Foxlily

 

If Elinore Pruitt Stewart had had a computer, she could have been a champion blogger. She didn’t even have electricity.  She lived in the middle of an often frozen nowhere, near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, in the early 1900s.

When she came to Wyoming, Elinore was no stranger to hardship, or to rural life. Born near Ft. Smith, Arkansas in 1878,  she was orphaned early, helped look after her younger siblings and keep the family together, and supported herself with railroad work in Oklahoma. She first married a railroad man named Rupert, with whom she had a daughter, Jerrine, in 1907. Not long after Jerrine’s birth, Stewart was again on her own,  scrubbing clothes at a Denver laundry, to support herself and baby Jerrine.  She was an early exemplar of a hard-working single mother.

Elinore moved to Burnt Fork in 1909, in response to an advertisement from homesteader Clyde Stewart, whose wife Cynthia had died in 1907.  After keeping house for Stewart for a short time, and learning to tolerate his musical tastes, Elinore married him.  She said of her husband’s bagpipe playing: “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.”

Elinore didn’t take up the “bugpeep,” but she did take up the pen, writing cheerful, frank letters about ranch life to her former employer, Juliet Coney, in Denver.  In these wonderful letters, Elinore told Mrs. Coney about her life of ranch work, hunting, and horse treks in spectacular country. She described eccentric neighbors, cowboys, horse thieves, and orphans (including an enterprising twelve-year-old neighbor, Cora Belle). Elinore wrote of snow (noting in her letters that there are only three seasons in Wyoming:  July, August, and winter), and of the long layovers with neighbors that winter travel sometimes made necessary. She chronicled frontier parties, including a two-day “Leatherstocking dinner,” that Elinore and other community members organized after reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales.  Cooper’s Natty Bumppo would have fit right in with these folks.  At the dinner, they served foods mentioned in the books: venison, antelope, porcupine, beaver tail, sage hen, grouse, and trout. Those recipes, as well as the presentation, would have been endlessly fascinating.  Imagine the photographs!  (Well, maybe not…)

Mrs. Coney enjoyed Elinore’s letters so much that she arranged to have them published in The Atlantic Monthly,  where they appeared in serial form in 1913.  Letters of a Woman Homesteader, a book of the collected letters, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth (father of Andrew Wyeth), was published in 1914.  Another collection of Stewart’s epistles, Letters from an Elk Hunt, was published in 1915.  In addition to writing, ranching, and caring for her daughter Jerrine and the three sons she had with Clyde Stewart, Elinore staked and perfected a claim to her own quarter-section ranch next to Clyde Stewart’s property.

Photographs of Elinore, Clyde, their family, and the old Stewart homestead (now tumbling down) appear on a website that some of Stewart’s grandchildren have constructed, www.elinorestewart.com.

The small collection of family snapshots on the website includes a 1925 photograph of Elinore on a horse-drawn mowing machine. She had learned to use this primitive implement years earlier, writing to Mrs. Coney in 1909:

I have done most of my cooking at night, have milked seven cows every day, and have done all the hay-cutting, so you see that I have been working.  But I have found time to put up thirty pints of jelly and the same amount of jam for myself.  I used wild fruits, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, and cherries…We began haying July 5 and finished September 8.  After working so hard and so steadily I decided on a day off, so yesterday I saddled the pony and Jerrine and I fared forth…There was a tang of sage and pine in the air, and our horse was midside deep in rabbit-brush, a shrub just covered with flowers that look and smell like goldenrod.

In 1926,  Elinore fell under a mowing machine, which a bolting horse dragged over her. She sustained severe injuries from which she never fully recovered. She died in 1933.

The 1979 film Heartland (shot well north of Wyoming, near Harlowton, Montana), based on Elinore’s book, stars Conchata Ferrell as Elinore, and Rip Torn as Clyde.  The movie is available through Netflix.  Viewers of the film will be looking at the Snowies and the Crazies. Elinore and Clyde Stewart would have been looking at the Cedar Mountain Range, and, to the southwest, the Uintas in Utah, possibly including King’s Peak, which, at over 13,000 feet, is Utah’s highest.   (I had thought they were looking at the Tetons, but an alert reader kindly assisted me with this correction).

Susan K. George published her biography of Elinore Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader:  The Life and Times of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, in 1993.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader has long been on my shelf of favorite books. When I saw Heartland, I was pleasantly surprised by the familiar landscapes in Sweetgrass and Wheatland counties in Montana.  I recommended the book to my book club, then missed the discussion because I was traveling.  Several members of the group made a point of telling me how much they enjoyed the memoir.

I think the unassuming Elinore, who worked so hard, met her troubles with so much courage, and took time to tell her stories, would have been pleased, and perhaps surprised, that her letters still entertain and inspire.   Humbled by the grandeur of her unspoiled surroundings, Elinore wrote to Juliet Coney,  ”all my own efforts have always been just to make the best of everything and to take things as they come.”