The once famous, trailblazing Minnesota nature writer you’ve probably never heard of
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“The most beloved unknown nature writer in Minnesota history.” That’s how author David Hakensen describes Helen Hoover in his new biography “Her Place in the Woods: The Life of Helen Hoover.”
Hoover was a successful chemist and metallurgist in Chicago in the 1950s when she and her husband quit their jobs for a life on the edge of the wilderness, 45 miles up the Gunflint Trail from Grand Marais.
They were ill-prepared for living year-round in such a cold, remote place. But after struggling to survive for several years, Hoover became an incredibly popular outdoors writer, chronicling her experiences of learning to live in a remote cabin,= and with the wildlife she closely observed. So many fans made surprise visits to their Northwoods cabin that Hoover eventually decided to leave the state.
Hakensen spent more than a decade digging through archives to write the first complete biography of Hoover. MPR News correspondent Dan Kraker spoke to Hakensen about why he finds her story so compelling. Their conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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What were some of the challenges they faced?
The cabin had no running water, and the only electricity was through an electric plant that didn’t work. They had an outdoor privy. They didn’t have any indoor plumbing, and the cook stove and an oil heater were adequate, but not for the middle of winter.
Probably one of the biggest challenges they had was about a month and a half into when they lived there, they were coming back from town with a load of clothes and groceries. This was November of 1954, and they had a head-on car accident. Both of them were injured, and they couldn't afford to fix the car. They didn't have another automobile for the next nine years. So they basically lived by mail or by delivery from town.
And in the winter, there were no deliveries up the trail. And so they had to buy groceries in bulk for the winter. And they didn’t eat fish. They didn’t hunt. So they bought lots of canned meat, canned vegetables, canned fruit. It was just kind of a real unusual way to live.
What led them to the Gunflint Trail?
They were sort of like the original double income, no kids. She was a metallurgist, which by itself, was an intriguing part of her background. She had worked at International Harvester, and she solved this problem that was challenging them with the discs on a harrow breaking. That’s a piece of equipment that they drag behind a tractor to till a field.
And they kept having this breakage problem with the discs. It was really starting to irritate their farmer client base. And she was tasked with fixing it. And I think she was given the job as a pretense to fire her if she didn't figure it out, because she was the only woman in this department, and a lot of the men resented the fact that she was very smart and knew what she was doing.
So she solved this problem, got a patent, and they changed their mind about her, and thought she can do lots of things for us. But she just walked away from the job. She said, “I’m done.”
Was she a writer when she moved to northern Minnesota?
She was not, although I learned in my research that she had made some attempts at writing when she was younger, but nothing other than a sort of a throwaway piece that was published in a Chicago newspaper.
But I think how she was able to really become good at writing about nature is that she just transferred her observational skills from the laboratory to looking at what was going on outside her window, and seeing how animals interacted.
And I think that’s another part of how people thought they were strange, aside from the fact that they didn’t hunt or fish — they also fed a lot of animals with seed and things, and fed a lot of these animals when they themselves were not able to feed themselves fully.
Is that what led to her most-famous book, where she observed a herd of deer for several years?
Yes, exactly. They did that very innocently feeding deer, and then it attracted other animals, and as they saw these deer come back to the yard and, in essence, get a bit domesticated, they started to name them so they could keep them straight. And she started to write about them.
How popular did she become as a writer?
“The Gift of the Deer” sold over 50,000 copies, which is phenomenal for a nature book, even today. That was not out of the ballpark of what Sigurd Olson was selling.
What was different about Helen is that her agent floated “The Gift of the Deer” by Reader's Digest. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Reader's Digest published condensed books, so that the reading public could afford them and read the best sellers of the day.
They sold over a million copies of that condensed book. That made them a lot of money. I think the payment for that contract was $25,000. That was real money in 1966.
Sigurd Olson was a very well-known environmental advocate and writer in Ely, Minn. Did they know each other?
They did communicate with each other about conservation issues, because there was a period in the late ‘50s when the Grand Marais Chamber of Commerce wanted to create another border entry at the east end of Gunflint Lake into Canada. It was a big battle. Sigurd wasn’t happy about it.
Helen kept him in the loop. Helen got involved with the resort owners up there, who surprisingly opposed it. They didn’t want all that traffic driving through and going on to Canada. So the resort owners up there and Helen mounted a campaign against it, and the idea eventually died out.
How would you compare them? Was Sigurd Olson more of an advocate than Helen Hoover?
I think so. Sig was more cerebral as a writer. He took his take on nature from sort of the paddler-adventurer point of view. And as he got older, he got more circumspect. And it was less about his early days as a guide and a hunter, and more about being retrospective about the environment and nature and how important it is for the soul.
I think she was more experiential, just in her little world and what she saw outside her window. And I think what was interesting about that is, she offered an opportunity to see nature without having to camp, backpack, hike, paddle and do all that. If you looked out your window and saw birds and studied them and looked at them long enough, you would learn a lot just by observing.
Why isn’t she more well known?
I think part of it is that she moved away, because she wasn’t able to write. Once her books got popular, there were so many fans who just dropped in on them and wanted autographs that it made her crazy.
And I think some of the local people were pretty sour on her, because she could be acerbic. And I think that they probably didn’t hold her in high esteem, like people held Sig Olson and some others in high esteem.
Were you motivated to write the book to give her the recognition you felt she deserved?
I totally wrote it for that reason. I thought she wasn’t given the credit that she was due, not only in her scientific world, but also in her writing. And I think there were a lot of myths about her. Several people told me, “oh, she never wrote any of that stuff. She just made it all up,” and that she actually made her living writing romance novels under a pseudonym.
And she did write one Gothic sort of romance that was serialized in the New York Daily News. She did it on a lark, because she was waiting for Alfred Knopf to tell her if they were going to publish “The Gift of the Deer” or not, and she wanted to do something.
So she wrote this and submitted it to her agent, and the agent sold it under a pseudonym, because she didn't want the name Helen Hoover attached to a gothic romance. But that was the only thing she ever wrote in that genre. So I’m hoping that the book sets the record straight on that.
What’s relevant about her story and her writing today?
Nature writing is timeless. We still read Thoreau, and how long ago was that? And I think because nature is timeless, you can pick up anybody’s nature book in writing, and you can learn from it.
I think the thing about Helen is that she was sensitive and certainly aware that man cannot control nature, and that we have to coexist with nature if we’re going to survive as a planet.
And that’s a message that’s as relevant today, probably even more so, than it was then.
