Diana of the Dunes, page 11
Nannie Piper died in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1948, the same year that her sister, Leonora, died. She was seventy-eight years old.
HUGH
Although the date is unknown, Hugh Gray married an Irish immigrant, Mary A. Flannery. The couple had two children, Mary Faye and Chester. The family lived in Iowa, along with Hugh’s brother-in-law, William Flannery. The 1920 census lists Hugh as a farmer. He later divorced.
Hugh died on June 23, 1926, at the age of fifty-four.
HARRY
Little is known about Harry Gray, other than his marriage to Frances Gray (the wedding date and her maiden name are unknown). According to 1900 census records, the couple lived for a time at 3522 South Hermitage, Chicago, just a few doors down from his mother and siblings, Alice and Chester. Harry and his wife had a boy named Harry.
CHESTER
Alice’s youngest brother, Chester, is the sibling she likely knew best, by virtue of being closer in age and the amount of time they lived together at home. Alice became his guardian after their mother’s death. Before World War I, Chester spent seven years in the army; during the war, he worked as an auditor overseas for the Morris Packing Company of Chicago. Following these stints, he settled near his sisters, Alice and Leonora, when he became town clerk of Long Beach, Indiana, in 1921. During the last four years that Alice lived in the dunes, the three siblings were located within about a twenty-mile stretch of beach.
Chester died of a heart ailment on October 7, 1941. He was fifty-seven years old.
APPENDIX B
Paul Wilson, After Alice
An unidentified white man, believed to have been approximately 55 years old, was
found dead on the floor of a lonely desert cabin about a mile north of Freeman
Junction Saturday afternoon.
—the Bakersfield Californian, 1941
The death of Alice did nothing to abate the public’s interest in the life of Paul Wilson. For at least six years after her death, newspapers continued to report on his penchant for thievery, his gun-toting ways and his marriage—in a courthouse, this time—to Henrietta Martindale Hyessa.
But it was one of the first articles about Paul, published two months after Alice died, that is most important; it confirmed for the public that Diana’s story was indeed of mythical stature and provided the foundation for the popular Diana of the Dunes ghost story. Shared by newspapers from San Francisco, California, to Palm Beach, Florida, the story ran a full page and featured the headline “Haunted by the Spirit of ‘Diana of the Dunes.’”187 Without actually interviewing Paul, the author spun a fanciful tale about his loneliness and immense grief; so intense were these feelings, she wrote, that he suffered vivid hallucinations of his Diana.
At the foot of Mount Tom, where Paul sat and waited for his beloved beneath a rising moon, the soft waves of Lake Michigan provided background music, while an evening breeze brushed across the sand hills. It wasn’t long before a ghostly figure pirouetted from a dune ridge down to the water’s edge, garbed in a white, billowy veil and moaning sorrowfully as she drifted along the beach. In Paul’s imagination, the writer insisted, the vision was that of Diana. She visited a bereft Paul because he suffered from “the deepest grief a heart may know—the knowledge of failure to keep faith with a loved one who is dead.” He mourned at Mount Tom because he could not cremate her and spread her ashes from its great height, as he had promised. What else could his Diana do but haunt the dunes she loved so much?
“And she said that she would come back and haunt the dunes if her wishes were not carried out. So he expects to see her and hear her—and he does!”188
Paul’s fame quickly fell from that brief, poetic grace and landed squarely in the newspapers’ crime beat. In the dozen or so primary stories generated over the next six years, Paul’s name is almost always followed by mention of him as the former mate of Diana of the Dunes. He could not escape the legend they had created.
