Words from an Early Naturalist

Gene Stratton-Porter

In my post last week, I wrote about discovering a book that had belonged to my 2x Great-Grandma. It was meaningful to me because I am a booklover. I was more excited to discover that the author, Gene Stratton-Porter, had been born Geneva Grace Stratton, and was a woman. Then, researching the book and the author led to the discovery that she was an early and avid naturalist, writing her books of fiction, ripe with a wealth of knowledge of the doings of the natural world, so that she could support her books and articles of non-fiction.

This voice from the past was more than just a connection to one of my ancestors. I see the effects of cutting down forest to build more city as the deer and coy dog populations become more and more visible in my city. The sight of eagles and hawks within the limits is becoming so common as to not be a novelty anymore. Why is that? Because their homes are disappearing for the sake of our comforts. It was both heartening and heartbreaking to discover Gene Stratton-Porter’s own words on the loss of her beloved natural world, almost a hundred years ago.

I found a description of her from biographer Frederic Cooper: “Gene Stratton-Porter lives in a swamp, arrays herself in man’s clothes, and sallies forth in all weathers to study the secrets of nature. I believe she knows every bug, bird, and beast in the woods… She is primarily a naturalist, one of the foremost in America and has published a number of books on flora and fauna…”

Voices from the Ancestors

The Limberlost marsh in Indiana was a favored place of the author at one period of her life, reflected in several of her books, most popularly in A Girl of the Limberlost. She was devastated when the trees and natural habitats of her animal friends were cleared to make room for farmland. And she watched in despair as oil drilling destroyed the marshlands. She spoke out against it, even though her husband owned many oil rigs.

Gene Stratton-Porter wrote several essays on environmental issues in a book, Let Us Highly Resolve, printed posthumously, in 1927. She watched her beloved swamplands get cleared for farming and oil. In her article “Shall We Save Our Natural Beauty?” she says: “The deer and fur-bearing animals are practically gone from the country I knew… The birds have been depleted in numbers until it is quite impossible to raise fruit of any kind without a continuous fight against slugs and aphis… With the cutting of timber has come a change in climate; weeks of drought in the summer…and winters so stringently cold that the fruit trees are killed outright. The even temperature and the rains every three or four days which we knew in childhood are things of the past…it has become necessary for the sons of men who wasted the woods and the waters to put in overhead sprinkling systems… windmills and irrigation are becoming common…as a nation, [we] have already, in the most wanton and reckless waste the world has ever known, changed our climate conditions and wasted a good part of our splendid heritage. The question now facing us is whether we shall do all that lies in our power to save comfortable living conditions for ourselves and the spots of natural beauty that remain for our children… If this is to be done, a nation-wide movement must be begun immediately…there may not be coal and iron, at the rate we are using it, to supply future generations… Certainly to plant trees and preserve trees, to preserve water, and to do all in our power to save every natural resource, both from the standpoint of utility and beauty, is a work that every man and woman should give immediate and earnest attention.”

Gene wrote her articles in the hopes of sharing the “often-overlooked beauty and complexity of wildlife.” She regarded it more highly than the social affairs and proprieties she saw within her world. Of the loss of habitat in the Limberlost marsh, she notes the inevitable climate change: “They had forgotten that draining the water from all these acres of swamp land would dry and heat the air… and they had not figured out for themselves how much rainfall they would take from their crops… [A]s the forests fell, the creeks and springs dried up… the work of changing the climatic conditions of a world was underway… the fur-bearing animals and all kinds of game birds were being driven farther and farther…”

I hear her words, and I think of my love of the green wilds. A friend of mine says that when she was growing up, her family home was in one of the first suburbs at the edge of a wood, a wood that stretched for miles behind them. Thirty-five years later, there are no woods to be seen at all. Nothing but more suburbs and sprawling spaces of dried grasses. I am not a scientist. I don’t have facts and figures. I don’t feel the need to prove we are damaging the Earth. Her resources are finite. That is a surety. How many generations of voices need to ring out before we find the strength to make the changes necessary for the continued survival of all life on the planet? For we are all relations.

Family Treasures: The Harvester

Over a year ago, my father and I sorted through an old tote of photos and collected articles from his maternal side of the family. His mother, Ruth Ruston, died when he was five of cervical cancer. The items in the trunk belonged to her mother, Minnie Estelle Wicker, and Minnie’s mother, Emma Angeline Whitcher.

Among the assortment of natural beauty tips and recipes cut from the newspaper, I discovered that my Great-Grandma Minnie was a local singer, as well as an amateur photographer. There were dozens of photos taken on family camping trips of lakes and woods. I found a piece of birch bark, collected and kept as a memento. Was it something that spoke to her? For I also have a fondness for birch.

