Fill This Form To Receive Instant Help

Help in Homework
trustpilot ratings
google ratings


Homework answers / question archive / Essay #1 IN AN ESSAY OF 3-5 PAGES (RECOMMENDED) DOUBLE-SPACED, ADDRESS ONE OF THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS: LINKS: LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER : STEWART, ELINORE PRUITT, 1878- : FREE DOWNLOAD, BORROW, AND STREAMING : INTERNET ARCHIVE Option #1: Using material from the assigned selections of Letters of a Woman Homesteader and the documents and readings listed below (available from the main course page), develop an essay that answers the following question: How do the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart document and/or obscure the realities of rural life in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century? Readings for Option 1: Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Chapters 1, 2, 7, 9, 13, 18, & 20) Sherry Smith, "Single Women Homesteaders," Western Historical Quarterly 22, no

Essay #1 IN AN ESSAY OF 3-5 PAGES (RECOMMENDED) DOUBLE-SPACED, ADDRESS ONE OF THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS: LINKS: LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER : STEWART, ELINORE PRUITT, 1878- : FREE DOWNLOAD, BORROW, AND STREAMING : INTERNET ARCHIVE Option #1: Using material from the assigned selections of Letters of a Woman Homesteader and the documents and readings listed below (available from the main course page), develop an essay that answers the following question: How do the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart document and/or obscure the realities of rural life in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century? Readings for Option 1: Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Chapters 1, 2, 7, 9, 13, 18, & 20) Sherry Smith, "Single Women Homesteaders," Western Historical Quarterly 22, no

Sociology

Essay #1

IN AN ESSAY OF 3-5 PAGES (RECOMMENDED) DOUBLE-SPACED, ADDRESS ONE OF THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS:

LINKS: LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER : STEWART, ELINORE PRUITT, 1878- : FREE DOWNLOAD, BORROW, AND STREAMING : INTERNET ARCHIVE

Option #1: Using material from the assigned selections of Letters of a Woman Homesteader and the documents and readings listed below (available from the main course page), develop an essay that answers the following question:
How do the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart document and/or obscure the realities of rural life in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century?

Readings for Option 1:

  • Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Chapters 1, 2, 7, 9, 13, 18, & 20)
  • Sherry Smith, "Single Women Homesteaders," Western Historical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (May 1991): 163-83.
  • Either of the following primary sources:
    • Homesteader Accounts
    • Wallace Stegner, "The Making of Paths"
Option #2: Using material from assigned sources listed below, develop an essay that addresses the following question:
How do the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and the memories of Wallace Stegner document or conflict with the stories of children's experiences in western settlement as presented by Elliott West?

Readings for Option 2:

  • Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Chapters 1, 2, 7, 9, 13, 18, & 20)
  • Wallace Stegner, "The Making of Paths"
  • Elliott West, Ch. 7 "Child's Play, from The Essential West

U. S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Homestead Act and GLO Webpage Explore the Homesteading Timeline 1776 – September 16, 1776: The Congressional Act offered those who enlisted in the Continental Army to fight in the Revolutionary War for American independence, a parcel of land ranging from 100 to 500 acres, depending on the rank achieved. This began the principle of offering free land, termed “bounty land,” as payment for military service. A series of bounty land acts would follow into the next century addressing needs of later veterans of other wars while allowing “free” land to pass from federal ownership. 1785 – May 20, 1785: Congress, acting under the Article of Confederation before adoption of the Constitution, enacted the first law to manage the newly established Public Lands that resulted from the newly independent 13 states agreeing to relinquish their western land claims and allow the land to become Public Lands, the joint property of all citizens of the new nation. The 1785 legislation enacted a Land Ordinance (law) for the public lands northwest of the Ohio that provided for their survey and sale but in tracts no smaller than 640 acres. The 1785 ordinance established principles of federal land policy with the next significant change resulting from the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. 1801 – March 3: Passage of the 1801 Act was the first of many laws passed by Congress giving preemption or preference rights to pioneer settlers on Public Lands to acquire the lands on which they had settled without prior purchase. 1812 – April 25, 1812: Passage of the 1812 Act established the General Land Office that was given broad responsibilities for all actions involving the public lands. These responsibilities would eventually include the administration of the 1862 Homestead Act 50 years later. 1820 – April 24, 1820: Passage of the 1820 Sale Act made it possible for the first time that public land in smaller amounts (down to 80 acres) could be sold to individuals for $1.25 per acre. Later this act was used when homesteaders took the option written in the 1862 Homestead Act for “commuting” their homestead claims and getting them faster by purchase. 1841 – September 4, 1841: Passage of the 1841 Preemption Act expanded pre-emption (preference rights) for pioneer settlers, promoting the division of public lands into small farms of up to 160 acres at not less than $1.25 per acre. When the 1862 Homestead Act was later passed, it contained provisions making it possible for settlers who had initially filed for homestead claims to retain their preemption rights enabling them to buy the land and thus obtain it sooner. 1848 – August: The Free-Soil Party was formally organized during a convention in Buffalo, New York in August of 1848 to establish it as a new national political party. While its origin was primarily related to rising national opposition to the extension of slavery into any of the territories new acquired from Mexico, it was also the first national political party to advocate passage of a homestead law providing free federally owned land to settlers. 1850 – September 27, 1850: Passage of the Donation Land Act provided free land to all white or mixedblood settlers who arrived in Oregon Territory before December 1, 1855. The main requirements were four years of residence and cultivation of the land. This, and later donation land acts, foreshadowed terms in later homestead legislation. Homesteading Timeline Page 1 U. S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Homestead Act and GLO Webpage 1852 – May 12, 1852: An early version of homestead legislation introduced to Congress was voted down on this day in the House of Representatives. Similarly, another homestead bill introduced in 1853 would also fail passage in Congress. The 1852 and 1853 acts were early attempts to pass a national homestead law that would not succeed until 1862. 1854 – July 1854: The passage of two acts within 3 days extended similar Donation Land Claim benefits beyond Oregon Territory. On July 19th similar benefits went to early settlers in the newly created Washington Territory that was split off from Oregon Territory in 1853. On July 22nd, another Act extended the same to early settlers in New Mexico Territory, thus further spreading the idea of free federal land. 1855 – March 3, 1855: The Bounty-Land Act of 1855 allows for warrants being issued to military veterans who could redeem them personally at any federal land office for a certain size of federally owned land. The amount was related to the veteran’s specific military service. The warrant could be sold to anyone else who could similarly obtain the land. Thus, this Act and other certain earlier bounty land acts provided in various way opportunities for settlers to obtain lands in the west beside by homesteading. 1860 – June 22, 1860: President Buchanan vetoes the first version of homestead legislation to be passed by both houses of Congress for many reasons including: 1) questioning its constitutionality in disposing of federal land, and 2) fearing that the price of twenty-five cents per acre (thus the homestead land was not to be free) might fuel land speculation and not benefit the people. 1861 – December 2, 1861: Galusha A. Grow (1822-1907) of Pennsylvania, serving as Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced homestead legislation that would be signed into law as the 1862 Homestead Act. Grow is called the “Father of the Homestead Law” for his long advocacy of this type of legislation since the 1850s and his primary authorship of the 1862 Act. 1862 – May 20: Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, fulfilling a Republican Party campaign pledge. 1863 – January 1: The first homestead claims were filed at land offices just after midnight on January 1, 1863. Daniel Freeman of Beatrice, Nebraska is often acknowledged as the first person to file a homestead although several others also filed quickly after it became possible. 