68 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
Stratton-Porter’s
desk at Wild-
fl ower Woods
Cabin holds
three of her
books. Michael
O’Halloran
outsold the novel
Pollyanna in
1916, though the
latter is far bet-
ter known today.Swamp by Gene Stratton-Porter, “her work
might have been taken more seriously by
her contemporaries.”I ARRANGE TO MEET Curt Burnette at the
Rainbow Bottom, 270 acres of hardwood for-
est owned by the Friends of the Limberlost.
We walk along a wooded path of cracked mud
imprinted with deer and raccoon tracks until
we come to a ten-foot-wide double-trunked
sycamore that looks like a giant wishbone
jutting upward. Blue herons fl y overhead andorange monarch butterfl ies drink from pink false dragonhead
in a lush meadow. Farther on, we fi nd a tree fallen across an old
channel of the Wabash and sit.
“To me,” Burnette says, thoughtfully, “this is the spot in the
Limberlost where modern life disappears.”
In the verdant canopy, chatters and trills of chickadees,
fl ycatchers and phoebes rain down around us. A cranky
white-breasted nuthatch spots us in its territory and makes
displeasured staccato chirps as it madly descends a hickory
tree. I slide my camera phone out of my back pocket and snap
a quiet picture. The ease of this motion contrasts sharply with
the daunting lengths Stratton-Porter went to do the same: ma-
neuvering her horse, rigging heavy cameras in trees with ropes,
sidestepping quicksand and rattlers, directing assistants, scal-
ing ladders to replace each glass fi lm plate, and waiting. There
was a lot of waiting—sometimes a week for one shot.loved so well. Their losses are staggering here, a part of the rap-
id decline of biodiversity driven by humans.
In 1900, Stratton-Porter’s article “A New Experience in
Millinery,” published in Recreation, called attention to the
slaughter of birds for ladies’ hats. “All my life I have worn
birds and parts of birds as hat decorations and have given the
matter no thought,” she wrote. “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 .”
After a number of successful magazine stories came
the book deals. Her 1904 novel Freckles was about a one-
handed ragamuffi n Irish boy. Freckles found
work walking a seven-mile circuit to patrol a
valuable area of lumber against maple thieves.
Stratton-Porter struck a deal with Doubleday,
her publisher, to alternate between nonfi ction
nature studies and sentimental stories with
happy endings and heavy doses of nature. Her
romances were enjoyably escapist and her in-
dependent female characters off ered millions
of girls and women alternative life narratives.
After her husband and daughter gave her
a camera for Christmas in 1895, Stratton-Por-
ter had also become an exceptional wildlife
photographer , though her darkroom was a
bathroom: a cast iron tub, turkey platters, and
towels stuff ed under the door to keep out light.
Her photographs are detailed, beautifully
composed and tender, as if there is a calm under-
standing between bird and woman. Birds clearly
trusted her, allowing Stratton-Porter to capture
never-before-seen details of cardinals fl uff -
ing after a bath, kingfi shers perched on a tree
stump in the sun, bluebirds feeding their young,
and more. “Few books entail such actual labor
as this, such marvelous patience,” a New York
Times reviewer wrote of What I Have Done With
Birds, “and few books are produced with a spirit
of enthusiastic at-oneness with the subjects.”
Porter was keenly aware of how her approach
diff ered from others’. “I often fi nd ornithologists killing and dis-
secting birds, botanists uprooting and classifying fl owers, and
lepidopterists running pins through moths yet struggling,” she
wrote in her 1910 book, Music of the Wild/With Reproductions of
the Performers, Their Instruments and Festival Halls. She went
on, “Whenever I come across a scientist plying his trade I am al-
ways so happy and content to be merely a nature-lover, satisfi ed
with what I can see, hear, and record with my cameras.”
Her work was featured in the magazine American Annual
of Photography for many years and she earned the highest
prices ever paid for bird pictures. “Had she not been a woman,
entirely self-trained,” Jan Dearmin Finney writes in The Nat-
ural Wonder: Surviving Photographs of the Great Limberlost
TO DISCOVER MORE trailblazing American women, visit
Because of Her Story at womenshistory.si.edu