The farm was called “Hopewell,” after the home of some of Mark Stratton’s ancestors. Mark Stratton and his wife had spent twenty-five years beautifying it. The land was rolling, with springs and streams and plenty of remaining forest. The roads were smooth, the house and barn commodious; the family “rode abroad in a double carriage trimmed in patent leather, drawn by a matched team of gray horses, and sometimes the father ‘speeded a little’ for the delight of the children.”
The girl had an invalid mother, for about the time when Gene could first remember things Mrs. Stratton contracted typhoid after nursing three of her children through it. She never recovered her health. The youngest child was therefore allowed to follow her father and brothers 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 birds, flowers, insects and plays she invented. ‘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 waded 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.
“‘I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.... I fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen of a cellar window, doctored all the sick and wounded birds and animals the men brought me from afield; made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits they carried in for my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew older, gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So I had the first money I ever earned.’”
At school Mrs. Porter hated mathematics. Once when a mathematical topic for an essay was forced upon her, she broke loose and read the class a review of Saintine’s Picciola, the story of an imprisoned nobleman and a tiny flower that blossomed within prison walls. She fascinated her audience.
“‘The most that can be said of what education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of my inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and mentality.’” Her father encouraged her in writing, and when she wanted to do something in color had an easel built for her. On it she afterward painted the water colors for Moths of the Limberlost. If she wanted to try music he paid for lessons for her. “‘It was he who demanded a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigors of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in five 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 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.’”
In 1886, at eighteen, Gene Stratton was married to Charles Darwin Porter. A daughter was born to them, but the fever to write was merely in abeyance for a while. “It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she designed for their home, and the books she read. When her daughter was old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter’s time came.”
She explains: “‘I could not afford a maid, but I was very strong, vital to the marrow, and 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 to such a degree that the manufacturers of one of our finest brands of print paper once sent the manager of their factory to me to learn how I handled it. He frankly said that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. He wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me tell him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom for a darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey platters in the kitchen sink, I was rather put to it when it came to giving an exhibition.’ ...
“She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to Recreation, and with the first installment was asked to take charge of the department and furnish material each month, for which she was to be paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material. We can form some idea of the work she did under this arrangement from the fact that she had over $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the natural history staff of Outing, working closely with Mr. Caspar Whitney. After a year of this helpful experience, Mrs. Porter began to turn her attention to what she calls ‘nature studies sugar-coated with fiction.’ Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up fiction, she wrote a little story entitled Laddie, the Princess, and the Pie.”
She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was disgraceful. “‘I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in the 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 need not know what I had attempted.’”
That was in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her story in the Metropolitan. She had not seen it. She wrote to the editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a Christmas story?