ABSTRACT

The Classic Journey of a Woman Homesteader:

The Travel Theme in Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Elinore Pruitt Stewart, best known for her epistolary collections, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, 1914, and Letters on an Elk Hunt, 1915, relied almost exclusively on the travel theme, one of the classic forms of narrative that has become a tradition in American literature, especially among plains and western writers. Besides contributing structure to Stewart's letters, these natural journey patterns add a symbolic or mythic dimension to her works as she detailed a woman's struggles to survive and succeed in an often hostile environment, and elevate the writings above the commonplace, personal letter. Through her letters she painted a picture of life which, after she had made her escape and established her home, became one long journey of exploration, a journey she undertook with zeal.

The Journeys of Elinore Pruitt Stewart

The journey or travel story, one of the classic forms of narrative, has become a tradition in American literature, especially among plains and western writers. The protagonists of James Fenimore Cooper, O.E. Rolvaag, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz reflect this well-established theme. Not only does it exemplify the homesteader's travels into a new world and often a new way of life, but it is, also, essential in the quest motif where the writer journeys into his or her own "self," discovering insight into the central experiences of life.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart, best known for her epistolary collections, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, 1914, and Letters on an Elk Hunt, 1915, relied almost exclusively on the travel theme. Even in her Culberson children's stories, every known story-letter written by Stewart, both published and unpublished, contains some type of journey. According to Janis P. Stout in The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures, the recurrent forms of the journey types--the exploration, the escape, the home-founding, and the limitless wandering--not only add mythic undertones but echo the patterns of pioneers' lives in their westerly migration into the continent (xi). Three of these patterns figure strongly in Stewart's letters, although in a different order: the journeys of escape, home-founding and exploration.

Stewart began her escape to a better life between 1907 and 1908 while still living in the Oklahoma Territory. Leaving behind a life of childhood poverty and a failed marriage and taking along her younger sisters, Susie and Josephine, and her infant daughter, Jerrine, she boarded a train for Colorado where she planned to visit the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. A serious illness caused her to reroute to Denver where she had no job, no money and knew no one. Eventually Stewart obtained work from the genteel Mrs. Juliet Coney. However, she labored seven days a week for two dollars as a nurse and housekeeper for the long-widowed schoolteacher from Boston in addition to helping out at the Sunshine Rescue Mission's day care Nursery to pay for Jerrine's child care.

Life did not seem to be working out for Stewart as she had planned. The major purpose of her decision to homestead was to escape from her dismal jobs of cooking, washing and stoking coal furnaces in crowded Denver and of having her child cared for by strangers. Although devoted to her employer, when the enlarged Homestead Act passed in 1909, enabling the head of a family to claim government land, Stewart found her way out. She answered Clyde Stewart's advertisement in the Denver Post for a housekeeper on his Wyoming ranch and moved to Burntfork with him in 1909. She filed on a 160 acre homestead adjoining Clyde's, and eight weeks later, became Mrs. Clyde Stewart. With strength and determination she "set out to prove that a woman could ranch if she wanted to" (LWH 279).

Stewart made her escape to Wyoming by stagecoach, much like Mark Twain's tenderfoot. She first glimpsed what the frontier had to offer aboard the rickety conveyance, plowing through mud in the jolting coach while the colorful Mormon driver "insisted on making love all the way" (LWH 4). Since Stewart explicitly mentioned Twain in Homesteader, she may also have been alluding to his western travel book, Roughing It, in the final line of the final letter of Homesteader, adding emphasis with quotation marks: "I just love to experiment, to work, and to prove out things, so that ranch life and 'roughing it' just suit me" (LWH 282).

A second journey pattern, the home-founding, traditionally accompanies the journey of escape and is most directly based on American history. Stout explains that "the great meaning of the West was opportunity, a future-centered concept, and the home-seeking narrative, typically westerly, explicitly incorporates the standard traditional values," emphasizing the development of social order and female-oriented domesticity in a male-dominated frontier ( 42). This pattern of home-founding prevailed in Stewart's letters. She proudly asserted in an early letter to Mrs. Coney that she had filed on her land and felt "well pleased" (LWH 7). In subsequent letters she acknowledged how, by herself, she had irrigated and cultivated her own land, milked ten cows twice a day, churned butter to sell and kept a flock of chickens and turkeys, bringing bounty, order and domesticity to the Stewart ranch. Stewart stressed her delight in her home and family when she confided to Mrs. Coney upon her return from the 1914 elk hunt, "Can you guess how happy I am? Be it ever so humble there is no place like home" (LEH 160).

