Diana of the Dunes, page 10
Damages were sought from the publishing company and its distributor in the amount of $100,000. The amount included medical fees incurred by Alice and Paul as a result of their run-in with Deputy Frank, which they felt was precipitated by the newspaper stories, and injury “in their reputation, in their person, in their characters and in their property.”166
But, just as Alice was denied the opportunity to have her say in court involving the lawsuit against Deputy Eugene Frank, in this case, too, she never got the chance to face her newspaper adversaries. On April 14, 1925, Galvin petitioned the court to dismiss the libel case.
And again, the press confounded the facts: “The death of Alice Gray, ‘Diana of the Dunes,’ who lived in a shack in the Indiana sand dunes, automatically ends a million dollar libel suit pending in the United States District Court.”167
In the End
Alice Gray Wilson—to uncounted thousands, ”Diana of the Dunes”—is dead.168
—the Evening Messenger, 1925
Throughout the day on Sunday, February 8, 1925, the weather was unsettled outside Wren’s Nest. Shifting winds prevailed, and the already cold temperature was expected to drop. Rain or light snow was forecast for the hours after dark. Icy foam marked the shoreline of Lake Michigan, while ice floes dotted the wild waves. In the midst of yet another difficult winter, Alice Gray lay seriously ill on her pallet, as she had for nearly a week, refusing medical treatment. Sometime late in the night, she slipped into a coma.
Frantic, Paul finally left Alice’s side to run for help. He knocked on the bedroom window of developer Samuel Reck, the nearest neighbor who owned a car, to waken him and ask that he fetch a doctor.
Reck dressed immediately and headed into Gary, where he picked up Dr. DeLong. The sand was still so frozen he could drive his car on the beach and park close to Alice and Paul’s shack, thereby saving valuable time traipsing across the dunes.169
The doctor diagnosed Alice with uremic poisoning (kidney failure) and treated her with hot water bags and “stimulants.” Despite his best efforts, she did not regain consciousness, so Reck and DeLong went back to Gary for additional medicine. That too, was ineffectual. After several more hours of bedside vigil, Alice died the morning of Monday, February 9, just before dawn. She was forty-four years old.
A Fisherman’s Home, etching by Earl H. Reed and published in his book, Voices of the Dunes. Courtesy of the Westchester Township History Museum.
The news spread quickly and with nearly as much imaginative reporting as when Alice was first discovered in the dunes. Within two days, newspapers across the United States reported her death by featuring variations of stories printed by dunes-area and Chicago newspapers. Among others, readers in Montana, Michigan, California, Nebraska, Tennessee, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Virginia and Texas read about Alice’s last days, whether they had previously known her story or not.
The national headlines ranged from the straightforward, “Diana Dead,”170 to the romantic, “Diana of Dunes Is Dead, Dancing in Moonlight on Sands of Shore at End.”171
A sampling of headlines written by local editors highlighted their favorite details from a long history covering Alice: “Diana of Dunes Reported Dead in Her Lonely Shack,” “Mystery Woman of Dunes Dies,” “Earth Claims Diana’s Body,” “Diana of the Dunes Dies at Her Little Shack Nestling in Duneland,” “Diana, Dunes Nymph, Is Laid to Rest in Oak Hill; Friends to Donate Flowers.”
Even the venerable New York Times published a six-paragraph article on the life and death of Alice, under the headline and bold-typed subheadline, “Diana of the Dunes Dies of Privations: Chicago Woman Who Took Up the Primitive Life in 1916 Refused Hospital Aid.”172
Almost every news account featured two simultaneously tragic and romantic notions. The first was that Alice died in Paul’s arms. In one example, a headline printed on the front page, top fold of the Syracuse Herald read: “College Honor Student, Who Led Cave Girl Life, Dies in Giant Mate’s Arms.”173
The second theme helped set the foundation for later ghost stories about Alice. Her one fervent wish, often expressed to Paul while she was living, so he claimed, was to be cremated—her ashes scattered on the northwest winds from the majestic dune called Mount Tom. Located at then Waverly Beach (now Indiana Dunes State Park), Mount Tom is the highest dune in the region. But cremation was unusual and therefore expensive and, even then, available only at some inconvenient distance from the dunes. Paul had no money but attempted to follow through on his promise by beginning to build a funeral pyre on Mount Tom—until Samuel Reck convinced him to let Alice’s family have their say.174 Ultimately, the family took over planning the funeral arrangements and refused to allow cremation.
One local newspaper article put it bluntly: “Diana of the Dunes is to be buried quietly and ‘horribly respectably’ late today from a little undertaking parlor in the sooty city of Gary.”175
A brief obituary published in the March 1925 issue of the Prairie Club bulletin was sympathetic to Alice’s struggles and kind in regard to the woman they had known:
A Tragedy of the Dunes
With the death of Mrs. Paul Wilson, long since printed the woman of mystery, “Diana of the Dunes,” the curtain has fallen upon a tragedy whose stage was our own Duneland. Formerly Miss Alice Gray, a brilliant science scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of Chicago, and an editorial secretary of accomplishments, her pleasant voice is well remembered by those with whom she dealt, and her fresh spirit and fair-mindedness left its impress, incorrigible individualist though she was. What cataclysm led her, ten years ago, from academic walls to the shelter of inclement skies and a shack on the wildest portion of the Dunes, we do not know. She lived alone summer and winter in the Dune wilderness, but finally received odious publicity through some avid sensation-monger. Her life for a time was shadowed by various conflicts with the society she had tried to escape.
