Foreword

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a young woman, recently married, began exploring a vast swamp near her home along the eastern border of Indiana, puzzling and occasionally scandalizing her neighbors. In that age of corsets and voluminous skirts, on her outings she wore breeches like a man, high leather boots to guard against rattlesnakes, and a broad-brimmed hat to shade her bold gray eyes. She carried a box camera, glass photographic plates, a tripod, a butterfly net, and other paraphernalia for capturing images and specimens of the teeming life in that dank place. As a precaution against varmints, including the human sort, and to reassure her husband, she also carried a revolver.

The 13,000-acre wetland was known locally as Limberlost Swamp, a legacy of the glaciers that flattened and watered the northern reaches of the Midwest. The young woman was Gene Stratton-Porter, who would brave the bogs, thickets, mosquitoes, and snakes for two decades, gathering impressions, and would write a series of books that carried the name of the Limberlost to millions of readers worldwide. A few of those books were natural history, chiefly about moths and birds, but most of them were novels, including the three immensely popular tales included in this volume.

Freckles (1904), A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), and The Harvester (1911), along with half a dozen other Stratton-Porter novels, were made into films, which also attracted large audiences. In fact, these movie adaptations became so profitable that in 1920 she moved to Los Angeles and started her own production company. In December 1924, soon after completing work on a film version of A Girl of the Limberlost, she died in Hollywood from injuries sustained when her chauffeur-driven limousine collided with a streetcar. It was an unlikely end to a life that had begun during the Civil War on a farm in the Wabash Valley of Indiana.

Geneva—her given name, later shortened to Gene—was the twelfth and last child of a mother worn out by childbearing and the rigors of pioneer life, and of a father who combined farming with preaching. Gene was two years old when her mother took to bed with typhoid fever, and five when her mother died. That early loss helps account for the frequent appearance of motherless children in Stratton-Porter’s novels, and also for the numerous characters who are afflicted by lingering illnesses. Shortly before her ninth birthday, Gene suffered another grievous loss when her teenage brother Leander, whom she knew as Laddie, her favorite among the siblings, drowned in the Wabash River.

Motherless, largely unsupervised as her brothers and sisters left home, young Gene entertained herself, and perhaps consoled herself, by spending most waking hours outdoors. She was especially attracted by birds and wildflowers, but every growing thing interested her, and this passion remained with her lifelong, informing all of her books. Those early experiences prepared her to see nature not as an opponent to be subdued—the prevailing view among pioneers—but as a healing presence, an antidote to loneliness, illness, and loss.

In Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost, and The Harvester, you will meet virtuous heroines and heroes, dastardly villains, plucky orphans, kindly elders, idealists and scalawags, and young lovers who overcome every obstacle to unite in bliss. Behind all of these characters looms the Limberlost Swamp, a fragment of the wilderness that once spanned the continent. It is a dangerous place—where thieves lurk, a father drowns, a hero is crushed by a falling tree, a scoundrel dies from snakebite. But it is also a comforting place, a tonic for those ailing in body or mind, a refuge of wild beauty in a landscape otherwise tamed.

Acre by acre, the Limberlost was also tamed during the years when Gene Stratton-Porter lived nearby. The old-growth trees were felled for timber, the wetlands were drained for farming, the ground was drilled for oil. Disturbed by this exploitation of the great swamp, which had so entranced her, Stratton-Porter eventually decided to seek out a more natural setting. In 1913, she and her husband moved to a lake in northern Indiana, where they settled into a house that she had designed, on an estate she called Wildflower Woods. She had also designed the home they left behind, a 14-room cedar-log house she called Limberlost Cabin. By the time she moved away, the wilderness for which she had named it was all but gone. The subduing of nature to human purposes, yielding profit but also loss, is the larger story told by these three novels, and it also the dominant story of American civilization.

Recently, however, a hopeful new narrative has begun in the place that Gene Stratton-Porter loved, as local people, inspired by her books, have enlisted farmers, scientists, land trusts, and government agencies in a cooperative effort to restore portions of the vanished swamp. Once more, waters gather and wetland plants thrive, nurturing birds, frogs, salamanders, butterflies, and countless other creatures, allowing visitors to sense what drew that bold young woman, more than a century ago, to the Limberlost.

Scott Russell Sanders