1865 – March 3: An 1865 appropriations act for expenses of the Indian Department extended the first possibility for some Indians to receive homesteads under the 1862 Homestead Act, but under conditions of essentially giving up their cultural affiliation. It was also one of the earliest laws outlining the course by which Indians (though just for the Stockbridge Munsee Tribes of Indiana) could become U.S. citizens. 1866 – June 21: Passage of the 1866 Southern Homestead Act allowed ex-Confederates, former slaves, and other citizens to homestead in the five public land states that had formerly been part of the Confederate States of America (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi). The Act also prevented the further sale of these lands principally to timber interest so as to allow homesteaders a preference. 1872 – April 14: Canada passed the Dominion Lands Act, a homesteading law in effect until 1918. It was based on the United States’s 1862 Homestead Act but had some differences. The act only applied to male farmers and allowed them to buy an adjacent tract of land to their initial 160 acres for the same $10 administration fee. Also, it initially allowed homesteading only in areas distant from railroad lines and only applied to certain lands in Canada. Homesteading Timeline Page 2 U. S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Homestead Act and GLO Webpage 1873 – March 3: Passage of the Timber Culture Act enabled homesteaders to gain patent of up to another 160 acres of public land, if a percentage was planted in trees. This was the first legislation to try to address problems faced by homesteaders moving onto the Great Plains with less rainfall and limited or no timber availability. 1874 – June 18: Passage of the Relief Act for homesteaders in Minnesota and Iowa due to grasshopper destruction of crops was the first of many later homestead laws passed to aid homesteaders encountering natural disasters and adverse weather conditions preventing or delaying their ability to prove up their claims. 1875 – March 3, 1875: A section within an appropriation act for the first time extended to all Indians the possibility of getting a homestead if they would “abandon” their “tribal relations” and thus become acculturated into non-Native society. 1877 – March 3: Passage of the “Desert Land Act” allowed settlers in some arid regions to acquire up to 640 acres of public lands by purchase if they irrigated the land. It was legislation that had some of the same purposes of homestead laws in encouraging settlement and development of western lands. 1884 – July 4, 1884: Another section within an appropriations act further defined how Indians could homestead, with their homesteads to be held in trust by the federal government for 25 years. 1887 – February 8, 1887: Passage of the Dawes Act provided for the division of tribally held lands under treaty into individually-owned tracts, with “surplus” lands being opened up to homesteading and other forms of disposal. Over the 47 years that the law was in effect until 1934, about 90 million acres of land left Indian ownership. 1889 – March 2, 1889: Passage of new homestead legislation made several important changes to the 1862 Homestead Act, including allowing homesteaders who had claimed less than 160 acres, to make another homestead claim for the remaining acreage needed to achieve a full 160 acres. 1894 – August 18, 1894: Passage of the “Carey Act” was an unsuccessful attempt to promote the use of desert lands by granting of up to one million acres of public lands to states for creating reclamation systems allowing settlers to succeed in farming desert lands. 1898 – May 14, 1898: Passage of legislation extended the use of homestead laws in Alaska, although homestead size initially was limited to a maximum of 80 acres. 1902 – June 17, 1902: Passage of the Reclamation Act (“Newland Act”) placed the federal government, instead of states, in charge of creating reclamation projects to bring water to dry areas, after which homesteading could occur. 1903 – March 3, 1903: An amendment to the 1898 Homestead Law for Alaska allowed homesteads up to 320 acres. This was the first time that an amount larger than the original 160-acre-size established under the 1862 Homestead Act was allowed. 1904 – April 28, 1904: The “Kincaid” Act for the sand hills of western Nebraska allowed up to 640-acre homesteads. Homesteading Timeline Page 3 U. S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Homestead Act and GLO Webpage 1906 – May 17, 1906: The Alaska Native Allotment Act allowed certain Alaska Natives heading households to select up to 160 acres of public lands in Alaska for purposes of obtaining individual land tracts similar to homesteading rights granted to Indians earlier in the contiguous United States. 1909 – February 19, 1909: The Enlarged Homestead Act allowed homesteads of up to 320 acres in most western states and territories. 1912 – June 6, 1912: The Three-Year Homestead Act decreased the time needed to reside on a homestead claim from five to three years. 1913 – This was the peak year for the most homestead applications filed throughout the USA. An estimated 11 million acres were claimed that year (an amount nearly twice the size of New Hampshire). 1916 – July 8, 1916: The Homestead Act amendment for Alaska decreased the maximum size of a new homestead claim from 320 acres to 160 acres. 1916 – December 29, 1916: The Stock Raising Homestead Act allowed homesteads not based on farming land but instead on raising cattle, with the subsurface mineral estate reserved for the federal government. 1927 – March 3, 1927: An amendment to the 1898 Homestead Law for Alaska created a new form of homesteading where up to five-acre tracts could be claimed under terms similar to homesteading but without doing any agriculture. Payment of $2.50 per acre was also required. 1934 – June 28, 1934: The Taylor Grazing Act passed resulting in millions of acres of public lands being placed into new grazing districts, thus removing them from any new homestead claims. This effectively ends most new homesteading in most of the contiguous United States. 1937 – July 22, 1937: The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act authorized the federal government to buy back certain farms, including some failed homesteads, which had not been economically viable. The claims were filed on marginal lands where farmers could not make a living. 1938 – June 1, 1938: The Sale and Lease Act for Small Tracts, although not a homestead act, nonetheless allowed a new way for persons to acquire small homesites of up to five acres in size on the public lands without having to performing agriculture. 1946 – July 16, 1946: The Bureau of Land Management was created from a merger of the General Land Office and the Grazing Service, with BLM subsequently given to responsibility to administer homesteading in the United States. 1940s-50s – Some limited post-World War II homesteading continues in the contiguous United States but mostly just in reclamation project areas, such as the Columbia Basin Project of Washington State where water from the Columbia River was used to irrigate desert lands. 1964 – August 31, 1964: Congress passed an act ending the use of land script rights after January 1, 1975, for soldiers obtaining homesteads. This ended a benefit to soldiers that began in 1873, with roots back to awarding free “bounty” lands to Revolutionary War veterans for their service. 1970s – The very last homestead claims in most of the western contiguous United States are patented in this decade, with only a very few lingering due mostly to legal issues. Homesteading Timeline Page 4 U. S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management Homestead Act and GLO Webpage 1976 – October 21, 1976: Passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed all homestead laws in the contiguous United States, but allowed for a 10-year extension in Alaska. 1984 – October 18, 1984: Elizabeth M. Smith of Alaska became the last woman to receive a homestead in the United States, with her 116.32-acre tract located near Big Delta, Alaska. 1986 – October 21, 1986: The last possible day for homesteading in Alaska, with the last claims made that same month under the special 1927 Homestead Law for Alaska allowing 5-acre “homesites.” 1988 – May 5, 1988: Kenneth W. Deardorff of Alaska received the last homestead issued in the United States for a nearly 50-acre homestead near Lime Village in Western Alaska. 1998 – October 21, 1998: Passage of the Alaska Native Veterans Allotment Act extends selection rights to certain public lands in Alaska for qualifying Alaska Native military veterans under terms of the earlier 1906 Native Allotment Act that was a form of homesteading for Alaska Natives. 2000 and beyond – Infrequent use of the 1862 Homestead Act as a legal authority for conveying lands continues, but now only to clear up title to older land transactions. Also, final patents being issued for the last claims made in Alaska under its special 1927 Homestead Law allowing 5-acre “homesites.” Homesteading Timeline Page 5 Single Women Homesteaders: The Perplexing Case of Elinore Pruitt Stewart Author(s): Sherry L. Smith Source: Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 163-183 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/969204 Accessed: 29-10-2018 19:07 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/969204?