Juliette Kinzie ─ Frontier Storyteller

In 1830, a young woman named Juliette Magill Kinzie moved from her fancy home in Connecticut to a rustic log cabin in what would later be called Wisconsin. Juliette lived there with her husband, John, who worked as an Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, one of Wisconsin’s earliest settlements. While living at the fort, Juliette came to know the Indian communities that called the land home, as well as the non-Indian settlers who were moving in. She later wrote a best-selling book about her experiences,Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest, an important first-person account of life on the frontier.

This new biography in the Badger Biographies Series turns the lens on the writer herself, detailing her life as she detailed the lives of those she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s.Juliette Kinzie: Frontier Storyteller details war, hunger, and the rapidly changing times Juliette witnessed on the Midwestern frontier, following the pioneering woman through her own changes from socialite to pioneer to famous writer and even to the work of her granddaughter, Juliette Gordon Low, who founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1912.

Kathe Crowley Conn has worked in education, public programming, institutional management, and philanthropy for thirty years. Her interest in the history and ecology of the Midwest began during a childhood spent roaming the lakeshore and open fields near Chicago and became a hallmark of her term as president and executive director of the Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Madison. She founded Nature Net: the environmental learning network to foster a love of the land and the thrill of discovery in children throughout the state. She resides in rural Rock County with her family.