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.

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. I am way up close to the Forest Reserve of Utah, within half a mile of the line, sixty miles from the railroad. O’Shaughnessy I The Arrival at Burnt ForkĪre 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. “Full of the tang of the prairies and of a delightful personality.” - The New York Times Read more First published in the Atlantic Monthly, these letters made their author an American icon of her time. In vivid detail and with lively prose, Elinore told Juliet of life as a woman in the American West. Through it all-weddings and births, illnesses and snowstorms, changing seasons and changing times-Elinore maintained correspondence with her former employer Juliet Coney in Denver, Colorado. Over the next five years, she not only made a home for herself, but traveled extensively across the state, befriending every neighbor within a hundred miles. Elinore soon fell in love with the land’s vast, untamed beauty, and filed a claim for her own adjoining property under the Homestead Act. In 1909, Elinore Pruitt answered an ad in the Denver Post to become Henry Clyde Stewart’s housekeeper on his homestead outside Burntfork, Wyoming. This “warmly delightful, vigorously affirmative” memoir of a woman homesteader in early twentieth-century Wyoming inspired the acclaimed film Heartland ( The Wall Street Journal ).

Elinore pruitt stewart homestead