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Western Historical Quarterly This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Single Women Homesteaders: The Perplexing Case of Elinore Pruitt Stewart Sherry L. Smith "W hen I read of the hard times among the Denver poor," Elinore Pruitt Stewart wrote in 1913, "I feel like urging them every one to get out and file on land." This washerwoman- turned-Wyoming-homesteader was especially enthusiastic about women homesteading. "It really requires less strength and labor to raise plenty to satisfy a large family," she claimed, "than it does to go out to wash, with the added satisfaction of knowing that their job will not be lost to them if they care to keep it."' Stewart understood that the original Homestead Act of 1862 allowed women to apply for land under the same conditions as men, requiring only that they be at least twenty-one years old, single, widowed, divorced, or head of a household. Until recently, however, historians overlooked many aspects of women's experiences, in part, because their sphere seemed largely domestic and private. Yet, women homesteaders' activities were also part of the public record. The story of their land transactions was, consequently, as accessible as that of men. Apparently no one thought to ask about them until the last decade or so. The record of these women's efforts simply awaited scholarly scrutiny.2 Sherry L. Smith is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, El Paso. I Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914; Boston, 1982), 214-15. 2 The major studies of women homesteaders include Mary Hargreaves, "Women in the Agricultural Settlement of the Northern Plains," Agricultural History 50 (January 1976), 179-89; Sheryll Patterson-Black, "Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier," Frontiers 1 (Spring 1976), 67-88; Paula Nelson, "No Place for Clinging Vines: Women Homesteaders on the South Dakota Frontier, 1900-1915" (master's thesis, University of South Dakota, 1978); Kathryn Llewellyn Harris, "W6men and Families on Northwestern Colorado Homesteads, 1873-1920" (doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, 1983); Jill Thorley Warnick, "Women Homesteaders in Utah, 1869-1934" (master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1985); Paula Bauman, "Single Women Homesteaders in Wyoming, 1880-1930," Annals of Wyoming 58 (Spring 1986), 39-53; Paula Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917 (Iowa City, 1986); Barbara Allen, Homesteading the High Desert (Salt Lake City, 1987); and H. Elaine Lindgren, This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 164 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May Historians, then, have begun to ask and answer th tions about the women who took up the government's filed and proved-up on homesteads? What motivated t with the intention of securing independently ear homesteads for themselves, or were they operating in th interest? Did the women's motivations and experiences from those of men who also attempted homesteading? Fin formation about women homesteaders alter our view of the ing experience? The first question is relatively easy to answer. The fice kept tract books, ledgers that documented activity and recorded all entries and actions, successful and un upon these and other legal records, several scholars ha data on the numbers of women who made homestead regions of the West. One study of forty-three townships for example, revealed that between the 1870s and 19 women land recipients ranged from one to twenty-tw average coming to ten percent. Another study showe women made up twelve percent of the entrants in Log in Washington) County, Colorado. After that date, the nearly eighteen in both counties. A third study revealed percent of homestead patents issued in five Wyoming cou and 1943 went to women.3 These numbers are significant ing. They represent women who merit investigation, p ing the matter of motivation-since taking up homest popular perception, remains an activity associated wi Answers concerning women's motivations, however, ar documents do not reveal private purposes. Therefore, Lindgren concludes that case studies provide the best, source for this kind of information. With that in mi mines the case of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, author of Homesteader, subject of the film "Heartland," and perh woman homesteader. She provides insight into the ma and suggests ways that consideration of women's experien the way historians look at all homesteaders. "Ethnic Women Homesteading on the Plains of North Dakota," Great mer 1989), 157-73. Glenda Riley's The Female Frontier: A Comparativ Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence, KS, 1988); and Riley's introductio Land of the Burnt Thigh (St. Paul, 1986) also contain information o 3 Lindgren, "Ethnic Women Homesteading," 159-61; Harris lies," 32; and Bauman, "Single Women Homesteaders," 48. For ot statistics see Patterson-Black, 68; and Warnick, 47-54, 78-79. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 165 Stewart's is an intriguin record of her reasons for to secure government lan a classic case, familiar to h and does another. Stewart's case also demonstrates the difficulties one can expect to find in attempting to understand even one woman's motivation for homesteading and the necessity, in some cases, of going beyond the individual to examine an entire family's land activities. In the book, Stewart undoubtedly intends her experiences as a woman homesteader to be a central theme. Her work appeals to some modern readers precisely because it offers a feminist perspective (although Elinor might resist that label) on the prospects of homesteading for single women. It could be argued that Stewart's book presents an idealized image of independent western women. Certainly, the book offers an antidote to th tired stereotypes of western women who were supposedly weepy, reluctant, depressed pioneers. In fact, she offers homesteading as a panacea to the problems of wage-working, urban women, and she suggests that her ow example should serve as encouragement to these unfortunates. Stewart main- tains "homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems.'"' Stewart also presents homesteading as the solution to her personal prob- lems, making it clear that one of her goals is proving-up, on her own. To succeed at homesteading meant paying the requisite fees ($15.51 for Elinore in 1909), residing on the land for five consecutive years, and makin some improvements. In addition, the applicant for land had to swear the homestead was for her exclusive use and benefit. In the book, Stewart eventually confesses her marriage, but insists her husband promised not to help her meet the homestead requirements. In this way, she establishes her own rather narrowly defined criterion for "independence": doing it alone. Fo Mrs. Stewart "proving up" meant more than meeting the legal requirements to claim the land as her own. She was, according to one analysis, "responding to a profound inner need to 'prove out'. . .on herself, on he desire for an identity of her own-and, beyond that, as a woman showing the way to other women."5 As Elinore put it, "any woman who can stan her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things and is willing to put in as much time and careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to ea all the time, and a home of her own in the end.'"6 Stewart, Letters, 215. 5 Elinor Lenz, "Homestead Home," in Women, Women Writers, and the West, ed. L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis (Troy, NY, 1979), 50. 6 Stewart, Letters, 215. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 166 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May As a result of these kinds of statements, Stewart is of historical literature as an independent (if not literally ful woman homesteader. Is this image warranted? W the terms she defined: to acquire a homestead on her o no one? Did she ever "prove up"? What do the facts of tions with the federal government reveal about her motiva ing and about the "real" Mrs. Stewart? And what doe about other women-and men-who homesteaded in th century West? Elinore Pruitt Rupert, a widowed laundress from D Wyoming in the spring of 1909 to work as a housekeeper Stewart. Up to that point, poverty, hardship, depriva characterized her life. She was born 3 June 1876, in Fo to Elizabeth Courtney Pruitt. Her father died when Eli her mother married Thomas Isaac Pruitt, Elinore's un mal schooling was brief. By the time she was seventee had died, and she took on responsibility for eight you sisters. To make matters worse, the Pruitts were landl cared for the three younger children while the rest went Territory, preparing meals and laundering for railroad cr ner, Elinore entered the working class.7 Around 1902, she married a civil engineer nam Rupert in Grand, Oklahoma, where the couple also fil The future must have looked promising compared to husband was better educated than she was, and he m nore toward self-education. Encouraged, she began w She gave birth to their daughter, Jerrine, in 1906. later claimed Rupert was killed in an accident one mo birth, evidence suggests they actually divorced.8 Wha nore was again on her own. She began nurse's trainin to write some pieces for the Kansas City Star. In fact, it offer to write an article on the cliff dwellings of the Sou Elinore Rupert to the West. Poor health interfered wit ever, and she ended up in Denver, laundering for a l 7 Susanne Kathryn Lindau, "My Blue and Gold Wyoming: Th Elinore Pruitt Stewart" (doctoral dissertation, University of Nebras Fuller Ferris, "Foreword," in Letters, by Stewart, vi-viii; and Elean Death Record, Vital Records Services, Division of Health and Medi Wyoming. 8 Lindau, "My Blue and Gold Wyoming," 11-12. 9 Ferris, "Foreword," viii-ix. