Alice Mabel Gray, known as Diana of the Dunes, rejected the conventional world of the early 1900s and chose to live in the remote coastal dunes of Indiana. Her free-spirited life in the region from 1915-1925 made her a beloved folklore legend, fascinated local townspeople and newspaper readers across the country, and brought national attention to the Indiana Dunes during early conservation efforts. In 1917, speaking at an event hosted by the Prairie Club, a group of Chicagoans who had first suggested preserving this landscape, she argued against the senseless destruction of the dunes in a speech entitled "Chicago's Kinland," calling the bond between the Dune Country and Chicago a family tie and saying that to see the dunes destroyed would be a sacrilegious sin. During the years she lived nearby, sand mining operations removed whole dunes by railcar for glassmaking, industrial, and fill purposes, leaving a flat expanse as a result of that exploitation, while protected dunes still remain because of forward thinkers like her.