AS A YOUNG GIRL growing up in the 1860s on a Wabash County, Indiana farm, Geneva Grace Stratton received a wondrous gift from her father, Mark, who had noticed his daughter’s love for nature and wildlife, especially the larks, cardinals, passenger pigeons, swallows, and hawks that flew overhead. He declared that all birds on the farm belonged to her, and she was to become their protector. “I was the friend and devoted champion of every bird that nested in the garden, on the fences, on the ground, in the bushes, in the dooryard, or in the orchard trees,” she noted years later.

From these early beginnings, Gene Stratton-Porter found a purpose for her life — that of sharing the outdoors with others through writing and photography and of working to conserve nature for the generations to come. By the time she died at age sixty-one, Stratton-Porter was one of the country’s best-known authors, with a following of fifty million readers worldwide and with her novels and nature books selling hundreds of copies a day. Though never a favorite with literary critics, Stratton-Porter was beloved by ordinary Americans, as much for her storytelling skills and advocacy for wildlife as for her independent spirit. Often clad in manly clothes and toting a gun for protection as she trooped through swamps and forests, Stratton-Porter lived life on her own terms and, in the process, helped push back society’s boundaries for women.

In this book, the seventh volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s youth biography series, Morrow traces Stratton-Porter’s early life exploring the treacherous Limberlost Swamp in northeastern Indiana to her development into a best-selling author and skilled photographer. Stratton-Porter used her popularity to campaign nationally for conservation, with some people claiming she was as influential as President Theodore Roosevelt in igniting public interest in wildlife causes. She continued her advocacy even after her moved to California, where she became one of Hollywood’s first female producers, turning her nature-themed novels into wholesome family movies.

(Panel) Stratton-Porter wrote her first book, A Song of the Cardinal, in 1903 while living in a log home in Geneva, IN. In 1914, she built another home on Sylvan Lake near Rome City. Both are state historic sites. (Wikimedia Commons)