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 167 Elinore eventually becam Coney, a well-to-do and wi bored seven days a week an held greater aspirations. Rupe examination and, in 1909, housekeeper on his ranch n discern, with certainty, her ther to west. her She former was dissatisfie employer, Mr lished in book form), Ruper about her own motivations with the intention of filin with the process that she saw in from land her O owners eluded her. Five weeks after she arrived in Wyoming, on 23 April 1909, Elinor traveled to Green River and applied for a 147-acre homestead. Soon afte she reported this event in a letter to Mrs. Coney, mentioning in passin that her land adjoined Mr. Stewart's. What Mrs. Rupert did not repor however, was her marriage. On 30 April 1909-one week after applyin for her homestead as a single woman-Elinore and Clyde applied for a m riage license." Elinore Rupert's days as a single woman homesteader we clearly limited. In September, Elinore informed her correspondent that Mr. Stewa was building her house, part of the requirements for obtaining the hom stead patent, in exchange for extra work. In this way she continued th deception, admitting neither her marriage nor the fact that Clyde was sim adding onto his own homestead cabin. This sequence of events sugges that Rupert and Stewart intended to take advantage of homestead laws that allowed single, divorced, or widowed women to file on homesteads but pro- hibited married women from doing so if their husbands also applied. B filing for land one week and applying for a marriage license the next, E nore was able to increase the newly formed family's land-holdings. Wh 10 Lindau, "My Blue and Gold Wyoming," 12-28; transcript of interview with Je rine Wire by Dorothy Garceau, Croyden, Pennsylvania, 23 March 1986. 11 Unpatented Serial Application File 01631, Evanston Land Office, Branch of Recor Management, Bureau of Land Management, U. S. Department of Interior, Washingt D. C.; Clyde Stewart and Elinore Pruitt Rupert, Statement of Applicant for a Marri License, 30 April 1909, copy on file at County Clerk and Ex-Officio Register of Deeds, Swe water County Courthouse, Green River, Wyoming. Elinore and Clyde were actually m ried on 5 May 1909 at the Stewart ranch. For Elinore's account of filing for a homest see Stewart, Letters, 7. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 168 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May this kind of arrangement violated the spirit and intentio laws, it did not appear to violate the letter of the law the Homestead Act to provide one homestead per fam many families (particularly in the arid West) found ways miserly intentions in order to make a living.12 One year passed before Elinore revealed more abou Mrs. Coney. She explained she selected property adjo in order to keep both the land and her job. At first, she want to do this, but added, somewhat mysteriously, th wisdom of it. Finally, in aJune 1910 letter, Elinore admit riage to Clyde-an act she described as "inconsistent." A passed before she disclosed the details of the weddin some shame for the haste with which she had married-six weeks after her arrival in Wyoming. "The engagement was powerfully short," she wrote, "because both agreed that the trend of events and ranch work seemed to require that we be married first and do our 'sparking' afterwards." Although Elinore says nothing about the land issue, it apparently was more a marriage of convenience than romance. To acknowledge this is not to say it was a match devoid of love. Elinore described Clyde affectionately as "really the kindest person." She also wrote, "Although I married in haste, I have no cause to repent . . , " adding, "[t]hat is very fortunate because I have never had one bit of leisure to repent in."'3 But what about the homestead and Mrs. Stewart's own desire to "prove up," not only to acquire property, but also to demonstrate to herself and to other working-class women the possibilities that awaited them in the West? Mrs. Coney apparently wondered the same thing for, in an October 1911 letter, later printed as a chapter entitled "Proving Up," Elinore responded to some of her friend's queries. She explained that she would not lose her land even though she had married. Clyde had proved up on his own homestead years before (1905) and held his deed. Consequently, she was allowed her own homestead since she had filed as a single woman.14 12 Stewart, Letters, 22. Legally, Clyde Stewart could have filed under the recently passed Enlarged Homestead Act and thus expanded his own land-holdings in that way. However, he did not do so. Perhaps the Stewarts were not aware of this option. 13 Stewart, Letters, 78, 79, 75, 185, 184, 187. 14 Ibid., 134. Clyde completed his homestead application on 14 November 1898 in Evanston, Wyoming, and his final proof was taken at Green River on 3 July 1905. One of the witnesses claimed that Stewart had lived on the property since July 1898 and that his improvements included a house, stables, sheds, a granary, other out-buildings, and fencing valued at $500.00. Clyde testified that he built the house in 1898 and that his family consisted of a wife. The couple had no children. Cynthia Hurst Stewart died in 1907 leaving Clyde a widower when Elinore Rupert came to Wyoming in 1909. Serial Patent 1117, Evan- ston Land Office, RG 49, Bureau of Land Management, National Archives. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 169 Even if her actions prov tionable), what about her Stewart repeated her det should not have married land difficulties unaided reason ments And I want to myself. in a earn . . . January I every know 1913 of Homesteading," Mrs. Stewart offered her treatise on women homesteaders, pitching her appeal to wage earning, urban women, suggesting they could do it and implying that her own example should give them heart.15 Ironically, when Elinore Stewart penned these words she had already relinquished her homestead. On 24 June 1912, she completed the relin- quishment paper and signed it "Elinore Rupert." Clyde and Elinore's mother-in-law, Ruth C. Stewart, served as witnesses. Then, swearing that she was a widow, Ruth Stewart took up the homestead that Elinore relinquished. In 1912, Ruth was seventy-three years old and had been a widow for twenty-two years. Her husband, James C. Stewart, died in 1891. Ruth never remarried. Although she made Boulder, Colorado, her home, Ruth claimed Burnt Fork her residence for purposes of making the homestead entry. 16 Why did Elinore relinquish her homestead and, presumably, her dream of an independently earned landholding? Of this transaction she makes no mention in her publications. She never admits the relinquishment. Presum- ably, the Stewarts believed it was either legally necessary, or at least pru- dent, for Elinore to relinquish her homestead and for Ruth to take it up, in order to insure the land would remain in the family's control. An analysis of similar-although not identical-cases that came before the General Land Office and Department of Interior in the early twentieth century suggests further explanation for the Stewarts' actions. By 1909, the General Land Office had clearly established that a woman who filed on a homestead and subsequently married could keep her homestead as long as her husband did not also have an unperfected homestead entry. 5 Stewart, Letters, 134, 215. 16 A copy of Elinore Stewart's relinquishment paper is contained in Unpatented Serial Application File 01631, Evanston Land Office, Branch of Records Management, Bureau of Land Management, Washington, D. C. For more information on Ruth Stewart's homestead application and final proof see Serial Patent Case File 488179, Evanston Land Office, RG 49 Records of Bureau of Land Management, National Archives, Washington, D. C. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms le - ::-:_:i:i:i-::::-:::::- ::-:-::: :iiiiiiiii.iic-iiii:ii~ii~iii-i:i-iiiii- iii-ii-iii:i:i:ii?i''-':i-i'ili:i:iiiii~ ii-iiiia,:iiiiii---::?:i:; :: :-?::-??i iii-i:-~i.?-r:i-~iiiiii:i:::-\:i-::i-:::i:i:iiiliiiiii~~i~i?iiiiii~i~iiiiii:l?-i i)l'iiCii ili_:~~ii?~ijc_:-:-:-:i::-l:i:i:::::- :::::::::::::::: :I::::::.:::::-:::_:-:::-:_:-:::_?: ::i:::::::- ili;i:i~liiii~:''iii:iii:ini'ii~riiii ~iii-iia~iiiEi?::::: ::::ii::c::::::::: iiiii~:i.::~-::i:ai:i :iii~~iiii~ii-~i ?i::;l'ii?-ii:ii iii~ii; i:~?~~:i-il~wB ~i6i-i:iiiili~~iiii~iiiiiii.ij:iili?i i:i:-i::::-:-:::::i-:::' :-::i~i`j:j:~:ii~~i-gi-i:ij ::_::J_ ::-:::;.- i:::? :,::::::::.: -,:: -:: : ? ""'-:l:-?ail,-rs-i:iri:-i:iiis;:s~ :::::::j:::-::::2::::::::?:-1:::::: ::r,:-?_:l:li-i:r:l::::j::::~_:::ii::::- ~'~T~:?:ijii?iiiii~.~-:-*i:i'k~~:~---i :-:---:::--i: -_-:_:_:i:~::F:-~:-::::::::--;:: ::/:/l::ii :-i/:-i_:~::2-_::;?:-::: ::1 i:i:j::::;.il: i~i;i~ii-?iii?~iiiiii:--iiii;i:-ii~',ii,-:,:::-:: --?:::.~~::j---l~i~~-iii~~~ii:iii~wii :j::::::ji::::::i:::::i:: . r-:~,~--~~-~-::::_;~-i-i:i~g-i:ij-~- j:?:::-:~:-:-:?:?:----:::i----- --:--:~:~_:Ii~9~i-i~~':-- n~a~~~~p i-i"isii-i ~-iii;i---li.:i~-i:i-iiiiiiei:i~a~~ii;, ii-b ii~~ii~ii l:iiiiiiiiibiiiiiiii.iii~i:iC?~i:(~ i;''-~---:; ~i~_~~f~~i:iiiiiii:i.i-iii:~:i:i.i:iiiiiliiiii::i-::-l-:i~:_:ja::-a:R'-:~ il:o-,~~---~i~i--~~if9:~:i ::i:-:-ia:liil~ ::::::::- ~-1 ----_ riii-_i_?l-- ---:_-_ ::-::::::::--:,::.:--::~s-d:~ i ::-:-:::::::' :::: ':l':'ii ii:ii-::.ii-iiiii~~s --_-----:-_ ----jii-i-i-i:i'i-ii-"''::""' :::i:::.-l??:_::::--:Cii-~iili;-iiii~i- :I_:_ -:-:lli-ili-ii:?:--: --:----i. _i-i ii-i-.~i:i~~i :,:~i:a? :a--?::-::-_--l- ::__::-i::I?.::ili:?~:~iiiiiii'iiiii--i- :-i:::::::::: ,i iiii-i -iiiiiiii I.~-is:~-:~~.~ .ii: i:i-ii~- -i-ii -'-'-':'ii':'i - -i'i :::::::::::--:?'':'?::'i-i:iiii-lii'i-i :I~-i--_?:i:i:i-:?