If there was any doubt that his relationship with Alice provided stability for Paul, the newspapers laid it to rest. “After the famous ‘Diana’ died in February, 1925, her soulmate of an ideal existence in the dunelands was in much trouble. It appears to have been the influence of the mysterious ‘Diana’ which kept the caveman Wilson within bounds.”189
He was first arrested by Michigan City police in the spring of 1926 for taking pot shots at a South Shore conductor after he jumped off the train. The conductor said Paul was upset because the train was forced to pass through a stop where he had meant to disembark.190 Paul, who admitted being on the train but denied using his gun, told police that two men who were arguing near the train had fired the shots, but his story was quickly dismissed. Reminiscent of the diary he and Alice turned over as evidence of their innocence during the murder investigation in 1922, police retrieved a letter Paul had written to the train operator, explaining the incident as he recalled it. In closing his letter, Paul wrote, “I’m too busy just now to be arrested on such affair.”191
Authorities looking for Paul after the train episode found him “in the hut of an Indian squaw living in the dunes...about four miles west of Michigan City.” In fact, she was Henrietta Martindale Hyessa, a white, Wisconsinborn woman who had inherited dunes property.
It seems well-educated women found Paul appealing. Henrietta, an alumna of Smith College, had also done some graduate work at the University of Chicago, 1915–16. While there, she became friends with, and the research assistant of, Jens Jensen, noted landscape architect and Prairie Club member. It was Jensen who inspired her to pursue family property near the Indiana dunes.192
A newspaper story indicated Henrietta had arrived in the region two years earlier to inspect it.193 A 1922 plat map shows “H.H. Wilson” property in Pine Township, near the town of Pines. In 1924, the local phone directory listed “Mrs. H. Martindale” as owner of Solomon Seal’s Lodge.
In the year following the train incident, Paul and Henrietta experienced a whirlwind of change and challenges. Less than a week after Paul’s arrest, they were married in the Porter County court clerk’s office in Valparaiso, on May 1, 1926. At the time, he was still out on a $2,000 bond paid in part with money from Henrietta’s mortgaged property.194
Less than ten months later, on March 14, 1927, Henrietta asked Porter County authorities to arrest Paul and place him under a peace bond because he meant to harm himself and had also threatened her life and that of “her little daughter”—seven-year-old Bonno, a child born to Henrietta during an affair with Dr. Charles Eastman.195
In seeking his arrest, Paul’s wife told Michigan City police that her husband became angry when she could not “meet his demands for money.” During several days of hiding, Paul was sought by both Porter and LaPorte County authorities. They caught up with him at the “clinic sanitarium in Michigan City,” where he went to see his wife who was a patient (the reason is unknown). He was carrying a .38-caliber revolver.196
Earlier that day—at Henrietta’s request—Porter County Superior Court judge H.L. Crumpacker withdrew the bond that she had posted for Paul’s release while he awaited arraignment on the shooting charge.197 Paul could not raise additional bail and was held at the Michigan City jail after being arrested at the hospital on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon.
It was reported that he consumed match heads—an entire box of them—in an unsuccessful suicide attempt during that first night in jail.198
A week later, on March 21, 1927, Paul was sentenced to one year in jail.
Less than three years afterward, on November 17, 1930, he was back in Judge Crumpacker’s court on burglary charges involving “seven minor jobs,” including theft from the Pine Township Farm Bureau.199 Henrietta again posted bond, and he was released.200
By this time, Henrietta and Paul’s family had grown with the birth of two more children. No doubt at Paul’s insistence, they named their first daughter, born in 1928, Diana. The couple’s second daughter, Henrietta, was born in 1929.
Just before they would have celebrated the new year in 1930, the Wilsons were devastated by the loss of their house in an unexplained fire: “The home of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Wilson on Dunes highway near Furnessville was totally destroyed by fire of unknown origin early Monday night. No one was home at the time and when neighbors arrived the fire had gained such headway that nothing was saved.”201
If Paul possessed any remaining manuscripts or diaries once belonging to Alice—at one point after her death he had tried to sell them—they were likely lost in the fire.
One week after his family’s home was destroyed, and while he was still free on bail, Paul was arrested again. This time, the charge was reckless driving202 in regard to an automobile collision that sent three men who were “badly battered” to a Michigan City hospital. The accident occurred at West Tremont on the Dunes Highway. A news story reported that Paul was injured, but the state police brought him to the Porter County jail anyway. There was no mention of the extent of his injury.
