Early in life, Proctor was a writer of poetry, but not until the Civil War —which aroused the patriotic element within her— were her verses known around the country when her national poems sounded like a bugle.

[3] Edna Dean Proctor was born September 18, 1829,[4][a] in Henniker, New Hampshire, her father's family having gone there from Essex County, Massachusetts.

Upon the day of John Brown's execution, her poem, "The Virginia Scaffold", was read at a large meeting in New York City, and its prophecy in the stanza: "They may hang him on the gibbet; they may raise the victor's cry When they see him darkly swinging like a speck against the sky; Ah, the dying of a hero that the right may win its way Is but sowing seed for harvest in a warm and mellow May!

Now his story shall be whispered by the firelight's evening glow, And in fields of rice and cotton when the hot noon passed slow, Till his name shall be a watchword from Missouri to the sea, And his planting find its reaping in the Birthday of the Free!"

[5] Upon the completion of the railway to the Pacific in 1869, Proctor went with friends to California, and her letters, "From the Narrows to the Golden Gate," in the New York Independent, were pronounced by many the best account of the continental journey.

A second collection of her poems was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1890, and two years later, the same house issued her Song of the Ancient People, which was inspired by the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition.

For the Columbian year of 1892, she wrote the poem, "Columbia's Banner," which was read and recited throughout the schools of the country on Columbus Day.

[citation needed] Proctor started a movement to make corn Columbia's emblem, and a resolution endorsing this idea was proposed.

This was emphasized when Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon, the leader of the Rodman Wanamaker expedition to the Indians, returned from his trip after covering 25,000 miles (40,000 km) and visiting 189 tribes or sub-tribes of Native Americans.

As a reviewer said of it, "It has gone straight to the heart of the American people, ... a song which will be more potent than law to give the Indian corn its representative place in the republic."

Her Song of the Ancient People—the Pueblos of our Southwest was characterized as having the dignity and pathos of a race that beholds all it revered and cherished slipping away.

[2] Never married and childless, she died December 18, 1923, in Framingham, Massachusetts,[1] and was buried at that city's Edgell Grove Cemetery and Mausoleum.