About the Book

1. Stewart's letters, written from 1909 to 1913, were the basis of the acclaimed 1980 film Heartland. "Mrs. Stewart was a woman whose nineteenth-century pioneer spirit seems to have been laced with a strong dose of twentieth-century liberation. Equally impressive is her ability to characterize the people around her."
2. -Western American Literature.
3. Elinore Pruitt Stewart (born Elinore Pruitt; June 3, 1876 - October 8, 1933) was a homesteader in Wyoming, and a memoirist who between 1909 and 1914 wrote letters describing her life there to a former employer in Denver, Colorado. Those letters, which reveal an adventurous, capable, and resourceful woman of lively intelligence, were published in two collections in 1914 and 1915. The first of those collections, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, was the basis of the 1979 movie Heartland.

About the Author: Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a homesteader in Wyoming, and a memoirist who between 1909 and 1914 wrote letters describing her life there to a former employer in Denver, Colorado. Those letters, which reveal an adventurous, capable, and resourceful woman of lively intelligence, were published in two collections in 1914 and 1915. The first of those collections, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, was the basis of the 1979 movie Heartland. Elinore Pruitt was born on June 3, 1876 in White Bead Hill, which was then a settlement in Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, and as of 2016 is an abandoned township in Garvin County, Oklahoma (founded 1906).Her father died in the late 1870s on Army service near the Mexican border. Shortly afterwards, her mother, Josephine Courtney Pruitt, married her husband's brother, Thomas Isaac Pruitt; and bore eight more children. Elinore was educated for a few years at Pierce Institute near White Bead Hill, until that grammar school closed in 1889. In 1893, her mother died of complications from childbirth; in 1894, her stepfather died in a work accident; leaving the orphaned Elinore responsible for her younger siblings, with only her grandparents available for support. In early 1909, Henry Clyde Stewart (1868-1948), a Scottish immigrant to U.S.A., and a widower, placed an advertisement in The Denver Post for a housekeeper to help on his homestead near Burntfork, Wyoming. Elinore answered it (with the agreement of Mrs. Coney), and was accepted. She arrived there in March 1909; in early May, she filed a claim for a quarter section adjoining Clyde's homestead under one of the Homestead Acts; and on May 5, she and Clyde were married. Around that time, she began to correspond with Mrs. Coney, in a series of letters which continued until 1914. Those letters were published in the magazine Atlantic Monthly; and later collected in the books Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915). By the early 1920s, she had gained national fame as the "Woman Homesteader." Ever practical, she used the royalties from her writings to buy supplies and equipment for the homestead. in 1928, she was included in Grace Raymond Hebard's Map of the History and Romance of Wyoming, a literary map of the state. Elinore died on October 8, 1933, of a blood clot to the brain following gallbladder surgery, at the hospital in Rock Springs, Wyoming. She is buried in Burntfork Cemetery, Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Her husband Clyde is buried by her.