author
Mary H. (Mary Henderson) Eastman
1818–1887
Best known for writing about Dakota life she observed at Fort Snelling, this 19th-century American author also left behind one of the era's clearest examples of pro-slavery fiction. Her work sits at the uneasy crossroads of firsthand experience, popular history, and the politics of her time.
2 Audiobooks
Aunt Phillis's Cabin; Or, Southern Life As It Is
by Mary H. (Mary Henderson) Eastman
Dahcotah: Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling
by Mary H. (Mary Henderson) Eastman
About the author
Born in Warrenton, Virginia, in 1818, she married Army officer and artist Seth Eastman in 1835. Years later she joined him at Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota, where she encountered Dakota communities and gathered material that shaped some of her most noted books.
Her best-known work, Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling (1849), drew on those experiences and helped introduce many American readers to stories and customs she described from the upper Mississippi frontier. Reference sources also note that her writing reflected the limits and biases of her era, even when it was based on personal observation.
She remains a complicated literary figure. Alongside her writing on Native American life, she published Aunt Phillis's Cabin in 1852 as a defense of slaveholding society, making her an important but deeply controversial voice in 19th-century American literature. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1887.