As a young widow with a small child, Elinore Pruitt left Denver in 1909 and set out for Wyoming, where she hoped to buy a ranch. Determined to prove that a lone woman could survive the hardships of homesteading, she initially worked as a housekeeper and hired hand for a neighbor — a kind but taciturn Scottish bachelor whom she eventually married. Spring and summers were hard, she concedes, and were taken up with branding, farming, doctoring cattle, and other chores. But with the arrival of fall, Pruitt found time to take her young daughter on camping trips and serve her neighbors as midwife, doctor, teacher, Santa Claus, and friend. She provides a candid portrait of these and other experiences in twenty-six letters written to a friend back in Denver. Described by the Wall Street Journal as "warmly delightful, vigorously affirmative," this unsurpassed classic of American frontier life — enhanced with original illustrations by N. C. Wyeth — will charm today's audience as much as it fascinated readers when it was first published in 1914.
Wyoming homesteader Elinore Pruitt Stewart was born Elinore Pruitt on June 3, 1876, and died on October 8, 1933. She sent letters to a previous employer in Denver, Colorado, outlining her life there. Two compilations of her letters were released in 1914 and 1915. The 1979 film Heartland was based on the first of those compilations. On June 3, 1876, Elinore Pruitt was born at White Bead Hill, which is now a deserted township in the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory. Near the Mexican border, her father passed away in the late 1870s while serving in the Army. She wed Harry Cramer Rupert, who was 48 at the time, somewhere about 1902. For many years, she kept her marriage a secret because she wanted to be able to claim the property as her own. She gave up her claim in 1912 in favor of her mother-in-law rather than risk losing it for failing to comply with the Homestead Acts' rules for claims made by unmarried women. The years 1909 to 1914 are covered in Letters of a Woman Homesteader. August through October 1914 are the two action-packed months covered in Letters on an Elk Hunt. When a horse bolted in 1926, a hay mower ran over her, causing severe injuries from which she never fully recovered.