-:--i:--:li:. i'i'-'-''': ~j:i-iiriliiiii?iiiiiiiiiii::B-i i:i::i- :::::::::2:jj:: :r:::::::::::::::j::::'_'':'ll::::':i'i~ ::::::_:_ -i:::i:-:::i:_:_:i::::::: -::r:::--: :::::::::::j:::::1:::::::-::::::::::: ;'iiiiiiiiiiiii:ii:--:::i . :::_::-_?::i:::i: _'-l::_li:li'_.:'iii:i:ii i(:l::::::::::: :::::---: :::1:::::::::::i:::,:-:? -:?:::-:::::::::: ----:-::::: :?:,:-_--::- i~iii:iiiiiiiii-riiiii:i--':'-?:::": : ?-::-:i-- i:i:i-i:iii:ii:s?ii?iiiiiii''i,:_:-d:~:::::i:;jr:i:jli iiii:ii:-:: ?:i-iii i'i-i ~_i-ii,-ili:--:-i-:::i-i:i- iiiii-:iiiiiiiiiii:i ili-ii'i:iiii~`ii-ii:ii i--i'i~:i:lii'::':??i:::::::: ::-:::- -:::::l,:iii':::-::;:-::: ii::Fiiiiii:'ii?i~iijii::i:~:jjr- iiiii.ii--ai~i ---::8-:i- :::::j-:-:_??;,?::ji ?:(::: ::--r,-_~i--:s;-::-i' i; ~:~?~: iiii-:-ii~~iil DiaiiU:r:iii:?ai-i--d~-i:iliiiii i?:l:--::_--i-'-':-:i~-~'ili-ii-i'::2 ii~iiijiili ~i$~~iriui~ - ---- _ i; 8:i i--iii-i:i-- ~iii::i.iili:i ~i~i;iiii-ii-i:iii-i:iiiiiiii'~.iiffi:i:- ?. I:i: siiiiiiiiiiii:izii-iiiisi I::::ii?l''' ~-,?::;*~~a i:~iiiii:~:i-iiiiii::i:i.-iiii:i-,::ii?i --:::::::-j_--:--:--i _:-:--::1::-:,-:--::::i:::::-------: i_. -i-;i-ii-iiii-:::-::-:~ ii~iiii~ii::i:.iiz:j-~i-ji::::-i:?-: -:::-:-i::-:.lil ::-:i~:--:::-:::::--::::: ;::::':- : :i-?-:i~iiiiii-ili:i-i~i:i-i-i;~i-;?~?-? ~:i~iiiii~~~Wi:~- ~i "88 aara ?II ~qB~Bsll -- ~i~~~i)i~la ia?_-:i::,,ii;,:ls:?iiiiii'''l:'i:''-'' i-:iiiiiiii:ii:iL :-:- :-:-:-:' ??---::---:-----:::::---: iiiii:i-i:i-i;:iii-l:?:i_-:i:_::i?i -ii :i-i:i ::i-iii:i-i:i::ilil:::::::::::::::::::?: --:--i:_:::i:::::: ii~ii-i.iii:iii :iiiiiili:ii':iliiiii':-: :::i:::-::::::~:_:::-:::: -i:iii-~i-i~:i:i~a ::::-:;::::;:: i:j:::l~:.-: i.Di:i -i-,.zi?i i-l:i,:iii--j Elinore Pruitt Stewart Photo courtesy of Ruel Triplett. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms :::._ ..: -::::: ::,::::::::i::::,,::,:::,i:'-':1:i:i-:i. ::-: ::::::: :-::---:-':------;:-::'--:8': --::: ::-~i:i:,:.:-::ir::~ :. iiiiii-i-i:iii~i:i:i:i-iiQ~~:~ij --: : : ::::: :::: ::::::::-::::::::: :::::::: :ij:: -_ :_:_ -:-::_::::::: i::::::::::::::::j :: ::::::::::::::ri:::: :_:_: :::::: ::-:-:::::::::: :::-.-:::_ ::: :::::::::--:-:::-::-:::_::--:-::-~::I::: : ::::::_:::-: :~:,:i::~i::-:i:--::::i::::::::::':::-:: --:-:::i_:-:_:--::::-:-::1:_: ::::::::-: :j::::::::::-::-:--:::-i-:-:-:i:-: --t--~-~rri~_?zi LB-~--gt- il~aiil:~~cl,~~..g" --~-----"-1" .;* ~-::::::::-:: Stewart Homestead Photo courtesy of Sheila Bricher-Wade, Richard Colli Archives, Museums and Historical Departm This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 172 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May She could take her claim, providing she performed concerning both residence and cultivation." If at the time however, the husband also had an unperfected homest of the two claims had to be relinquished, for a "husba the marital relation, can not [sic] maintain contempo upon different tracts under the homestead law."'18 Now, by 1909, Clyde Stewart had already obtained stead, so Elinore's marriage to Clyde alone did not au nate her legal right to her own homestead. To put it did not have an unperfected homestead entry when The problem for the Stewarts, however, seemed to be and residency. Cases brought before the Department o quite clear that it was not legal for a couple to share homesteading adjacent properties. Even though Cl perfecting his homestead patent, Elinore was living his land. She could not, then, legally meet the residen her own homestead. Further, the law assumed a wife took residency, so the Stewarts, if challenged, would have h doubt, that they had left Clyde's residence and built homestead. The Stewarts, of course, did not do this. T plausible that the Stewart family decided Elinore would r stead claim. Ruth Stewart would immediately take it up, they could rest assured that the property would remain t lived with the Stewarts, the law would not automatica the case, since she was not Clyde's wife. In this way, t potentially troublesome legal issues of marriage and In 1912, Congress lowered the residency requirements from five years to three years. Further, this new la homesteader an absence of five months per year. Ruth these more liberal conditions.19 Taking advantage of 17 "Maria Good (22 October 1886)," Department of the Inter Department of the Interior and the General Land Office in Cases Relating to t 1, 1886 to June 30, 1887, ed. S. V. Proudfit (hereafter, for all date 5 (Washington, 1887), 196-98. I am indebted to James Muhn, B Federal Center, Denver, Colorado, for his help on these legal iss 18 Quoted in "Thompson v. Talbot (22 November 1895)," Dec 430-31. For similar decisions see "Hattie E. Walker (15 October 15 (1893), 377-79; "Jane Mann (12 February 1894)," Decisions, v and "Leonora H. Fores (12 February 1898)," Decisions, vol. 26 19 According to one study of women homesteaders in Wyoming, who filed claims did so after the residency requirement was dropped "Single Women Homesteaders," 41. For information on the 1912 a Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (Madison, 1965), 39 Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1970 (Lincoln, 1976 This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 173 for an absence from the h 1913 (presumably to winter On 29 October 1914, Ruth it was patented cultivable on land 26 August was plante remainder of the claim wa planting. Forty head of cat her son, grazed there. Clyd he had no interest in the c of the property for four y for one hundred dollars.20 Elinore Pruitt Stewart evidently abandoned her dreams of proving u on her homestead. But she neither related such discouraging news in h Letters, nor did she relinquish her interest in owning property. By 192 her original homestead entry was secured through the efforts of her mothe in-law. This tract was added to the lands Clyde had already obtained: hi 1905 homestead along with an additional eighty acres that he acquired 1911 under the provisions of the Desert Land Act.21 In 1922, Elinore applied for a Desert Land entry as well. No legal impediments concerning ma riage and residency existed here, as they had with the homestead. The la she hoped to acquire had been part of a homestead entry made in 192 by Mrs. Marion Hortense Langley. Mrs. Stewart claimed Langley h not resided on the land for one year. In fact, she had not been heard o or from, since leaving the area in July 1921. Further, Elinore testified that Mrs. Langley had indicated upon her departure from the Burnt Fork ar that she did not intend to return. Contending the 160 acre tract und consideration was too rocky for cultivation, but potentially useful for grazi if water was conveyed to it and it was sown with grass seed, the fortyyear old ranch woman paid her forty dollar fee.22 Under this act, th 20 See Serial Patent Case File 488179. A copy of the Warranty Deed transferring th property from Ruth C. Stewart to Henry Clyde Stewart, 9 August 1920, is filed at the O fice of the County Clerk and Ex-Officio Register of Deeds, Sweetwater County Courthou Green River, Wyoming. This coincides with Harris's contention that women who did pro up on land to increase the family's holdings retained the right to that property and receive compensation for it when they sold it. Harris, "Women and Families," 32-33. 21 Lindau states that at its height the Stewart ranch consisted of 1100 acres. They ran about one hundred cattle, a medium size operation. See Lindau, "My Blue and Gold Wyo ming," 33. For information on Clyde's homestead transactions see Homestead Fin Certificate 1117, Evanston Land Office, RG 49, Records of the BLM, National Archiv and on his Desert Land Act transactions, Serial Patent File 525300, Evanston Land Offic RG 49, Records of the BLM, National Archives. 22 Elinore's "Application to Contest," can be found in Evanston Serial File 0837 Branch of Records Management, BLM, Washington, D. C.; Elinore Stewart's "Desert Land Entry Declaration of Applicant," Serial Application 09049, can be found in the sam This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 174 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May claimant paid twenty-five cents down per acre and swore any amount up to one section (640 acres) within thr time had lapsed, if the claimant provided proof that ciently irrigated the area, the payment of an additional d pleted the deal. Elinore Stewart's contest of the Langley homestead nally rejected because of a technicality. She neglecte absence was not due to military or naval service. Suc necessary, even though in the case of women militar reality. This, of course, reflects the law's implicit assump ing was a man's activity. Elinore did return the contest d statement attached. However, the General Land Office eventually dismissed Stewart's chal- lenge because the defendant Langley was not served notice of the conte against her. According to the "Rules of Practice," Langley had to be per sonally informed of such action against her homestead claim. If that w not possible, notice could be published in a local newspaper. Only then could the contest proceed.23 The records indicate Langley did not receiv "personal" notice concerning Stewart's charges. Nor did Elinore advertise her intentions in the newspaper. The contest action was therefor closed.24 Elinore's failure to pursue the contest she initiated against Mrs. Langley is linked to Clyde's frustrated efforts to confirm his right to property he had purchased at a public auction in 1917 at $2.50 an acre. The Stewarts' neighbor, John Hutton, had fenced in twenty-two acres Clyde believed be- longed to him, by virtue of this purchase at public auction. Eventually, Stewart brought an ejection suit against Hutton in the Third Judicial District Court. He lost the case. Confusion resulting from a resurvey of the area apparently caused the problem. In 1919, Stewart asked the commissioner of the General Land Office to investigate the resurvey, but his re- quest was denied. Finally, by 1922, Stewart resigned himself to the loss office. More than ten years before this action, Elinore told Mrs. Coney she intended to file a desert land entry "some day when I have sufficient money of my own earning." Stewart, Letters, 134. 