Letters Of A Woman Homesteader

By Elinore Pruitt Stewart

"Peopled with the kinds of characters most novelists only dream of" (Christian Science Monitor), this classic account of American frontier living captures the rambunctious spirit of a pioneer who set out in 1909 to prove that a woman could ranch.

A series of letters make for a fascinating narrative and descriptive journal of Mrs. Stewart's life, moving from the city to a Wyoming homestead, marrying and still having the determination to homestead on her own. Stewart's captivating missives bring to full life the beauty, isolation, and joys of working the prairie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 15, 1998
• ISBN: 9780547525907

Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Elinore Pruitt Stewart was born in 1878. Letters of a Woman Homesteader, first published in 1914, inspired the critically acclaimed movie Heartland.

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THE WOMAN HOMESTEADER

Copyright 1913, 1914 by The Atlantic Monthly Company

Copyright 1914 by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Copyright renewed 1942 by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Foreword copyright © 1988 by Houghton Mifflin Company

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Stewart, Elinore Pruitt.

Letters of a woman homesteader.

1. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt. 2. Ranch life—Wyoming. 3. Pioneers—Wyoming—Biography. 4. Wyoming—Biography. I. Title.

F761.S8 1982 978.7'03'0924 [B] 81-20192

ISBN 0-395-91151-6 (pbk.) AACR2

ISBN 978-0-395-91151-8 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-547-52590-7

v2.0516

Publishers’ Note

THE writer of the following letters is a young woman who lost her husband in a railroad accident and went to Denver to seek support for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Jerrine. Turning her hand to the nearest work, she went out by the day as housecleaner and laundress. Later, seeking to better herself, she accepted employment as a housekeeper for a well-to-do Scotch cattle-man, Mr. Stewart, who had taken up a quarter-section in Wyoming. The letters, written through several years to a former employer in Denver, tell the story of her new life in the new country. They are genuine letters, and are printed as written, except for occasional omissions and the alteration of some of the names.

4 Park St.

Spring 1914

Illustrations

THE WOMAN HOMESTEADER Frontispiece

JERRINE WAS ALWAYS SUCH A DEAR LITTLE PAL 30

ZEBULON PIKE 112

THE STEWART CABIN 138

GAVOTTE 180

MRS. LOUDERER AND MRS. O’SHAUGHNESSY 258

Foreword

By Gretel Ehrlich

Letters of a Woman Homesteader, first published in 1914, are the letters written by Elinore Pruitt when she and her young daughter, Jerrine, came to the sage-covered benchland of southwestern Wyoming in April 1909. The slowest growing state in human population, Wyoming had been overstocked with grazing animals for more than twenty years. The year Elinore Pruitt arrived, there were an estimated 861,000 head of cattle in the state and 6,091,000 sheep. Conflicts between cattlemen and sheepmen, settlers and cattle barons, were rampant. Ranchers had been devastated by the most severe winter on record, that of 1886–87, and had undergone a financial crisis in the nineties. By 1909, stockmen were only beginning to recover.

Elinore Pruitt had heard about Wyoming from a friend while recovering from an illness. She wrote: I was so discouraged by the grippe, that nothing but the mountains, the pines, and the clean fresh air seemed worthwhile . . . and I wanted to homestead.

Two days later she was on her way. An ad put in the Sunday paper quickly gained her employment with a closed-mouthed Scottish bachelor who ranched near the Utah-Wyoming border. I was twenty-four hours on the train and two days on the stage, and oh, those two days! she wrote in what would grow to twenty-six letters to her former employer in Colorado. The snow was just beginning to melt and the mud was about the worst I ever heard of.

A Wyoming spring has little to recommend it. It’s hell on women and horses and death to cattle, one old-timer wrote. But Elinore Pruitt was not to be turned back by hardship. Orphaned early in life, she and her brothers and sisters had made their own way in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, and in the absence of schools, she had taught herself to read and write. In Denver, having lost her husband to a railroad accident, she had worked as a laundress, a housekeeper, and a furnace tender to support herself and her daughter.