In Stewart's later letters, when she had firmly established herself on the ranch, she expounded on the happiness she gained from her accomplishments and the home itself. On March 1, 1928, in one of her annual letters to Mrs. Coney's daughter, Stewart accompanied her correspondent on a verbal tour of her cozy kitchen, her pride evident in what she had managed to do with so little:

The table now, is covered with sixteen quart Mason jars filled with kraut in the making. Some of my cabbage was beginning to burst so I made kraut which I can put in the cellar under the kitchen pretty soon. Being in the mason jars it will keep perfectly. Next the cook table is my cupboard--which the Stewart made before I came--just an open set of shelves on which I keep my dishes, this has two short curtains like sash curtains, made of the skirt of an old more white than blue barred gingham dress of mine. I have to wash these every week or they get pretty grimey.1

The next year, February 18, 1929, Elinore again contrived a "pen visit" for another friend and correspondent, the blind Mr. Zaiss of Massachusetts. She admitted the bareness of her existence, "Walls bare except for cooking utensils, guns, coats. The kitchen serves as dining room, sitting room and library in the West," but she boasted of the warmth and friendliness of the atmosphere. However physically humble Stewart's log cabin, she furnished it amply with love for her family and humanity.

The founding of Stewart's home and family, normally the last in the pioneering journey pattern according to Stout, occurred almost immediately after the Woman Homesteader had made her escape. Traditionally, men explored the wildernesses, often leaving their families behind, sometimes sending for them after a home had been established. This reversal of order, the home-founding and then the exploration, appears typical for women on the frontier. It was not until their "women's work" was completed that they might have the luxury to explore their surroundings. The caretaking of her daughter and then the establishment of a second family necessitated that Stewart delay the exploration stage of her quest.

The theme of exploration, the third pattern, occurred only sporadically in the Homesteader letters. Stewart's first work concentrated mainly on the development of her home and family, although she took occassional trips to explore the nearby mountains and deserts and to become acquainted with their inhabitants. In September of her first year in Wyoming, she and her daughter left on "a camping-out expedition" and climbed high into the mountains thirty or forty miles from their homestead where they feasted on rabbits and trout, listened to the howl of wolves at night, and awoke one morning to an early snow storm (LWH 25). In this exploration, Stewart proclaimed, "We did n't know where we were going, but we were on our way" (LWH 29). Her delight in her discoveries prompted her to exclaim, "But when you get among such grandeur you get to feel how little you are and how foolish is human endeavor," a feeling she must surely have shared with many adventurers upon first viewing the magnificence of the frontier (LWH 30).

Exploration began to figure more importantly in Elk Hunt, after Stewart had made her escape from the city and founded her home. This exploratory spirit led Stewart to undertake the elk hunting expedition into the mountains. Her descriptions of the deserts, mountains, and forests, and of the people who inhabit them, exemplify an explorer's keen sense of observation and curiousity and explain, in Stewart's words, "how greedy I am for new experiences" (LEH 13). She enjoyed them to the fullest, exclaiming, "Dawn in the mountains--how I wish I could describe it to you! If I could only make you feel the keen, bracing air, the exhilarating climb; if only I could only paint its beauties, what a picture you should have!" (LEH 97).

The exploration theme figured even more actively in her later unpublished works as she travelled, not only in the surrounding countryside and physically back and forth from Boulder, but also through the expanded horizons of her reading.

In an October 24, 1920, letter to Miss Wood, a lifelong correspondent from Lexington, Missouri, Stewart described her delayed wedding tour. Exploring the mountains and glacier lakes as her husband and children went fishing, Stewart became lost, sending her family forth in a frenzied and fruitless search for their missing mother. The next morning, Elinore found her way back to camp in time for breakfast and commented ironically about her husband's irritation: "But then he had eight days of fishing and not nearly the luck fishing that I had exploring."

In two later stories published by the Atlantic Monthly, "The Return of the Woman Homesteader," 1919, and "Snow: A Letter from the Woman Homesteader," 1923, Stewart journeyed away from the ranch. In the first story, Mrs. Louderer and Elinore hitched their horses, Chub and Kronprinz, to a wagon and toured the surrounding countryside to raise money for the war effort from people who had nothing to spare. The second involved a more dangerous enterprise, for Elinore had to travel home alone through a blizzard after nursing a neighbor. While stranded in a deserted shack, she discovered the isolated and mystical world of a Swiss immigrant who, before he had left to serve in the army during World War I, had covered the walls of his cabin with philosophical sayings. Both explorations taught the Woman Homesteader a little more about human emotions.

In 1925, Stewart undertook a five hundred mile trip from Boulder to Burntfork with her three boys. Three known stories result from people she either met or imagined while travelling on this expedition. One concerns an elderly lady, Mollie-Jane, who journeyed West to escape the stifling life of conventional southern society, and another introduces us to Goof, a young man orphaned at birth who was travelling to the mountains to escape his past and establish a family. A third story concerning a young lady named Jessie killed by cattle thieves also entails a journey, "a long, lonely crawl over sand ridges and waterless alkali flats."

In addition, in the late 1920s, Stewart's persona travelled into the mountains in order to confront the social issue of prohibition. With the resolute Mrs. Pond at her side, she galloped through the mountains and hid in valleys while foiling the efforts of moonshiners. Perhaps her most exciting encounter, though, occurred in her story of the wild horse hunt where she became swept up in a wild horse stampede, encountered a veteran who no longer believed in the glory of war and watched the agonies of wild horses brutalized by mercenaries.

