[1] Some of them included, History of Brown County, Wisconsin, in several volumes, Struggling up to the Lights, Homeless Thought at Home, Cassie, The Story of a Woman's Love, and Rocks and Shoals.

Her father was an architect and inventor, of considerable renown, who was unfortunately stripped of quite a fortune by the great overflow of the Mississippi River in 1851; and three years later, he started for England to recover some portion of his mother's estate, but was lost at sea, or supposed to have been, as he was never heard of thereafter.

In 1874, she started the American Sketch Book, an eighty-page historical magazine, at La Crosse, Wisconsin, which, on account of ill health, she removed to Texas in 1877, when she was forty years of age.

[1][a] Two years later, she established a health spa, the "Thermo Water Cure or Hot Air Bath and Hygienic Institute", for those who suffered from neuralgia, paralysis, and rheumatism.

[2] Among her published works were the History of Brown County, Wisconsin, in several volumes, Struggling up to the Lights, Homeless Thought at Home, Cassie, The Story of a Woman's Love, and Rocks and Shoals.

She was remembered as a sort of universal genius: she cooked a dinner, made a dress, nailed up a broken fence, harnessed her horses for a drive, edited a paper, wrote a story, and then entertained with her verses in the afternoon.