What might have seemed cruelly isolated and desolate was a welcome relief and an adventure for her. On her arrival at the small ranch outside Burnt Fork, Wyoming, she was full of expectation: I am way up close to the Forest Preserve of Utah . . . and sixty miles from the railroad. . . . There is a saddle horse especially for me and a little shotgun with which I am supposed to kill sage hens. We are between two trout streams so you can think of me as being happy when the snow is through melting and the water gets clear.

Besides her work as Clyde Stewart’s housekeeper and hired hand, Elinore had a claim to file. When the land was cleared of snow, she traveled to Green River, about eighty miles away, by horse and buggy to file on land that adjoined Mr. Stewart’s. Camping out for a night on the way, she woke to find herself covered with snow—after all, it was only May, which can still be wintry in Wyoming. Ignoring discomfort and fatigue, she chose to see in that snowy desolation an eerie beauty that would take hold of her and carry her through many hardships to come. After we quitted the cañon I saw the most beautiful sight, she wrote. It seemed as if we were driving through a golden haze. The violet shadows were creeping up between the hills, while away back of us the snow-capped peaks were catching the sun’s last rays.

Spring and summer on any ranch is hard, steady work—branding, farming, irrigating, haying, doctoring cattle. It was September before she had time off, and while her neighbors went on a hunting expedition, she and Jerrine went camping, a trip that marked the beginning of many adventures. Daring, a little reckless, and endlessly curious, Elinore Pruitt Stewart (she had by now married the kind, gruff, bagpipe-playing Scot) proved she was undaunted by terrain, weather, and loneliness. During the four years these letters span, she befriended every neighbor within a hundred miles.

What began as quaint personal accounts turn into Elinore Stewart’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress, and in the process she reveals herself to be not only tenacious and resourceful but saintly as well. Whenever possible, she took off from the ranch—usually in the company of her daughter, and later her other children, but rarely her husband—and traveled on horseback or in a buggy over mountains, through forests, over deserts and through canyonlands, over the broad, spare terraces that make up this state, giving us, along the way, the lives of those she encounters. In the course of her travels she was, by turns, matchmaker, Santa Claus, savior, midwife, mother, doctor, teacher, and friend. When she became lost in a snowstorm forty miles from home, she came on Zebulon Pike, an illiterate bachelor who became a dear friend; she played matchmaker and wedding giver, improvising a last-minute dress, gifts, and wedding feasts. She befriended two lonely older women, went to the aid of a newly widowed and pregnant young woman, was entertained by a French trapper, Gavotte, and was saved from certain death by an eccentric named Hikum. On one of her outings she found herself in the middle of a midnight raid by horse thieves, and during another, nearly the victim of a snow-slide. The personal sorrow of losing her own child, born in 1910, was mitigated by helping others: when she came across two Mormon women abandoned by their husbands in the mountains at Christmas time, she and friends hurriedly made clothes and toys, put up a Christmas tree, gave them food from the back of her wagon, and on top of all that, delivered a baby. Having once declared her interest in being a world traveler, Elinore Stewart found that even within the confines of a turn-of-the-century ranch she could live expansively. What matters to us about her is not the distances she covered but the greatness of her heart.

During the four years spanned by these letters, Elinore Stewart bore four children, raised all the food on the ranch, helped with every ranch job, and proved up on her own homestead. To me, homesteading is the solution of all poverty’s problems, she claimed, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of a sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.

Her insight about temperament was right. Jerrine, the daughter who came with her by stage to Burnt Fork, only recently died. She had been an art teacher in Pennsylvania, and once she went east, never returned to Wyoming.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader is not a book about the breathtaking difficulties of solitude and struggle, but rather, a book about the way in which we might find plenitude in paucity. No other account of frontier life so demonstrates the meaning of neighborliness and community, of true, unstinting charity, of tenaciousness charged not by dour stoicism but by simple joy.