Then, on February 5, 1931, Paul was sentenced on the burglary charges and sent to Indiana State Prison for a term of one to five years. Not surprisingly, the court took his criminal record into consideration:
Wilson, who is thirty-eight years old but appears somewhat older due to his graying hair, told the court of his sick wife and three children and begged leniency on their account. But Judge Crumpacker, after a lengthy review of Wilson’s past criminal record and general disrespect for the law, refused to accept his plea and imposed sentence.203
For his prison file,204 Paul provided some interesting, if not wholly truthful, personal information. His aversion to using the name Eisenblatter was evident, since he identified his father as Otto “Wilson” and his mother as Caroline “Westman,” her maiden name. He indicated his parents were living together—although his mother was long deceased—and that their financial position was “poor.” He claimed that he had no brothers or sisters. Paul also told authorities that he left home at age sixteen and that his education extended to the seventh grade. In response to a checklist of questions, he answered that he smoked cigarettes and drank “moderately.”
Although he was given two brief temporary paroles, Paul spent nearly two years in jail; he was released on January 26, 1933.
At some time and for reasons unknown, the Wilsons moved to California. The next time Paul Wilson’s name was published in a newspaper story, it was to report his death—and the story began with a familiar theme: “An unidentified white man, believed to have been approximately 55 years old, was found dead on the floor of a lonely desert cabin about a mile north of Freeman Junction Saturday afternoon.”205
The man was identified the next day as Paul G. Wilson of Freeman Junction, California.206 On the death certificate, Paul is listed as a “transient.” He died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm on “about” October 25, 1941. Although Henrietta is named as Paul’s wife, the record also indicates he was divorced.
There was little to know for certain about Paul’s life; the same held true regarding his death.
The funeral of “Paul Wilson” was held in Bakersfield, California. An obituary in the Michigan City News Dispatch announced the death of “Paul George Eisenblatter.” He was survived by two children, and by two sisters, two brothers—and his wife.
APPENDIX C
Alice’s Diary—Excerpts
Acquiring “The Diary of Diana of the Dunes” was no doubt a journalistic coup for the Chicago Herald and Examiner. On June 1, 1918, a large, threecolumn advertisement was printed to promote publication of the diary in the next day’s newspaper. The ad copy synthesized the most popular details of Alice’s public persona: she was smart, living in the wilderness and suffering from lost love. What readers would discover, the newspaper implied, was that Alice was also a gifted writer:
Written in the wilderness by a girl who went there to die but remained to live the wild and primitive life of a modern Eve. She was a student at the University of Chicago. She loved a brilliant man who mocked at marriage. Hers is the strangest love tale ever written. This, with her letters, which are the literary sensation of the day, will appear exclusively in tomorrow’s big Super-Sunday Herald and Examiner.
By this time, Alice had lived for three years in Driftwood. After her dunes life was revealed in the summer of 1916, she became a favorite story in the press, but that initial burst of publicity eventually waned. She was back in the news in the spring of 1917, when she was lauded for her Fullerton Hall speech advocating preservation of the dunes. But for more than a year, until the diary was published, the newspapers had nearly forgotten her. For a woman who said time and again that she sought solitude, it seems surprising that Alice turned a portion of her diary—from November through February of 1915, her first year in the dunes—over to the Chicago newspaper. Surely, she worried that such publicity would re-ignite the public’s interest in her sojourn and spark more exaggerated reporting. Or did she seek the attention?
Perhaps, Alice sought to publish the diary as a way to renounce her relationship with “L.” During the late winter of 1918, when Alice lived temporarily with the Johnson family, she received a personal letter. Her response—“And I thought he believed in free love!”—might indicate that the author of the letter had revealed something upsetting to Alice about “L.” Was he getting married, or had he already? If so, publishing letters that she wrote to him, but never mailed, might provide some necessary closure for her. The newspaper, in introducing the first diary installment, noted this about the mysterious “L.”: “Should he read this he may know her letters for the first time.”
