proved that she was eminently correct. I heard the quote about no hair raising thrills and no violent sex problems in short documentary about her, and I was like, I've got to go find more of this, more of this quote. One of her last novels, Keeper of the Bees, was written with the specific goal of turning it into a movie. This told the story of a World War One veteran recovering from the physical and mental after effects of the war by becoming a bee keeper. One of its character is a plucky girl named Little Scout, who was patterned after Stratton Porter's granddaughter, Jean, to whom she also dedicated the book. Jean Stratton Porter Productions made this into a film in nineteen twenty five. In nineteen twenty four, Jean Stratton Porter started building a mansion in what would become bel Air, which would have separate quarters for her husband, Charles, as well as a vacation home on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. I said, Los Angeles with a tea. I don't know what's going on there. I'm gonna make it fencey. But on December sixth of nineteen twenty four, she died at the age of sixty one when the chauffeurd car that she was riding in collided with a street car. Initially her body was held in a temporary vault before being buried in California. Then, in nineteen ninety nine, the remains of both Jean Stratton Porter and her daughter Jeanette were exhumed and reinterred in a monument on the grounds of the Cabinet Wildflower Woods. This was done after years of fundraising and with the involved of Jeanette's sons. At the time of her death, Jean Strattonporter was one of the most famous and best selling writers in the United States. During her lifetime, she wrote twelve novels, seven nonfiction nature books, and numerous poems, articles, columns, and essays. Her work was translated into more than a dozen languages. Seven films had been made of her books prior to her death, and then there were many, many more of them later on. Her books reached an estimated fifty million readers, and people like Rachel Carson cited her as an influence. Her impact on people's interest in nature and conservation was compared to that of Teddy Roosevelt, but her work was not really taken seriously by literary critics. They saw it as formulaic and overly sentimental. Here's an example of what she had to say to someone who called it molasses fiction quote, what a wonderful compliment all the world love sweets a field, bears as well as flies would drown in it. Molasses is more necessary to the happiness of human and beast than vinegar, and over indulgence in it not nearly so harmful to the system. I am a molasses person myself, So is my family, So was my father's family. So are most of my friends, all of them who are happy. As a matter of fact. So I shall keep straight on writing of the love and joy of life I have found in the world. And when I have used the last drop of my molasses, I shall stop writing. Her work as a writer started out when she and her husband were living largely on oil money, which can feel a little contradictory, and she also wasn't taken seriously by most naturalists and ornithologists because she had no formal training and no advanced education. But she spent so much of her life carefully and lovingly documenting the flora and fauna of Limberlost Swamp and the surrounding areas, and advocating for conservation in the environment. In addition to laws allowing the drainage of state owned wetlands that we talked about before. She wrote to President Calvin Coolidge advocating against a plant to drain Mississippi bottom land. She advocated for preservation of things like eagle habitats. She didn't really know the science behind it, but she correctly connected the mass destructions of forests and wetlands to the disruption of rainfall patterns and a warming climate. She had actually tried to get the state of Indiana to purchase Wildflower Woods as a nature preserve before she moved to California, and that sale did not happen at the time. But today the Cabinet Wildflower Woods is Jean Stratton Porter State Historic Site and it includes one hundred and forty eight acres of gardens, fields, and forests. The cabin preserves much of her furniture and decor, including her collection of moths. There have been efforts to reverse the draining of parts of Limberlost Swamp and to protect and conserve these and other wetland. This includes Limberlost Historic Site, Limberlost Swamp Wetland Preserve, Music of the Wild Nature Preserve. It's named after some of her work, I Think and lob Lolly Marsh Nature Preserve and that is Jean Stratton Porter. So that was our live show that we recorded in Indianapolis. Thanks so much to the staff of the Eugene and Marylandlick, Indiana History Center. They have been such a treat to work with both times we have been there. In lieu of regular listener mail, I also just wanted to shout out to every single person who came to the meet and greet and talk to us beforehand. Yes, we had such a good time. I know we were not one hundred percent awesome at meeting out how much time people got in the beginning, so some of it at the end got kind of a rushed experience. I also wanted to make sure there was someone that did not come to the meet and greet, but they hand it off gifts for us. Yeah, to our contact, and I believe their name is Carol. I think Carol is what it looks like on the on the bag. Yeah. Mine. I couldn't read very well to begin with, and then in the ride home some of it got rebuffs. So Carol, thank you so much. It is so thoughtful and sweet and I'm sorry we weren't able to collect those in person and the person who brought us stickers. Also, the stickers are in my bag, so I cannot refresh my memory on their name either, but thank you. Also, yes, stickers key to my heart. Yeah. So thanks everyone who came to the show. Thanks everyone who came to the meet and greet. Thanks again, staff at the Eugene and Marylyn Click Indiana History Center. If you would like to drop us a note about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over social media at miss and History. 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