At the end of a marvelous description of her own wedding—a hurried affair because ranchers have to chink in the wedding between times, that is, between planting the oats and other work that must be done early or not at all—she concluded: When you think of me you must think of me as one who is truly happy. It is true, I want a great many things I haven’t got, but I don’t want them enough to be discontented and not enjoy the many blessings that are mine. I have my home among the blue mountains, my healthy, well-formed children, my clean, honest husband, my kind gentle milk cows, my garden which I make myself. There are lots of chickens, turkeys, and pigs which are my own special care. I have some slow old gentle horses and an old wagon. I can load up the kiddies and go where I please any time. I have the best, kindest neighbors and I have my dear absent friends. Do you wonder I am so happy? When I think of it all, I wonder how I can crowd all my joy into one short life.

Shell, Wyoming

1988

I

The Arrival at Burnt Fork

BURNT FORK, WYOMING,

April 18, 1909.

DEAR MRS. CONEY,—

Are you thinking I am lost, like the Babes in the Wood? Well, I am not and I’m sure the robins would have the time of their lives getting leaves to cover me out here. I am ’way up close to the Forest Reserve of Utah, within half a mile of the line, sixty miles from the railroad. I was twenty-four hours on the train and two days on the stage, and oh, those two days! The snow was just beginning to melt and the mud was about the worst I ever heard of.

The first stage we tackled was just about as rickety as it could very well be and I had to sit with the driver, who was a Mormon and so handsome that I was not a bit offended when he insisted on making love all the way, especially after he told me that he was a widower Mormon. But, of course, as I had no chaperone I looked very fierce (not that that was very difficult with the wind and mud as allies) and told him my actual opinion of Mormons in general and particular.

Meantime my new employer, Mr. Stewart, sat upon a stack of baggage and was dreadfully concerned about something he calls his Tookie, but I am unable to tell you what that is. The road, being so muddy, was full of ruts and the stage acted as if it had the hiccoughs and made us all talk as though we were affected in the same way. Once Mr. Stewart asked me if I did not think it a gey duir trip. I told him he could call it gay if he wanted to, but it did n’t seem very hilarious to me. Every time the stage struck a rock or a rut Mr. Stewart would hoot, until I began to wish we would come to a hollow tree or a hole in the ground so he could go in with the rest of the owls.

At last we arriv, and everything is just lovely for me. I have a very, very comfortable situation and Mr. Stewart is absolutely no trouble, for as soon as he has his meals he retires to his room and plays on his bagpipe, only he calls it his bugpeep. It is The Campbells are Coming, without variations, at intervals all day long and from seven till eleven at night. Sometimes I wish they would make haste and get here.

There is a saddle horse especially for me and a little shotgun with which I am to kill sage chickens. We are between two trout streams, so you can think of me as being happy when the snow is through melting and the water gets clear. We have the finest flock of Plymouth Rocks and get so many nice eggs. It sure seems fine to have all the cream I want after my town experiences. Jerrine is making good use of all the good things we are having. She rides the pony to water every day.

I have not filed on my land yet because the snow is fifteen feet deep on it, and I think I would rather see what I am getting, so will wait until summer. They have just three seasons here, winter and July and August. We are to plant our garden the last of May. When it is so I can get around I will see about land and find out all I can and tell you.

I think this letter is about to reach thirty-secondly, so I will send you my sincerest love and quit tiring you. Please write me when you have time.

Sincerely yours,

ELINORE RUPERT.

II

Filing a Claim

May 24, 1909.

DEAR, DEAR MRS. CONEY,—

Well, I have filed on my land and am now a bloated landowner. I waited a long time to even see land in the reserve, and the snow is yet too deep, so I thought that as they have but three months of summer and spring together and as I wanted the land for a ranch anyway, perhaps I had better stay in the valley. So I have filed adjoining Mr. Stewart and I am well pleased. I have a grove of twelve swamp pines on my place, and I am going to build my house there. I thought it would be very romantic to live on the peaks amid the whispering pines, but I reckon it would be powerfully uncomfortable also, and I guess my twelve can whisper enough for me; and a dandy thing is, I have all the nice snow-water I want; a small stream runs right through the center of my land and I am quite near wood.