Alice had met Paul at least by the winter of 1917, just before he was incarcerated for six months on charges of stealing from neighbors. He had moved into her shack by the time of the diary revelations. It might not have seemed so daring, then, to finally let go of her Chicago relationships.
On the more practical side, it seems certain that Alice was paid for her diary. If “L.” was no longer of consequence, why not provide the intimate details? It may well have been a matter of survival.
The “Diary of Diana of the Dunes” was published, in excerpts selected by Chicago Herald and Examiner editors, from June 2, 1918, through Thursday, June 6, 1918. (Although the newspaper refers to a Wednesday, June 5, edition, that installment could not be found.)
CHICAGO HERALD AND EXAMINER
SUNDAY, JUNE 2, 1918
“THE DIARY OF DIANA OF THE DUNES: HER LOVE
LETTERS THAT WERE NEVER MAILED”
A few miles east of Chicago lies the sand dunes of Indiana, a wilderness of primitive beauty that has moved lovers of nature to petition the government to set it off as a national park.
Glistening torpedo sand, glacier strewn and wind blown, forms valleys and mountains topped by fir and pine trees. Orchids grow there in brilliant variety. The beauty of shore, lake and sky have so charmed artists that at present we have a special exhibit of Dune paintings and photographs at the Art Institute.
The spirit of this domain is a wild girl, Diana of the Dunes they call her. Fishermen, scurrying to shore before squalls, have been startled to see her breasting the waves far out in the lake. Hunters have chased and been chased by her. Reporters have often penetrated to her driftwood hut in the wilderness, but learned little more than that her name is Alice Gray and she was one of the most brilliant students turned out by University of Chicago.
It is the privilege of the Herald and Examiner to solve the mystery of Alice Grayand to present extracts from her diary. Those who have read it pronounce it a literary sensation.
She had been engaged by a man to assist in the preparation of a book. It dealt with the problems of sex and society. The man, older than she and more worldly, made love to her and she thought of marriage. But his theories of life disillusioned her. With vague ideas of going off alone to die, she bought a ticket to get as far away from Chicago as her money would allow. She alighted in the dunes.
One night, alone, under a primitive hut, and she awoke to the beauty of the dune district. She found that she wanted to live. And she has lived there ever since, setting down her thoughts in a diary and writing very human love letters to the man—letters that never were mailed. Should he read this he may know her letters for the first time. When she went she was weak and sick, hating the world. Now she thinks nothing of a twenty-mile walk at daybreak or a swim that would frighten most men. The diary:
Beach Near Dune Park
Nov 7, 1915
Nov 10—Wednesday
I have been out just a week this morning.
To-day is more like July than November. I’ve taken off my arctic apparel and hung it up in the wind to dry.
There were two rather large camping parties near me Sunday. I sat around and climbed near-by slopes and kept an eye on my possessions. But it was quite needless.
What is it, I wonder, about photography that is so eminently respectable? The two campers had a camera with a high stand, and at once my fears of them subsided.
The men off by themselves were heard to mention “mother earth” and “acquiescent,” and of course were thereby beyond suspicion as to blanket filching.
They seemed to have a good effect on me—a calming, suspicious-allaying, confidence-bringing effect.
The larger party left with a call to “Mr. Hawker” to “hurry up or he would miss the sunset.” I always smile at such a remark; sentimental, I say. And yet—last night I exclaimed, “oh, my God!” as I saw the new moon above the bands of yellow in a zone of clear greenish light. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
Now, on this cloudy afternoon, as I sit and look over the milky green on the lake between the trees defined at the horizon with something darker than I should not know whether to call greenish or bluish or reddish. I feel sometimes as if I could faint with the rapture of it.
Back of this hill there is a wonderful sweep of sand up to the heights—a great wash, really the great white way. From the top of that hill is a wide prospect—brown hills in the distance, over the tops of oak woods, and back to the lake between the dunes. The road I take to the farms and the railroads lies that way, sharp down into the oak forest in the valley. How exquisite the bare sand hills stand out coming back, especially in the subdued light at sunset.