Beneath those layers we discovered older portraits and a hand-sewn quilting sample. There were also unopened envelopes of patterns that Minnie had sent away for; a doll pattern and an apron. Pamphlets from church events became brochures for the Order of the Eastern Star meetings, a spiritual group with no religious affiliation; it was a fraternal order that both men and women could belong to.

There were recipes from the US Department of Agriculture, explaining the correct nutrition for your children in 1917. Still yet came recipes scrawled out for danish pudding, baked apples, cauliflower pickles, suet pudding, cabbage salad, marmalade, olive oil pickles, molasses layer cake, chicken croquettes, homemade catsup, and canned beets. It’s unfortunate that most do not have clear instructions. They seemed to be recipes often used. At some point the handwriting changed and dated back to the turn of the century where my 2x Great-Grandma Emma had written down how to brine pork in a barrel, placing the separate cuts at varient levels and taking them out after different lengths of soaking.

At the bottom of the tote was a water-soaked book. One book in the whole trunk and it was like gold to me. I am an avid reader and I always have been. My mom helped me get a card to the adult section of the public library before I was of age as I had read through the children’s library. So, to find a book that had been saved over time, and set aside with other personal things, was a treasure to me.

I’ll never know if it was a favorite book, or if it had any sentimental meaning to an ancestress. I’ll never know if it was purchased or borrowed from a friend and never returned. I’ll never know if it was the book someone was reading at the end of her life or if it was a favorite book to bring along on vacations. But it speaks to me that there might have been another reader in the family who had fond memories of curling up with a book against a window in the afternoon light.

The book has a red cloth cover. It is water damaged and misshapen. The spine is cracked and bent and the book sits at an awkward slant. There is an old bug on the inside, where the cover seems to have been used as a means to its death. It has definitely seen better days.

Illustration by W.L. Jacobs

It is a first edition from 1911, called The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter, published by Grosset & Dunlop in New York. I was surprised to discover that the author was a woman, born Geneva Grace Stratton (1863-1924), who achieved commercial success with her writing in her lifetime, during which she wrote over 20 books. She wrote her fiction to support her non-fiction; she was an amateur naturalist.

A biographer stated that, “Readers who are completely in tune with nature and who find fulfillment through its healing qualities are easily absorbed into the characters of her novels.” Gene herself wore men’s clothing, wading into the swamp and woods, writing about the wildlife around her. She included her findings within her novels.

The Harvester is a syrupy love story. But the love the author had for the wilds comes through in her details. The information in using natural herbs for remedies alone would have been invaluable to most readers, caught up in the story of the Medicine Man who prepares them. The main character has a mystical vision and moves mountains to manifest that vision into being, the truest kind of magic.

I curled up with the book, tenderly turning old and worn pages. I stepped back into a time when other hands, not mine and yet with similar blood, touched the same pages in turn. Despite the impossible speeches, I found myself drawn into the Medicine Woods that Stratton-Porter described, transported to a space once also visited in the mind of an ancestor:

 “The forest is never so wonderful as when spring wrestles with winter for supremacy. While the earth is yet ice bound, while snows occasionally fly, spring breathes her warmer breath of approach, and all nature responds. Sunny knolls, embankments, and cleared spaces become bare, while shadow spots and sheltered nooks remain white. This perfumes the icy air with a warmer breath of melting snow. The sap rises in the trees and bushes, sets buds swelling, and they distil a faint, intangible odour. Deep layers of dead leaves cover the frozen earth, and the sun shining on them raises a steamy vapour unlike anything else in nature. A different scent rises from the earth where the sun strikes it. Lichen faces take on the brightest colours they ever wear, and rough, coarse mosses emerge in rank growth from their cover of snow and add another perfume to mellowing air. This combination has breathed a strange intoxication into the breast of mankind in all ages, and bird and animal life prove by their actions that it makes the same appeal to them.

            “Crows caw supremacy from tall trees; flickers, drunk on the wine of nature, flash their yellow-lined wings and red crowns among trees in a search for suitable building places; nut-hatches run head foremost down rough trunks, spying out larvae and early emerging insects; titmice chatter; the bold, clear whistle of the cardinal sounds never so gaily; and song sparrows pipe from every wayside shrub and fence post. Coons and opossums stir in their dens, musk-rat and ground-hog inspect the weather, while squirrels race along branches and bound from tree like winged folk.”

Read my blog post about the Quilt Sample from March 2012.

Read my blog post about birch trees, featuring the found birch bark, from December 2012.