A neighbor and his daughter

Reviews for Letters Of A Woman Homesteader

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the early 20th century, a widow with a young daughter takes up a homestead claim in Wyoming and writes letters about her life and adventures to her former employer in Denver. Elinore wanted to prove that a woman could ranch on her own. She claimed success in her letters, but she really wasn’t on her own since she married the Scotsman with the neighboring claim almost as soon as she arrived. She did show how much a generous-hearted homesteader could accomplish with the aid of equally generous neighbors. Her down-to-earth descriptions of her home, her neighbors and their homes, her travels and the people she met, and holidays and special events will quickly captivate most readers.I listened to the audio version. The reader’s voice reminded me of a voice mail assistant or GPS navigator so much that I wondered at first if it was being read by a computer. Since she changed accents when someone else was speaking, I decided it was a real person speaking and not a computer!

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

nonfiction (letters from early 1900s). use of 'n' word and Negro as vernacular of the day.

[ludiegrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had never heard of this book before, just stumbled across it while looking for volumes of letters to download from Project Gutenberg. I’m so glad I did. Engrossing, well-written, often humorous letters of a widow who decided to start a new life on the Wyoming frontier. If you enjoy reading letters and don’t mind that key bits of the story are revealed gradually, then I recommend this! I’d certainly read it again—her voice is a delight.

[anitatally · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book. The letter-writer must have been a wonderful woman. I would have loved to have known her.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written in a warm chatty style, Letters of a Woman Homesteader paints an interesting picture of homesteading in Wyoming in the early 1900’s. The author, a widow with a young child, takes on the role of housekeeper on a ranch while at the same time files her own claim on land that adjoins this ranch. To prove her claim she plants and grows vegetables and makes some basic improvements on the property. She marries the rancher and all the while continues to write letters to her friend in Denver describing her life.With both humor and insight she describes her day to day activities and that of her neighbours. This isn’t an easy life, they are miles from any town or railroad and have to learn to be self-sufficient in many areas, including medicine. Even going to a neighbours for a dinner party means a long overnight camping trip to get there. Yet even while living such an isolated life, her letters portray her love of life and nature. Her prose is simple and heartfelt, and her descriptions of the natural world that surround her allow the reader to feel part of that world as well.Eleanor Pruitt Stewart was a strong, independent woman, as I imagine most women who homesteaded had to be. When there wasn’t a minister available for a funeral service, she went ahead and conducted the services for her new-born son herself. But beyond having this core of steel, she was a woman who found the place she was meant to be. “I love the flicker of an open fire, the smell of the pines, the pure, sweet air, and I went to sleep thinking how blest I was to be able to enjoy the things I love most.” An enjoyable read.

[jillian_kay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent audiobook -- adventurous and touching.

[magnolia2_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting read showing an upbeat look at life as a woman homesteader. The book is a series of letters from Mrs. Stewart to a friend back east.

[clueless_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thoroughly enjoyable tale told in letters. A plucky widow moves west with her infant. With humor, wit and optimism she writes of her riveting life. Hard work doesn't daunt her.

[satyridae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loved this! Stewart's letters are delightful. Betsy-Tacy is always my frame of reference for the early teens, and I kept thinking about how while Elinore was mowing the meadow or helping someone deliver a baby, Betsy was trying to get a bath in a German hostel. Stewart is indomitable, plucky, and amusing as all get-out. Her life is interesting, her voice unique.

The narrator was good. The letters, terrific!

Highly recommended for all the BT folks.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Did you ever wonder what life might be like on the early 20th century frontier for a woman and her daughter? In this series of letters written to persons back home, we find the story of a woman who was tough enough to make it. In some of the letters she details how she settled her claim which provides valuable information for persons researching pioneer settlers. Her life is truly remarkable and inspirational.

[jules72653 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very descriptive look at life in Wyoming during the early 1900s. I believe it took a remarkable woman to do what she did. Very entertaining book and I hope to get a hard copy for my mom. I think she would enjoy it as well.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a strong pioneer woman, an adventurer, a loving mother, a hard worker, an imaginative problem solver and a great letter writer. She describes homesteading in Wyoming at the beginning of the 20th century in letters full of joy, love of the land, self assurance, community spirit and optimism. She thought any woman who tired of dreary, repetitive hard work in town should and could be a homesteader. She thought the work was no harder and the rewards far greater. She appeared to be a woman with no self doubt an an inspiration to us all.

