My goal in delving into the life of my great-grandmother, Elinore Pruitt
Stewart, was to glean from her experiences her humor, fortitude, sense of
adventure and love and zest for life. In her published and unpublished letters,
Elinore maintained an undying cheerfulness and appreciation for whatever life
threw her way. I hoped to learn from her, to call upon my ancestress, to really
know her. I hoped that Elinore’s philosophy for life of "making do" with
courage, optimism, and generosity, would teach me to appreciate and make the
most of what life threw my way.

Elinore is by no means alone as a strong, adventurous, inspiring female role
model from the pioneering and homesteading era. Brave and inspiring women
abound. These women traveled, with or without husbands, children or families,
into areas often previously "unconquered" by those of European descent. I sought
other role models from this era by reading Pioneer Women: Voices from the
Kansas Frontier, which includes stories from hundreds of women. Also
informative was the PBS series "Frontier House" in which three 21st
century families ventured into the mountains of Montana to try out the pioneer
lifestyle. The women in Pioneer Women and "Frontier House" were living a
slightly more primitive life than Elinore, but much of their daily work and
experiences were the same. The experiences of these women were often based on
hardship: endless work, illness and bad-health with little to no medical care,
harsh and unforgiving landscapes, death. But they punctuated their lives with a
never-ending faith, and drew inspiration and hope from the people and land
around them. Elinore wrote, "I love the smell of the pines. I love their stately
confidence. They inspire me with the thought, ‘All is well. Why worry,
life can’t go wrong.’"

In middle-class America today, I think there is often an overwhelming and
debilitating malaise that is based on several factors. First, the necessities of
life are too easily acquired by middle-class Americans. Many people work in jobs
whose usefulness is incomprehensible, and that does not challenge them
physically, emotionally, creatively or spiritually. These jobs provide a
comfortable enough income to provide life’s necessities, with leftover funds for
mind-numbing entertainment, plastic children’s toys, and mass-produced, uniform
homes, cars, furniture and clothing. Lacking from this lifestyle are the many
factors that made the homesteading life, though unfailingly challenging, feel
valuable and inspiring to the people who lived it.

Homesteaders could see and appreciate the products of their labors, although
in some cases there may have been a gender imbalance. In "Frontier House" one
women noted that she felt less satisfied with a day’s work than her husband
because he had more creative tasks. On any day he was off building a root
cellar, corral or garden fence, while she had the repetitive tasks of cooking
meals, laundering the family’s clothes and milking the cows. At the end of the
day, her husband could look back at the fruit of his labor, while the meals she
prepared were gone moments after they were set upon the table, and the laundry
inevitably needed doing against the next week.

For Elinore, and all pioneer and homesteading women, work began before dawn
and lasted until bedtime. Boiling water could take as long as three hours at
high altitudes, so meals had to be begun well in advance. When they were not
cooking, women worked in the garden, tended and taught children, cleaned house .
. . The list continues indefinitely. After dark, as the family sat around after
supper, the women folk were sure to be working on some handwork: quilting,
knitting socks or sweaters, mending clothes. To survive and carve out a real
life required constant vigilance. If large tasks like growing and harvesting
enough crops and hay, laying by a gargantuan supply of firewood, and planning
and purchasing several months worth of supplies in a single trip to town, were
bungled, families could easily starve or freeze to death in the long, harsh
winters.

Although women typically cooked and cleaned and men tended the livestock and
built and mended the fences and buildings, there was more room in the west for
variations on the strict gender-roles of the east. Women often participated in
traditionally "manly" tasks necessary for carving a living on a farm or ranch.
After America joined WWI, Elinore wrote:

"The draft has made us so short of men that I find myself in my element
again, on the mowing machine. Oh, I’m glad I can mow and rake and even stack
hay. I have been having a perfectly lovely time helping. And we have had a
perfectly glorious fall. There has been no snow or rain and the frost has been
so light that my flowers are not harmed. My beautiful blue and gold Wyoming! You
would love it."

Likewise the men often took part in some "feminine" tasks, joining in the
evening handwork by knitting wool socks for winter.

In spite of the endless workload, the women did manage to bring a little
gentility and culture to their homesteads. In spare moments and with ingenuity
and clever recycling, women transformed their rustic log cabins. The cracks
between logs in the walls of the Stewart cabin were filled in with daub, then
covered with grey paper. Elinore had a few sheets of rose patterned wall paper
and cut out the roses, pasting them as a border eighteen inches from her and
Clyde’s bedroom ceiling. The windows were dressed with crisp white curtains in
summer and double-hung with more insulating curtains in winter.