She knew and loved every native plant and animal, every mood and color of lake and dune. Three years ago she married Paul Wilson, a native son. Early in February she died, after a short illness, among her loved sands.
The funeral attracted the public eye, and not surprisingly, newspaper details of it vary. Just one story reported that schoolchildren brought flowers to place on her grave.176 The fact that Paul brought a gun, however, is consistent throughout the retellings.
As her body lay in a parlor of the Williams and Marshall funeral home in Gary, Reck recalled,177 a crowd of curious people gathered outside, while a smaller group of relatives and friends sat on benches inside the chapel. Reck sat next to a visibly grieving Paul, who was alone in the back of the room. He noticed that Paul’s hand was covering a revolver in his pocket.
The funeral, which began at 2:00 p.m., was presided over by the Reverend James Foster, rector of Christ Episcopal Church. It was brief.178 As those in attendance made their way forward to view Alice’s body before the casket was closed for burial, Paul joined them. At the sight of her, he dissolved into a grief-stricken spate of shouting, drawing his gun and waving it in the air above Alice’s bier. Two people said he yelled a threat, although they each heard something different.
One of them heard, “Diana, I’ll get that damned newspaperman!”179 The summer before she died, Alice was busy preparing for her libel case against the Chicago newspaper company,180 which was set to be heard in the spring of 1925. The pall of accusation had hovered over them for two long years, and the couple was anxious to have their say. But Alice’s death effectively ended the lawsuit.181 Paul—acutely aware that the news coverage of the 1922 murder had devastated Alice and weakened her not only spiritually, but physically—was wracked with resentment.
A second threat from Paul—“Anyone who takes her body will be sorry!”—was also reported.182 His frustration with his inability to fulfill her wish to be cremated, her ashes cast from atop Mount Tom, would account for such a wild outburst. As it happened, he did not see her buried in the Gary cemetery, either.
Still waving the gun, Paul pointed it at Alice’s nephew, Chester Dunn, the relative who signed her death certificate and paid for the funeral.183
But Paul gave up passively when the authorities arrived. He was escorted to Gary’s police station and held for a short time. Once his Diana was laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery, Paul was freed.
The memory of her, and the plans they had made to leave the dunes region and move to Texas, haunted him. Paul supposed he would make the trip alone, but he wasn’t making any promises. He was literally lost without Alice.184
Reck left little choice for Paul; he had to make some sort of move. Just days after Alice’s burial, Reck cut Paul loose. “We agreed that a good revenge on the curious would be to burn down the shack and remove all traces of it. When he agreed, I carried out the destruction of the shack at once, having no desire to harbor a wild man on the property.”185
But for another decade, a single, visible trace of Wren’s Nest would remain:
After this, Paul and Mr. Reck burned and destroyed the last vestige of one of the most romantic episodes in the history of Ogden Dunes. No, not all, for still to be seen in the hollow where the couple lived is the twenty-two-foot steel stack of a tugboat that served as a chimney. To see this is to fill one with awe at the strength of the man who placed it there. To visit this spot on a quiet moonlit night is to make one wish history could turn back and permit one to converse with this couple who knew and loved the handiwork of Nature as she was to be found here in Ogden Dunes.186
Eventually, Paul became embroiled in other adventures that landed his name in the columns of newspapers; but after Alice died, his free-spirited life in the dunes ended without reprise.
Afterword
Although Alice Gray died in 1925, we still tell her story today for myriad reasons; each version suits a purpose. We rework and refine details, winnow facts and dismiss them at will, follow a thread, create a new weave. The story’s ultimate design depends on our audience, our level of interest and curiosity, perhaps the time of day—are we camping around a late-night beach fire telling ghost stories or visiting the local museum on Saturday afternoon?
As much as anything, historical relevance keeps Alice’s story alive. The last decade of her life spanned a broad and important era in dunes history, one in which efforts to preserve the region’s world-renowned environmental treasures clashed with the plans of steel-mill barons and jobseekers. Before those years, Alice lived in the early days of an industrial Chicago bursting at its seams, followed by a time when the city shared a cultural tapestry with the neighboring Indiana dunes through well-known characters such as sculptor Lorado Taft, poet Carl Sandburg, painter Frank Dudley and landscape architect Jens Jensen.
Alice’s story also highlights a time when the political activism of women claimed front-page headlines in defiance of second-class citizenship. It is easy to admire her self-liberation from the strict and confining roles defined by society.