[countrylife_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

”To me, homesteading is the solution of all poverty’s problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”Elinor Pruitt takes her future into her own hands and heads to Wyoming with her young daughter. While proving up her own homestead, she keeps house and cooks for the bachelor at the next homestead, in this way making an income meantime. Her letters back home to her friend are full of the beauties of her surroundings, and accounts of encounters with neighbors, Mormons, wild creatures, and weather. The saved letters cover her years in Wyoming from 1909-1913. I would love to have letters such as these in my family history. They are full of emotion and fact and held me rapt for the duration of the book. ”Did you ever eat pork and beans heated in a frying-pan on a camp-fire for breakfast? Then if you have not, there is one delight left you. But you must be away out in Wyoming, with the morning sun just gilding the distant peaks, and your pork and beans must be out of a can, heated in a disreputable old frying-pan, served with coffee boiled in a battered old pail and drunk from a tomato-can. ”

[mldavis2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While not a novel as such, this is an interesting publication of a series of letters written by a homestead woman around 1909 in Wyoming. The letters were written to a former female employer and, apparently good friend, and chronicles her life during a short period of time and the struggles and optimism and her love of nature. No replies are recorded and the letters are written in a semi-diary format. The value of this book lies in the attitude of the writer, her self-sufficiency and her descriptions of a wide-open country life.

[etxgardener · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a collection of letters from a woman who leaves the east to homestead and be a housekeeper for a Scottish man in Wyoming to her former employer., and are a delight to read. The author reveals herself to be an intrepid woman to which nothing is too big a problem to surmount. She grabs life with both hands & enjoys the ride.At first I doubted that this was actually a work of non-fiction, but upon researching the author after I finished the book, I found that, indeed, she was a real person. I would compare her to the fictional Amelia Peabody of the famous mystery series. She is a woman of heart and pluck.

[sundownr_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed reading her letters and wish there had been more!

[boundtogetherforgood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a delightful book! Elinore Pruitt Rupert Stewart was a prolific writer of letters. After her husband died, leaving her with a young infant, she decided to head west and see as much of the world as possible.After a bout of flu she was advised that she should travel out to Wyoming as she was supposed to fare better there. On a whim she contacted a man who was advertising for a housekeeper. She moved from Denver to Wyoming, near the Bad Land hills.This book is a collection of letters which she wrote to a dear friend and former employer in Denver. Over the course of the letters on learns bits and pieces about her life...a few secrets even. If you've never read this type of book or if you just think you might not be interested, I would still encourage you to broaden your reading horizons and read this little gem. At only 112 pages it is certainly a page-turner. I couldn't wait to see what Elinore and her gang might be upt to next. The best part is that she is quite the humorist. Not only does she find humor in many things, she is also able to convey humor through her writing. What a talent! How pleased must have been those people to whom she wrote letters! I can only imagine what a pleasure it must have been to know her. With such a bright and giving spirit, those around her must truly have been blessed. She, too, was blessed. Moving to Wyoming brought her to a land that was much less inhabited than where she had previously lived. She had to learn new ways. She also learned independence as she was also on a quest to prove her own homestead! In the course of doing that she also made many life-long friends and found that she did not have to be always so fiercely independent because she was surrounded by people who loved her and cared for her.

[nancylang-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I thoroughly enjoyed Elinore's letters and her optimitstic view of a possible brutal time. She continually challenged herself and shared her achievements in a most delightful way. I too appreciated her clear view and appreciation of the natural beauty around her and her affection for her husband.

[itsjustme_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some of it was interesting. I like historical books but I guess I don't really care for books made up just of letters. I found it harder to follow and real slow. I think if it was written in story form I would have enjoyed it more.

[heylucy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A timeless collection of vignettes about life on the frontier at the turn of the century.