Hattie Wheeler’s Writing Succeeds when Loyal to the Ojibwe

In 1894 Hattie Wheeler lives with her brother E.P. in Ashland, Wisconsin, close to the Bad River Reservation. Living there reminds her of her childhood so intensely that she begins publishing stories and novels about it. In her first novel, Cub’s Career, a bear cub narrates a story about a mission family that closely resembles Hattie’s own. That some in her family complain that her writing career costs her more than she makes may help explain why her next book, The Woman in Stone, collects misleading stereotypes of Natives. It still does not sell, so Hattie turns over her research on the Black Hawk War to a Chicago writer, Oliver Gale, who manages to make a romantic novel from the material called The Knight in the Wilderness that dismisses Black Hawk as a bumbling old man. After remaining silent for over a decade, Hattie writes her own novel from her research, On Black Hawk’s Trail, which characterizes the Sacs and Black Hawk positively, stressing their nobility and their mistreatment by the government.