“My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never saw one of my books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like a yeast jar in July over some literary work, and if I timidly slipped to him with a composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good in it, and made suggestions for its betterment. When I wanted to express something in colour, he went to an artist, sketched a design for an easel, personally superintended the carpenter who built it, and provided tuition. On that same easel I painted the water colours for Moths of the Limberlost, and one of the most poignant regrets of my life is that he was not there to see them, and to know that the easel which he built through his faith in me was finally used in illustrating a book.
“If I thought it was music through which I could express myself, he paid for lessons and detected hidden ability which should be developed. Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in his belief in me. He was half the battle. It was he who demanded a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigours of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in ten years, five of which were on nature subjects, having my own illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with natural history, true to nature. It was he who demanded of me from birth the finishing of any task I attempted and who taught me to cultivate patience to watch and wait, even years, if necessary, to find and secure the material I wanted. It was he who daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I portrayed in The Harvester, and who constantly used every atom of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men to do the same.”
No further illumination should be needed on the most extraordinary personal influence in Mrs. Porter’s life.
v
Gene Stratton was married in 1886, at the age of eighteen, to Charles Darwin Porter, of Wabash, Indiana. Marriage, a home of her own, and a daughter were successively brought to bear upon a nature already powerful; none of them succeeded in eradicating the impress of Mark Stratton. The new home was a cabin of fourteen rooms (at first), standing on some fifteen acres near the Limberlost Swamp. The familiar address runs: “Limberlost Cabin, Rome City, Indiana.” Red, white, pink, blue, lavender and yellow flower-beds of an acre apiece were laid off in the deep woods running down the shore of a lake; the cabin stands in the middle of the yellow bed, a dwelling of large rooms and four fireplaces, two of which Mrs. Porter built, to a large extent, herself. One is of pudden stone, red and blue pebbles; another, in the living room, is constructed of field boulders split to expose their quartz crystals that sparkle under artificial light. The windows were built with broad, deep casements especially to furnish feeding-tables for birds. On the open, cement-floored porch may stand in winter wheat, apples, cabbage and celery bunches. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, sapsuckers, flickers, song sparrows, jays, cardinals and squirrels come to the sills to eat the chopped wheat, ground corn and suet put out for them.
But this is to mix past and the comparative present. It was not long before Mrs. Porter’s daughter was old enough to go to school. “I knew how to manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s clothes, I kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and cooked and washed dishes, besides, three times a day. In my spare time (mark the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography ...” but we need not go with her into the details of this one among many of her personal triumphs. She was for two years editor of the camera department of Recreation, for two years on the natural history staff of Outing, for four years specialist in natural history photography on the Photographic Times Annual Almanac. She had a dread of failure and, at first, carried on her special work as secretly as possible. “My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines, but only a few people in our locality read these, none were interested in nature photography or natural science; so what I was trying to do was not realised even by my own family. I did not want to fail before my man person and my daughter and our respective families.” She was further afraid of ridicule in a community “where I was already severely criticised on account of my ideas of housekeeping, dress and social customs.” When she first attempted “nature studies sugar-coated with fiction” she proceeded with the same furtiveness. “I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank”—Mr. Porter was president of the Bank of Geneva—“need not know.” Through loss of her address at the New York end, she waited unanswered until one day, months later, when she went into “our store” on an errand and the storekeeper said: “I read your story in the Metropolitan last night. It was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?” Mrs. Porter relates: “My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels, so I said as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared he could hear it, ‘No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any spare copies? My sister might want one.’”
The appearance of her first story led to an order for a second, to be illustrated with her own photographs. She had a day, or less, to fill the request for photographs, and kept a number of persons up all night to pose for her. The genesis of Freckles, her second book, was the discovery by lumbermen of a nest of the black vulture in the Limberlost Swamp. Her husband, whose business had compelled him to allow her to work alone but who was also a natural history enthusiast, insisted that he must go with her. “A Limberlost trip at that time was not to be joked about. The swamp had not been shorn, branded, and tamed. There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known in the worst of such locations in the Central States.
“A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at every step, and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our progress was a steady succession of prying and pulling each other to the surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odours for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.
“We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take wing.”
The idea of Freckles came one day when they were leaving the swamp. A big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and swirling earthward, and fell in Mrs. Porter’s path. It was an eagle’s feather, but although she instantly looked aloft, Mrs. Porter’s well-trained eyes could not catch sight of the bird. She has always regretted that to her story the title Freckles was given; her wish was for “The Falling Feather”—that tangible thing drifting down out of Nowhere, just as the boy came in the story of her fashioning.