Perhaps Elinore’s greatest glory was her garden. Although a garden was a
necessity, Elinore and Clyde grew many things not strictly necessary to their
survival. During the war, Elinore grew sugar beets. While she was unable to
separate the molasses from the pure white sugar, and the sugar was therefore
black, this did enable the Stewart’s to have sugar when other families went
without. Aside from potatoes, onions, and other foodstuffs they raised a bounty
of flowers. In her correspondence with a friend, Elinore wrote:

"We raise a heap of flowers but they never finish blooming before the frost
gets them. What we raise are beautiful. We have poppies, zinnias, pansies
lark-spur, cosmos, nasturtiums sweet peas, sweet alyssum ragged robin,
holly-hocks dahlias, morning glorys–and wild cucumber vines; At the east window
of the dining room we have a hop vine that climbs to the top of the house. We
all love roses but have never succeeded in getting them started. I think they
would grow here, there are lots of wild ones but they are always dried out and
brittle before they get here. . . There [are] acres of beautiful iris here and
we have columbine and wild-flowers wild. At this altitude there are no wild
vines. I miss them so, the woods at home, in Oklahoma were a tangle of
vines."

Aside from the daily work of homesteading, and the added creative tasks of
making their lives a little more beautiful, women also served invaluable uses in
their communities. In Kansas, women served on school boards and as mayors and
city council members. One of Wyoming’s state nicknames is "The Equality State":
they were the first state to give women the vote in state elections. Women also
served as midwives and doctors, ministering to the sick. Elinore was considered
the "doctor" of her little Burntfork community. "Elinore’s cure-all for ill
health combined fresh mountain air with wholesome homegrown food and the
renewing physical labor she herself found in gardening" (George, 40). During war
time, Elinore raised more food than her little family needed, and shared the
excess with the neighbors. She and a neighbor friend also traveled around the
area selling war bonds and supporting the war effort.

 

With all of this work, Elinore still found time for writing. Her daily
schedule included doing her house chores in the morning, working in the garden
in the afternoon, and after supper, writing late into the night. She was a great
letter writer; she corresponded with several elderly people and took great joy
in providing them with entertaining stories of her adventures in the wilds of
the west. She was not always altogether truthful, but seemed to exaggerate and
create little half-truths to enhance her stories. Her publishing career began
when Mrs. Coney, her former employer in Denver, sent her letters from Elinore to
the Atlantic Monthly. These letters were soon after compiled into
Letters of a Woman Homesteader. Elinore began to regularly contribute
stories to the Atlantic, and later to a magazine for young people,
Youth’s Companion. Her stories for Atlantic Monthly and Youth’s
Companion were not only in letter form, but were also short works of
fiction. Her publisher from Letters asked her to write another book,
Letters on an Elk Hunt, and she set out on a month-long trip with Clyde,
her daughter Jerrine, and two of her three sons. She wrote "letters" depicting
the adventures of this trip and sent them directly to her publisher.

Around 1920, Elinore wrote her only novel, Sand and Sage. It
apparently took her several years to write, and, as paper was scarce, she often
had to wait for paper before continuing. The later chapters are written on the
back of earlier chapters. It is approximately 530 hand-written pages, in
twenty-two chapters. It tells the story of an upright, respectable family of
cattle ranchers in Burntfork, Wyoming, who come by some trouble when they are
framed for rustling cattle. I think it is a marvelous adventure, with many
characters and interweaving plots, love stories, conniving villains and a keen
understanding an portrait of the cattle business. The rough draft, which is the
only surviving copy, was finished around August of 1921. Later, when Elinore
sought publication, one book agent refused to represent the book, saying that
Elinore’s appeal to readers was strongest when she wrote shorter works of
fiction, or in an epistolary form. In these forms, her natural voice and sense
of adventure and morality shine through. However, the book agent, Miss Weil,
felt that the story was a bit cliched and did not fully grab the reader. Elinore
continued seeking publication, but was rejected by Houghton and Mifflin, who had
published both Letters books.

"Some time after Houghton Mifflin rejected [Sand and Sage], Elinore,
remembering F.N. Doubleday’s invitation years earlier, sent the manuscript to
his company. Doubleday, Page, and Company responded by wiring a telegram to
Boulder, purportedly offering five thousand dollars for "Sand and Sage."
Elinore, however, had already returned to Wyoming. . . The messenger pushed the
slot in the front door and it fell onto the floor in the foyer. Several days
passed before the children noticed it. . . As a result, Elinore could not accept
Doubleday’s offer by the deadline specified, and the novel was not published.
Not getting the book published was one of the greatest blows of Elinore’s life."
(George, 69).