Alice Gray set out to rediscover herself when she left Chicago on a South Shore train bound for the remote sand hills of Indiana. In telling her story, we reflect on how both history and our own standards judge the success or failure of her journey. Her intentions are suspect, too, even now. Should Alice have left Chicago at all? What reason would we find most acceptable: a love affair gone sour, illness, rebellion against a male-dominated society, a chance to prove her self-sufficiency? Was she mentally ill or merely formidable in deciding to live alone in the dunes? Was Paul a soul mate, a bodyguard, a menace? Did she appear friendly enough and proper, or was she morally bankrupt and too self-righteous?
This is also the story of a woman with romantic dreams thwarted and her dogged determination, in the face of that corruption, not to give in or relent when tides of objection rolled in. To study Alice Gray is to learn about digging our toes in the sand and standing firm, despite the inevitable shifting that takes place beneath our feet.
Alice Gray loved the dunes region; she sought to explore it, to document the wonders intrinsic in the landscape. She wished to experience that natural artistry by melting into it—at the same time, nurturing her own wild roots. While the process may not have been fluid or graceful, Alice must have succeeded. For all she may have suffered or left behind, she also gained a truer sense of Alice Gray, her limitations and her potential, her ghosts and devils, her needs and desires. Alice could not help but find what she was looking for, although her search did not play out according to some original, romantic plan.
Writers of Alice’s story have claimed that she sought solitude, finally achieving her hard-fought peace only in death. At first glance, there is little reason to argue this point. The press was indeed intrusive in its business of myth-making, especially where she was concerned. However, digging deeper into Alice’s life both before and during the dunes years, it seems more accurate to conclude that she did accomplish what she set out to do when she left Chicago, bound for the sand hills along Lake Michigan’s southern rim. In the end, she lived on her own terms, setting parameters by lifting them, fiercely guarding her door against those who would attempt to beat it down. For all the public scrutiny, there must also have been ample periods of solitude and time enough to reaffirm her decision to stay.
The dunes stretch both wide and deep, traversing from open shoreline to sand hills to dense forest. The region is both harsh and forgiving, depending upon the season and upon one’s will and innate strength of character. It was easier to get lost in those sand hills than one unfamiliar with the landscape might think. Alice learned to navigate the terrain, circumvent the realities of weather extremes and glorify the spare rewards of living simply. It was the human connection that kept tripping her up; reporters, fellow beach dwellers, townspeople—Alice often found herself in their relentless glare. Little wonder, then, that the poem that inspired her to seek a new life among the sand hills contains these lines:
CLXXVIII
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto IV”
Lord Byron
APPENDIX A
Siblings
LEONORA
When Alice was just five years old, her eldest sister, Leonora “Lena” Gray, married Ernest G. Dunn, who was born in England and made his living in the lumber business. After their marriage in January of 1886, the couple moved north to Muskegon, Michigan. By 1896, they had settled into a home on Spring Street in Michigan City, where they raised a family of eight children. Death took two of their children in young adulthood.
The couple’s eldest daughter, Emma, died suddenly, at age twenty-six of Landry’s paralysis. She was a beloved first-grade teacher in a local school and had retired six months before her passing in order to prepare for her upcoming wedding. On January 10, 1912, the Michigan City News reported that her death “came like a thunderbolt from a clear sky and brought untold sadness to the home of Mr. and Mrs. E.G. Dunn.”
Ernest Dunn Jr., an engineer and the Dunns’ eldest son, died in 1920 at the age of thirty, during the aftermath of the influenza epidemic that began in 1918. His lengthy obituary ran on the front page of the Michigan City Evening News because he had served as county engineer for two years before his death. Prior to that election, he was the city engineer for Michigan City. His wife, Clarriet Wilhelm of Laporte, Indiana, and their five-year-old daughter, Leonora, survived him. His brother, Howard, worked at the time as his assistant, and a second brother, Chester, lived in Gary. Chester, who eventually became president of the First State Bank of Gary and president of the Gary Board of Works, married Martita Furness, granddaughter of the pioneer family of Furnessville, Indiana. It was this nephew of Alice’s who paid for her funeral and signed her death certificate, inadvertently providing an incorrect date of birth—one that persisted even on her gravestone, commissioned decades after her death.
Leonora Dunn died in 1948, at the age of eighty-one, in Michigan City, Indiana.
NANNIE
At age eighteen, Nannie Gray married two years after Leonora—in August of 1888—moving to North Dakota with her husband, Herbert W. Piper, a physician. The couple eventually moved to Bondurant, Iowa, near Des Moines, and raised two children. Their eldest child and only son, Herbert Jr., died in 1919 at the age of twenty-nine. He was one of 234 soldiers who died during the influenza epidemic at Camp Pike, the U.S. Army training camp in Arkansas. Although Nannie and Leonora were closer in age, and despite Nannie having left home while Alice was still a child, these two sisters must have remained close: Nannie named her daughter Alice.
This niece, Alice Piper, went on to create a few headlines of her own during the 1930s in Iowa. While working as a nurse, she sued a black physician for failing to follow through on their engagement—and was awarded one dollar for her effort. She eventually married a black man, although not the physician, and became the mother of three stepchildren. The family suffered racist attacks, including cross burnings in the front yard of their house. All of this was reported with headlines nearly as sensational as the ones that created the legend of her aunt—Alice Gray, Diana of the Dunes.
