Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
By early 1909, Elinore, determined to make a more permanent home and livelihood for herself and her daughter, decided that homesteading was the best way to achieve her goal. A priest at the Sunshine Rescue Mission in Denver advised her to look for a position as a housekeeper for a rancher as a good first step, and Elinore's employer, Mrs. Coney, agreed.
In March, Elinore saw an advertisement in the Denver Post for a housekeeper sought by a Wyoming rancher, Clyde Stewart of Burntfork, a hamlet in the southwest corner of Sweetwater County near the Utah line. He needed help running his homestead ranch after his wife died. Elinore responded immediately.
Stewart had grown up on a farm near Boulder, Colo., and his widowed mother still lived there. He and Elinore first met by appointment in Denver, then Elinore traveled to Boulder to meet Clyde's mother. Clyde offered the position and Elinore accepted. Within a week, Elinore, Jerrine and Clyde traveled together by train to Carter, Wyo., near Fort Bridger, and from there by wagon to the homestead at Burntfork.
In May, Elinore fulfilled her dream by filing on a 160-acre homestead adjoining Clyde's. Clyde built a twelve by sixteen-foot addition to his house across the property lines of the two homestead claims to serve as Elinore's cabin. The house not only met the residency requirement of the homestead law; it also signaled the joining of Elinore's and Clyde's lives; they married later that month.
Elinore Stewart on a horse-drawn hay mower, 1925. Elinorestewart.com. The toothed sickle bar would be lowered in the field when it was time to mow the hay.
Under the Homestead Act, single women could claim government land in their own names, but married women could only claim jointly with their husbands. The act also required that claimants live on the land five years before they could take full title. But the law also required that husbands and wives filing on separate homesteads maintain separate residences. Thus, in 1912, Elinore regretfully relinquished her homestead claim to her mother-in-law rather than jeopardize losing it because of the homestead law's requirements.
With Clyde, Elinore had four sons, the first of whom died shortly after birth, and a daughter, who also died as an infant.
Letters to a friend
Elinore shared her experiences as a homesteader in the lively letters she sent to her former employer, Mrs. Coney, picturing life in her rural Wyoming neighborhood. Although she initially kept her marriage secret from her friend, Elinore happily described her new homestead, writing, "Well, I have filed on my land and am now a bloated landowner."
Interestingly, Elinore represented herself as single until several years into the correspondence. She told Mrs. Coney later that she delayed telling her about the marriage at first because she so wanted to be independent and claim her land on her own.
Over the next few years, Elinore wrote to Mrs. Coney frequently. The letters often consisted of stories about local characters, about Elinore's own adventures, about neighborhood comedies and tragedies, all told in an informal and lively style. The image that emerges in the letters is of a cheerful, enthusiastic, hard-working woman who embraced her new life and who had a gift for observing human nature.
Publication
Several years into the correspondence, Mrs. Coney, during a visit to Boston, showed some of the letters to her friend, Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Sedgwick, eager to expand his audience, saw the merit of Elinore's letters and published them in a series between October 1913 and April 1914. In 1914, Houghton Mifflin published the series in the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.
The letters were frank, vivid, eloquent and perceptive. “To me,” she wrote on Jan. 23, 1913, “homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone.
“A the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed, will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”
Both the magazine pieces and the book brought Elinore enthusiastic responses from a nationwide audience of readers and reviewers. The success of the book took Elinore by surprise, for she considered her lack of formal education a real handicap as a writer—a challenge she overcame by voracious reading.