"Who was that woman? I wanted to vindicate her."
Mary Casanova read about the frozen prostitute 20 years ago in a history of Koochiching County, and she couldn't get the image out of her head.
"Someone took this woman's body, put a liquor bottle in her hand and stood her up as a joke before a town meeting around 1909," recalled Casanova, who lives in Ranier, Minn., near the Canadian border.
"Who was that woman? I wanted to vindicate her, give her a voice. For a long time, I wasn't sure how to tell it; the image of her body used as a joke was so disturbing and compelling. But it wouldn't let me go. I kept working on it and leaving it, until finally it took shape in the voice of her daughter."
By: Mary Ann Grossmann
Story Date: 2012-09-11T00:00:00