Despite the failure to publish Sand and Sage, Elinore continued to be
a successful writer. Countless fans of her books wrote Elinore during her
lifetime of their appreciation for her stories. Her books Letters of a Woman
Homesteader and Letters on an Elk Hunt by a Woman Homesteader have
continued to draw an audience for over 80 years. In the seventies, several women
became interested in Elinore’s life and writings in their academic studies.
Suzanne George has based her entire academic career on Elinore, and wrote the
biography The Adventures of a Woman Homesteader. There are some hard
feelings in our family towards Ms. George because she has not complied with the
agreement she set with my grandfather; at least, he felt that she had
overstepped her bounds. There is also some strife because some things are
unknown about Elinore’s past and in these instances, Ms. George made assumptions
and put them in her book. There is no historical evidence for some of the things
she claims as fact. Another woman, Beth Ferris, wrote a movie script called
Heartland, based on Letters of a Woman Homesteader. Because
Letters swerve periodically away from absolute truth to make for a better
story, Heartland misses the mark of truth. For example, Elinore often
refers to my great-grandfather as "the Scotsman." In Heartland, actor Rip
Torn who played Clyde, Sr., played the role with a Scottish brogue. In truth, he
was born and raised in Pennsylvania. While these half-truths (Clyde’s ancestors
were Scottish, several generations back) certainly enhance the story,
Ferris further exaggerated these things making Heartland not particularly
accurate. It does, however, still capture the friendliness, spunk and spirit of
this remarkable woman. Fans of her book and people who have seen the movie
continue to visit her homestead, regularly asking locals how to get to the
"woman homesteader’s" homestead.

My idea in doing this contract was to glean some inspiration from the
fortitude of my ancestress. All my life, I’ve had a romantic idea of what this
woman homesteader was, or how her life was. She is that one famous ancestor of
the family, and I was raised on mentions of my great-grandmother Elinore who was
born in the Indian Territories of Oklahoma, made her way with her daughter to
Denver, and finally to the wilds of Wyoming to settle on a homestead. In my
mind, she became a goddess-like figure: a strong, independent, adventurous
single mother. I had little knowledge of the reality of her life, and my
understanding of her was often based on fleeting stories and periodic viewings
of Heartland, the accuracy I have already described.

After visiting her land, I feel a keener sense of the woman herself, but my
understanding continues to ripen. I wrote Elinore a letter recently, apologizing
for my lack of real and deep commitment to this project this quarter. In it I
wrote:

"I don’t feel that I have honored you as you deserve. I do not feel that I
have truly done what I set out to do: to learn from your memory how to better
live and love. Your life deserves more real and focused attention than I gave it
this quarter. I wanted to reread your letters, to catch your humor and your
strength in facing the difficulty and irony of life with a sense of adventure
and enjoyment. These are things I have not previously nurtured in myself that I
hoped to pick up from you. . .

I love having a little more understanding of the homesteading life you lived.
My pride in having you as an ancestor feels more genuine. I am no longer simply
saying your name, telling others of my writer/homesteader ancestress. I am
reading and typing up your book (and really enjoying the process! What a fun
little story!) and have visited your home. I have named every color imaginable
for the browns and greens of the dry desert between my house and yours. I have
felt the wind sweep endlessly across your garden, walked across your floors, and
felt homesick driving away from your land. I have seen the sand and smelled the
sage.

A part of me saw your land, your Wyoming. A wild, lonely
beautiful place. Blue skies dotted with fine clouds. Drought-ridden, dry hay
fields. A small, winding creek bed. Sparsely green trees. A long line of fresh
white mountains and cedar covered slopes. Mile after mile of sagebrush. And
home.

I have enjoyed inviting you into my life. I hope to nurture your memory even
more fully in my life, and to bring your humor and strength into my life. Thank
you so much. So much. For providing me with a strong, adventurous,
beautiful role model. It makes me feel so much stronger knowing that I come from
you, who had such adventure, hardship and zest for life. You teach me how to be
a better woman."

Elinore’s legacy is like that of her peers, those countless adventuresses who
lived with humor, fortitude, and cheerfulness and loved life deeply. In a letter
from February 19, 1925, Elinore wrote to Miss Wood, lamenting the shortness of
life: "It will not be long enough to get my loving done up. I just love people,
I just love to love them." She is a wise and valuable
teacher.