In October 1915, Alice Mabel Gray left Chicago and took a train to the Indiana Dunes, looking for a simpler life away from the city. She was 34 and had graduated from the University of Chicago before working as a secretary and later as an editor. The dunes offered a stark contrast: long stretches of sand, marshes, Lake Michigan and very few people. Gray first stayed in a small teepee belonging to friends before finding an abandoned shack near the beach. She called it Driftwood, furnished it with things that had washed ashore, and began living largely on what she could find or buy from nearby fishermen and farmers. The National Park Service says she spent nearly nine years living in makeshift shelters among the dunes and became known as “Diana of the Dunes.”
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