23 "Rules of Practice," in Decisions of the Department of the Interior in Cases Relating to the Public Lands, ed. Daniel M. Greene, vol. 48, 1 February 1921-30 April 1922 (Washing- ton, D. C., 1923), 247-49. 24 Evanston Serial 08378, BLM, Washington, D. C. Langley's entry was also contested by two men in 1923 and 1924. John Briggs, Jr.'s contest successfully cancelled Langley's homestead entry. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 175 of this land, but still hope eral government for this ment issue as well.25 By t financial problems.26 They on another Desert Land E sive. So, they suspended t What can we conclude fr legal actions? What we hav sufficient property under ranching. hance the ment Husband, family's that was wife, land-hold not cond abundant sense in the arid perhaps especially women, ation" as literal history, Intriguing questions rema and Stewart's own rendit the discrepancies? Was sh did and what she wrote? I experiences into her publi Stewart remained silent. I did she acknowledge this ga the raw material of her ex The best one can do is spe On one level, it seems ap teller. She intended her w spiring; and once she real appealing.27 She chose hom its supposed opportunities she claimed she wanted to sider homesteading as an alt earning, a totally accurate served 25 that Serial National Archives. purpose. Patent File So, s 642950, 26 Lindau, "My Blue and Gold Wyoming," 137. 27 The letters that comprise the book were actual letters Stewart wrote to her former employer, Mrs. Juliet Coney. On a visit back to Boston, Coney showed the letters to Elle Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthy, who agreed they should be published. For more on Stewart's publishing career see Lindau, "My Blue and Gold Wyoming," 41-69. Presum ably, the letters were edited for publication. 28 To dwell on the pessimistic and discouraging was simply not part of her characte or personality. On one rare occasion, Stewart confessed to Coney, "If you only knew ho This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 176 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May In the process, what she offered, of course, was a of-the popular safety-valve myth. This theory maintained ence H. Danhof's words, "that the western lands drew whenever eastern industrial conditions were unsatisfactor western land performed the function of a safety valve conflicts."29 It rested on a number of assumptions, inc depression, unemployment, horrible working conditio encouraged laborers to take up cheap western lands; so with relative ease; and that significant numbers did But Danhof and others have proved this theory a my had neither the skills nor the capital to succeed in th Why should we assume that women could succeed counterparts had failed? Further, the high arid plains particular problems for homesteaders. One hundred six from sufficient for successful ranching. Moreover, it wa perils, and if one reads Letters of a Woman Homesteader ca ties of that existence are apparent. The cheery tone o completely mask the harsh realities. If working class women in Denver and elsewhere h filed on homesteads, and consequently failed in drove charged not only with deception, but worse. On this sc less culpable than railroad companies and town promote sands of unsuspecting homesteaders out to the arid W is highly unlikely Letters inspired poor women to attemp far short I fall of my own hopes you would know I could never boast Ironically, had she admitted failure more often, Stewart might hav propriate spokeswoman for her generation's actual experiences. Several as a major theme in the lives of twentieth-century homesteaders. Man to western South Dakota, according to Paula Nelson, failed, and "th ter twist to the frontier dream." Barbara Allen concluded that the homesteaders was also largely one of failure. Stewart, however, sp than about actual experiences. See Nelson, After the West, xiv; and A 29 Clarence H. Danhof, "Farm-Making Costs and the 'Safety in The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. V son, 1968), 253-54. See also Fred A. Shannon, "The Homestead A plus," in The Public Lands, ed. Carstensen, 297-314. Edith Kohl valve theory in her first-hand account of homesteading. See Kohl, La 47-49. 30 Bauman's sample concerns only women who had patented their homesteads, r than those who tried and failed. However, she indicates no poor women tried home ing. Most of the single women homesteading in Wyoming had skill and jobs (teaching, n etc.) that served as their primary source of income. See Bauman, "Single W Homesteaders." This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 Her SHERRY initial woman. L. SMITH 177 audience, Once The of Atlantic M ship consisted primarily o who read that magazine. as a manual for women ho as a collection homesteading dency, as her of life. son charmin Most put of it, story!"'31 At the same time, it is not appropriate to conclude Letters From a Woman Homesteader is total fabrication. Beyond serving as an engaging group of tales, the work should be viewed as an experientially accurate account of how Stewart perceived her life and what she thought was important. We have two perspectives on Stewart's homesteading activities-her own narrative, and the version that emerges from land office documents. The latter presents the legal dimension to Stewart's life; the former, the ideational dimension. Letters signifies the human part of her historical experience, albeit the more subjectively rendered part, for it offers only the things she chose to reveal. Her account serves as the form and structure through which she channels her experiences. In this sense, the fact that its details do not coincide with the land office's version does not make it any less "true". Reality consists of a constant dialogue between a person's perceptions of experience, "the pictures inside" one's head, and the objective world.32 Likewise, the reality of Elinore Pruitt Stewart's experience is both the one revealed in the legal documents and the "pictures" she presents in her book. Letters depicts how Stewart construed the events of her life, how she made sense of them. The General Land Office records ordered these events one way, Elinore another. With this in mind, Mrs. Stewart's case is instructive on several levels. First, the legal version demonstrates the way some homesteaders, though by no means all, used the land laws to their own advantage. Success required a good deal of back-breaking work not only from a husband and wife, but from children, other relatives, and helpful neighbors. In most cases, it was not a life for a single person, male or female. It suggests that 31 Clyde Stewart, Jr. to author, telephone interview, 13 May 1988. 32 This discussion is based, in part, on observations historian Gene Wise has made. "It may be," he wrote, "that reality in history lies on more than one plane, and that what is objectively real from a detached position may not jibe with what is perceptually real in the experience of involved people." "Experience-or at least the human part of experience," he continues, "lies along the plane of transactions between men's pictures of the world and what the world throws up to them." Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations (1973; Min- neapolis, 1980), 32, 44. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms t 178 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May many operated in the context of family, and that the lan the entire family (husband, wife, even mother-in-law in parents and siblings, in other cases) need to be considered ter understand any individual's, female or male, motivat To acknowledge this possibility is not to dismiss wom merely the result of men's decisions. It is difficult to d decision-making processes, because evidence is scant. No to The Congressional Record exists to indicate the nature of d vote on important issues. Yet, it is unreasonable to assu no voice in certain types of family economic decisions. El Jerrine, for instance, remembers her parents made decis though Clyde publicly headed the household. On several book, Elinore insists Clyde did not "boss" her.33 Further, although Elinore did not prove up on her o the property did remain in the family's hands, and that was goal for the Stewarts. Elinore was clearly a successful ran ating in the framework of her family. True, she did not suc dependent woman homesteader," in Elinore's own narrow of that term. However, to the extent that "independent" "alone," to the extent it also means individualistic and self-r certainly applies to Mrs. Stewart. She was a free-spirited, ality, working alongside, rather than under the domination The Stewart case, then, underscores the necessity of i considerations in any analysis of homesteaders. Some histori to acknowledge this factor in their work on women hom Nelson indicated that women rarely homesteaded alone plains, opting instead to come with family or friends from although the majority of the 220 women in her western Sou were single. Further, Nelson divided these homesteaders absentee and bona fide settlers. Only eight of the 220 wo farmers, leaving the vast majority to be the absentee var approached homesteading with the goal of acquiring prop ment, but who did not intend to settle. Erikka Hansen, from eastern South Dakota, was one of these. She filed a her brother's. Eventually, another brother filed on another and her She The the three siblings helped one another. In time, Han actual living by teaching, proved up and sold her hom is significant because she succeeded with the help of same could be said of her brothers. 