The Burntfork Connection to the Women's Movement

Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s letters written from Burntfork in the 1909 through1913 time period and subsequently published in Atlantic Monthly (Letters of a Woman Homesteader) were popularized by academia in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and she became an icon of the women’s movement.

 Elinore was a storyteller with a bent for exaggeration and the stories she tells in her letters are of great interest.  Of greater historical value, however, is “The Adventures of the Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart”, a biography by Susanne K. George (Bloomfield), which is available through the University of Nebraska Press.

The movie “Heartland” (1979) was based on Letters of a Woman Homesteader.  Here Burntfork was shunned.  If you acquire the movie with hopes of seeing anything of the Burntfork landscape, forget it!  The movie was filmed in Montana!