Later, when Stewart herself became unable to participate in actual excursions because of her health, her letters brought her correspondents on imaginary journeys to her. In a March 4, 1925, letter to Mr. Zaiss, Stewart took the blind gentleman high into the mountains on a sensory exploration and in a letter dated February 18, 1929, she brought him on a bobsled right up to her cabin door and inside by the warm fire.

Besides Stewart's actual and imaginative physical journeys, she spent many hours in pleasant exploration through her reading. Stewart explained her "thought journeys" to Miss Wood in a February 26, 1930, letter:

Through the National Geographic I have taken some wonderful journeys right here at home--and I have had some trips to Egypt and to Asia via the Atlantic. When I can fix my mind on the colorful trip to Java I do not mind scrubbing milk pails or cleaning pigs feet to pickle. When I can think of the excavations at Ur I do not mind cleaning the separator. While I can think of the Mongolian method of capturing and breaking wild horses I can darn contentedly--mend heavy, sheepskin coats while I ponder catching tigers in Bengal--

Besides contributing structure to Stewart's letters, these journey patterns add a symbolic or mythic dimension to her works as she detailed a woman's struggles to survive and succeed in an often hostile environment.

The classic archetypal journey or quest in literature involves a protagonist who must undergo several trials before being allowed to reach a goal or reward. The journey may be for the betterment of society or for more personal ends, often a search for riches, honor or truth. Stewart, deprived of any formal education, spent her life on a quest for knowledge. She read voraciously, everything from government bulletins and popular magazines to classic and popular literature, and while at Boulder, attended public lectures at the University. She continuously added to her store of knowledge about illness and nursing, until the Burntfork community considered her their "doctor." Even the privation the family endured in order to send the children to good schools attests to her regard for learning. The hardships Stewart encountered on this journey through life did not cause her to waver: poverty, the deaths of loved ones, illness, both her own and her family's, and the elemental struggle for survival on the frontier. Such trials strengthened her determination and caused her to focus on the positive aspects of life. Hungry to learn, never satisfied with a simplified explanation or second-hand information, she wanted to experience as much of life as she could for herself.

Stewart's letters document this search. She wrote in 1920 to Miss Wood about her dangerous exploration of glacial moraines during her delayed wedding tour, in the stories about moonshiners, she commented about packing along her mallet, chisel, magnifying glass and binoculars to search promising spots for fossil beds, and in her 1925 letter describing her trip from Boulder to Burntfork, she hounded an innkeeper for the name of an unfamiliar wildflower. Her daily life, as documented in numerous letters, centered on botanical experiments with flowers and vegetables foreign to her area of Wyoming, and her successes heavily outnumbered her failures.

Stewart's journeys are important, also, in displacing the frontier stereotype of the male as the western adventurer. "Most histories of the American West are heroic tales: stories of adventure, exploration, and conflict," states Susan Armitage in The Women's West (10). However, the problem with these narratives, she adds, is that "women are either absent or incidental to the story" (11). She proposes that all genres of women's writing provide essential information to produce a more accurate view of the West and that "because their perspective is different from what we are used to, help us to see the frontier experience in a new light" (11). In Stewart's Homesteader collection of letters, she specifically sets out to destroy this myth and set an example for women:

Now, this is the letter I have been wanting to write you for a long time, but could not because until now I had not actually proven all I wanted to prove. Perhaps it will not interest you, but if you see a woman who wants to homestead and is a little afraid she will starve, you can tell her what I am telling you.

I never did like to theorize, and so this year I set out to prove that a woman could ranch if she wanted to. (LWH 279)

Although Stewart married her employer six weeks after her arrival in Wyoming, apologizing to Mrs. Coney for the haste, and did not entirely prove up on the homestead herself, her spirit of adventure, her willingness to enter a man's world on equal terms, and her determination to take control of her life proves that women, too, helped write western history. Through her letters she painted a picture of a life which, after she had made her escape and established her home, became one long journey of exploration, a journey she undertook with zeal. The mythic patterns inherent in her journeys elevate her writings above the commonplace, personal letter, placing her with other authors who have chronicled the diverse conflicts of humanity.

Susanne George, Ph.D.

Kearney State College

Kearney, Nebraska

Notes

1 Excerpts from Stewart's unpublished writings are printed as they appear in her existing manuscripts and typescripts with errors in punctuation, misspellings, grammatical inconsistencies and underlining for emphasis intact.

Bibliography

Armitage, Susan and Elizabeth Jameson. The Women's West. Norman: U of Okla P, 1987.

Stewart, Elinore Pruitt. Letters of a Woman Homesteader. 1914. Boston: Houghton, 1988.

---. Letters on an Elk Hunt. 1915. Lincoln: U of Nebr P, 1979.

---. Unpublished Writings. In personal collections of Clyde Stewart, Jr. and Jerrine Egloff.

Stout, Janis P. The Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures. Westport: Greenwood P, 1983.