3 As for bona fid 33Garceau interview with Jerrine Wire, 1986; Stewart, Letters, 2 34 Nelson, "No Place," 3-6; and Nelson, After the West, 43-47, This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 179 sexes, turning grasslands "involved all family mem many others including fi by anyone able to do them Barbara Allen, in her b 1905-1915 era, also recog example more akin to th a 1908 letter to his fathe lowing: "You can take 16 take Homestead Desert all I can take 320. If we all c acres. "36 cient for came, One a in hundred family fact," sixt enterp Allen c members-husbands and w blocks of land in adjoini Office tract books. . .are or six different individuals terprising homestead fraudulent. They did fam so not were simply "people . . . The challenge for histo and examine those tract b tainly suggest family conn records with an eye towa picture-albeit not a perfe ship ties among homestea sure relationship or coope the same name. Nevertheles New Mexico, plat book indi in Uxer scrutiny township, of 35 Nelson, 36 Allen, 37 Ibid., other After only plat the West, Homesteading, 32, 36. See tw book 50 33. also War and 87, on the repeated occurre by the Mormon practice of pol in proving up reflected family 38 Quoted in Homesteaders," 39 Coreta Mexico, Allen, 78-79. Justus, Home "Single 1900-1920," Wom paper This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms in 180 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May data, enhanced with anecdotal evidence as well as information g marriage, divorce, and death records, and probate, tax, and tions could lead to an enhanced understanding of both ma homesteaders' motivations. A more accurate assessment of family connections, cooperation, maybe even collusion, does not mean the whole issue of motivation be reduced to numbers and percentages. It can lead to a more precis planation than the common and not very satisfying: "the reasons w varied as the individuals." It may lend more credence to the argum that most homesteaders of both sexes wished to acquire property in to provide additional economic security for their families. Undoubt the importance of family considerations in analyzing women homesteade motives, must be applied to a consideration of men's motives, as we may also mean that the number of single men and women attracte homesteading by a sense of adventure and desire for independence w than Elinore Pruitt Stewart's book implies. Or, perhaps, it suggest ways people and their purposes can change over time. An individual m stride forth onto the public domain inspired by notions of single-sp independence and slide into a greater appreciation for family strategies o of necessity, economics, loneliness, or even love. Possibly, Stewart p through this range of motivations. In presenting the public version o life, however, she simply emphasized those motives she thought Mrs. Co and other readers would find most compelling. The other way Stewart's case is instructive relates to her pictur homesteading, to her own, perhaps quite consciously constructed, of the frontier. In -the book, Stewart offers ideas about, and symbo her experiences. In this respect, the account stands as a cultural reco her circumstances, time, and place. The editors of the Atlantic Monthly re nized her talent for expressing the perceptions, hopes, and aspiratio an American type: a woman homesteader. So, they published her let The meaning she found in that life revolved around certain cultural of her day, most notably: feminism, individualism, the back-to-the movement, and the crucial link between these ideas and the powerful Am can dream of land ownership. These served as the major componen Stewart's own frontier myth. Elinore's remarks about independence, for instance, certainly ref what Glenda Riley has called "a slowly liberalizing attitude toward w during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the openin cades of the twentieth century," an attitude, Riley adds, that freed wom homesteaders "from much criticism from their peers."40 That 40 Riley, Female Frontier, 134. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY westerners L. SMITH also 181 made the homesteaders is apparen ing the Rosebud Land L a suffragette. She looked her a on and secure of to she stake woman disappeare in a place suffrage newspapermen, w did the n edi readership, and to the w Of course, Elinore's id the actions revealed in t apparent contradiction m Griswold recently made wrote, "might exhibit beh and seemingly contradic liever in a single woman wifehood and motherho might incorporate both tr is a useful way to unders her actions. Elinore's pu Yet, like most American tural context of domestic ing goals without Clyde family remains a domin At times, Stewart seem and family. Actually, sh Others no doubt did the same. New research on western women reveals that family units, providing all kinds of crucial "support services," proved critical in the trek to and settlement of the West. "Was individualism in fact, nurtured by intense cooperative effort," several historians ask, with the family acting as the "central building piece of westward (or northward) settlement"?'" Stewart's example is pertinent here for, publically, she unquestionably perpetuated the nineteenth century "sacred ideas of individualism and self-reliance.'"44 Yet, her private actions reveal the importance of family and cooperation. That she emphasized a perhaps mythological 41 Kohl, Land of the Burnt Thigh, 155. 42 Robert Griswold, "Anglo Women and Domestic Ideology in the American West in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century," in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque, 1988), 16. 43 Schlissel, Ruiz, and Monk, "Introduction," in Western Women, 4, 6. 44 Ibid., 4. This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 182 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY May individualism is a reflection of her time. That we now see the role of fami- lies acting "as a subculture [weaving] the binding cords of mutual support and cooperation," is a reflection of ours.45 In the end, her case represents the importance of both individualist ideology and family strategy. Here again, Stewart is representative of many men and women who blended this ideology with this strategy in the course of homesteading. Finally, Stewart's work incorporates some of the ideas of the popular "back-to-the-land" movement. This crusade was based on the assumption that rural life proved more healthful than city life. It was, according to one historian, "a rhetorical binge about the virtues of life on the land as the American public struggled to adjust to the closing of a three-hundredyear-old frontier."46 This national infatuation with rural life partially explains Congress's passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act and the fact that "more land was homesteaded between 1898 and 1917 than in the preceed- ing thirty years.'"'7 The back-to-the-land movement probably does not explain Elinore's motives in leaving Denver for Burnt Fork, Wyoming. It does help explain why her stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. A number of popular magazines, such as Colliers, Outlook, and one called Country Life in America, regularly ran pieces like Stewart's. In fact, these periodicals became the medium through which the back-to-the-land movement gained its widest exposure. These articles ran from the practical to the promotional, and emphasized the physical, spiritual, and financial rewards of rural life-all significant themes in Stewart's work. She was just one of several women homesteaders who contributed articles of this nature. She was just one of many spokeswomen for these popular ideas.48 Not long after her letters were first serialized in Atlantic Monthly, Elinore wrote to the editor of that magazine about the many cards and letters she had received from appreciative readers. "One dear old lady eightyfour years old wrote me that she had always wanted to liv6 the life I am living, but could not, and that the Letters satisfied her every wish. She said she had only to shut her eyes to see it all, to smell the pines and the sage, and she said many more nice things that I wish were true of me."'" 45 Ibid. 46 Stanford J. Layton, To No Privileged Class: The Rationalization of Homesteading and Rural Life in the Early Twentieth-Century American West (Provo, UT, 1988), 2. 47 Allen, Homesteading, 136. 48 Layton, To No Privileged Class, 41-47. For an interesting analysis of Stewart's cultural context and the literary tradition into which her work fits see Peter C. Rollins, "The Film Heartland: Faithful Adaptation or Independent Vision," unpublished TS in author's possession. 