Collaboration, Community, and the Realities of Woman Homesteaders

The call to live off the land, to cultivate one’s food, and to embrace an existence rooted in ancestral traditions, is a romantic notion that still calls to some in the present day. Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s letters colorfully capture this romantic ideal. Elinore Stewart Pruitt was born in Oklahoma and after working as a laundress in Denver, and left widowed with a young daughter, she traveled to the American West in 1909, a land ripe with opportunity and hardships. Initially, she worked as a housekeeper for a Scottish rancher in Wyoming and later would homestead herself and marry that very rancher, Harry J. Stewart, with whom she would have a son. A compilation of her letters called “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” reveal intriguing insights into her life. Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s letters serve to display a communal and collaborative culture in the American West, while obscuring the realities of single woman homesteaders. <a href="https://medium.com/@benjaminbenson303/collaboration-community-and-the-realities-of-woman-homesteaders-e1605913edb2">Website</a>