Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919

by Philip L. Gerber (Editor), Paul Corey (Foreword by), Wayne Franklin (Afterword)

Overview

In July 1909 twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Corey left her Iowa farm to stake her claim to a South Dakota homestead. Over the next ten years, as she continued her schoolteaching career and carved out a home for herself in this inhospitable territory, she sent a steady stream of letters to her family back in Iowa. From the edge of modern America, Bess wrote long, gossipy accounts—"our own continuing adventure story," according to her brother Paul—of frontier life on the high plains west of the Missouri River. Irrepressible, independent-minded, and evidently fearless, the self-styled Bachelor Bess gives us a firsthand, almost daily account of her homesteading adventures. We can all stake a claim in her energetic letters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587290794
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	10/01/1990
Series:	American Land & Life
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	540
File size:	7 MB

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword by Paul Corey Acknowledgments Introduction A Note on the Editing Elizabeth Corey's Homesteading Letters Epilogue: 1920-1954 Afterword by Wayne Franklin Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

Early in this century, a person with determination could change the course of a life by heading west to homestead in places like South Dakota--and, as Elizabeth Corey demonstrates in letters to her family in Iowa, that person could be a single woman. A lively and informative correspondent, Corey uses a multitude of details to flesh out the quotidian activities on her 160-acre claim: designing a brand to mark her stock, sitting for exams to maintain her teaching credentials, juggling meager funds for building materials to improve her property, shooting a rabbit in her garden (``I had to give him a little persuasive gun talk to get him to stay for dinner'') and dressing in ``three layers of wool all over'' as protection from the bitterly cold winters. Often her descriptions bubble with good humor: she suggests a law requiring that all marriage proposals be oral; when they're written, there's no way to stop the man from asking. However, elsewhere Corey ends with the plaintive postscript, ``I'm so homesick.'' Gerber's work includes Critical Essays on Robert Frost. Illustrations not seen by PW . (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Once I started reading the letters, it was extremely difficult to skip over some and not read every one, word for word…Each letter provides such rich details of this woman's life in regard to her daily activities, her interaction with neighbors, the difficulties of homesteading in Dakota, and, perhaps most unusual, many of her private feelings about herself and her life there."—Dorothy Schwieder

From the Publisher