9 Elinore Rupert Stewart to editor, 23 January 1914, published in the Atlantic Monthly 113 (April 1914), 532. For notices of Letters see "The Joys of Homesteading," Dial 57 This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1991 SHERRY L. SMITH 183 This must have been very dated her primary purpos a homestead as a literally ceeded as a popular write struck a responsive chord a When Elinore Pruitt Stewa her passing with a short o Novelist Who Died Here to tified as "the author of 'Th emphasis] book."'50 Such tions and the semi-fiction edly contribute to our und experiences. She provides The other version of Stew documents, is equally imp tire Stewart family mana It affords insight into the vised in the process of ho did their part. They used Desert Land Act. They tri ments and sometimes violate In this respect, Elinore Pr case study. She is that rar significant questions abou her life lead to a greater families played in the Am (1 July 1914), 21-22; and The Na other periodicals including New 820-21; and the Wisconsin Librar include "The Return of the Wom and "Snow: An Adventure of th 1923), script, Gold 50 780-85. Sand See and Wyoming," Rock Lindau Sage, Springs for which 136-41. Rocket, This content downloaded from 134.50.4.135 on Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:07:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 5 a Atl Octo The Making of Paths 4 The Making of Paths They felt how far beyond the scope Of elder Europe's saddest thought Might be the New World sudden brought In youth to share old age's painsTo feel the arrest of hope's advance, And squandered last inheritance; And cry-"To Terminus build fanesl Columbus ended earth's romance: . 1" No New W or~dto man kin d remains. HERMAN At MELVILLE, Clarel least Martin left something behind him-a town, a cemetery. Even a dump ground is an institution of permanence. But what we did on the homestead was written in wind. I~ bega~ as it ended-empty space, grass and sky. ~ rememb~r it as it originally was, for my brother and I, aged eight and si;: accom. d my father when he went out to make the first improvepame . . h ·· ments." Except for the four-foot iron post 1uttmg from t e prame ·ust where our wagon track met the trail to Hydro, Monta~a, and 1or the three shallow holes with the survey stake at t!1err ap~x that marked the near corner of our land, there was nothm~ to distinguish or divide our land from all other, to show which 320 acres of that wind and grass were ours. That was our first experience of how fl.at land could spread 268 • 269 from the wagon and tent by which we attempted to demonstrate ownership-fl.at to the horizon and beyond, wherever we looked, except that, halfway to our western line, a shallow, nearly imperceptible coulee began, feeling its way, turning and turning again, baffied and blocked, a watercourse so nearly a slough that the spring runoff hardly fl.owed at all, its water not so much moving as pushed by the thaw behind it and having to go somewhere, until it passed our land and turned south, and at the border found another coulee, which carried in most seasons a little water-not enough to run but enough to seep, and with holes that gave sanctuary to a few minnows and suckers. It was called Coteau Creek, a part of the Milk-Missouri watershed. In good seasons we might get a swim of sorts in its holes; in dry years we hauled water from it in barrels, stealing from the minnows to serve ourselves and our stock. Between it and our house we wore, during the five summers we spent vainly trying to make a wheat farm there, one of our private wagon tracks. Coteau Creek was a landmark and sometimes a hazard. Once my father, gunning our old Model T across one of its fords, hit something and broke an axle. Next day he started walking the forty miles into Chinook, Montana, leaving me with a homesteader family, and two days later he came back carrying a new axle on his back and installed it himself after the homesteader's team had hauled the Ford out of the creek bed. I remember that high, square car, with its yellow spoke wheels and its brass bracing rods from windshield to mudguards and its four-eared brass radiator cap. It stuck up black and foreign, a wanderer from another planet, on the flats by Coteau Creek, while my father, red-faced and sweating, crawled in and out under the jacked-up rear end and I squatted in the car's shade and played what games I could with pebbles and a blue robin's egg. We sat baldly on the plain, something the earth refused to swallow, right in the middle of everything and with the prairie as empty as nightmare clear to the crawl and shimmer where hot earth met hot sky. I saw the sun fl.ash off brass, a heliograph winking off a message into space, calling attention to us, saying "Look, look!" Because that was the essential feeling I had about that country -the sense of being foreign and noticeable, of sticking out. I did not at first feel even safe, much less that I was helping to take 270 Town and Country charge of and make our own a parcel of the world. I moped for Whitemud, nearly fifty miles north and east on its willowed river, where all my friends were and. where my mother was waiting until we could get a shack built. Out here we did not belong to the earth as the prairie dogs and burrowing owls and gophers and weasels and badgers and coyotes did, nor to the sky as the hawks did, nor to any combination as meadowlarks and sparrows and robins did. The shack that my father built was an ugly tarpaper-covered box on the face of the prairie, and not even its low rounded roof, built low and round to give the wind less grip on it, could bind it into the horizontal world. Before the shack was finished we lived in a tent, which the night wind constantly threatened to blow away, Happing the canvas and straining the ropes and ·pulling the pegs from the gravelly ground. And when, just as we were unloading the lumber to start building, a funnel-shaped cloud appeared in the south, moving against a background of gray-black shot with lightning forks, and even while the sun still shone on us the air grew tense and metallic to breathe, and a light like a reflection from brass glowed around us, and high above, pure and untroubled, the zenith ':"as blue-then indeed exposure was like paralysis or panic, and we looked at the strangely still tent, bronzed in the yellow air, and felt the air shiver and saw a dart of wind move like a lizard across the dust and vanish again. My father rushed us to the shallow section holes at the corner, and with ropes he lashed us to the stake and made us cower down. The holes were no more than a foot deep; they could in no sense be called shelter. Over their edge our eyes, level with the plain, looked southward and saw nothing between us and the ominous bent funnel except gopher mounds and the still unshaken grass. Across the coulee a gopher sat up, erect as the picket pin from which he took his nickname. Then the grass stirred; it was as if gooseflesh prickled suddenly on the prairie's skin. The gopher disappeared as if some friend below had reached up and yanked him down into his burrow. Even while we were realizing it, the yellow air darkened, and then all the brown and yellow went out of it and it · was blue-black. The wind began to pluck at th_e shirts on our backs, the hair on our heads was wrenched, the air was full of The Making of Paths •• 273 dust. From the third section hole my father, glaring over the'· shallow rim, yelled to us to keep down, and with a fierce rush rain trampled our backs, and the curly buffalo grass at the level of my squinted eyes was strained out straight and whistling. I popped my head into my arms and fitted my body to the earth. To give the wind more than my Hat back, I felt, would be sure destruction, for that was a wind, and that was a country, that hated a foreign and vertical thing. The cyclone missed us; we got only its lashing edge. We came up cautiously from our muddy burrows and saw the tent collapsed and the sky clearing, and smelled the air, washed and rinsed of all its sultry oppressiveness. I for one felt a little better about being who I was, but for a good many weeks I watched the sky with suspicion; exposed as we were, it could jump on us like a leopard from a tree. And I know I was disappointed in the shack that my father swiftly put together. A soddy that poked its low brow no higher than the tailings of a gopher's burrow would have suited me better. The bond with the earth that all the footed and winged creatures felt in that country was quite as valid for me. And that was why I so loved the trails and paths we made. They were ceremonial, an insistence not only that we had a right to be in sight on the prairie but that we owned and controlled a piece of it. In a country practically without landmarks, as that part of Saskatchewan was, it might have been assumed that any road would comfort the soul. But I don't recall feeling anything special about the graded road that led us more than half of the way from town to homestead, or for the wiggling tracks that turned off to the homesteads of others. It was our own trail lightly worn, its ruts a slightly fresher green where old cured grass had been rubbed away, that lifted my heart. It took off across the prairie like an extension of myself. Our own wheels had made it: broad, iron-shod wagon wheels first, then narrow democrat wheels that cut through the mat. of grass and scored the earth until it blew and washed and started a rut, then finally the wheels of the Ford. By the time we turned off it, the road we followed from town had itself dwindled to a pair of ruts, but it never quite disappeared; it simply divided and subdivided. I do not know why the last miles, across buffalo grass and burnouts, past the shacks we \ __.; ~~ed Town and Country Pete and Emil, across Coteau Creek, and on westward until the ruts passed through the gate in our pasture fence and stopped before our house, should always have excited me so, unless it was that the trail was a thing we had exclusively created and that it led to a place we had exclusively built. Here is the pioneer root-cause of the American cult of Progress, the satisfac. tion that Homo fabricans feels in altering to his own purposes the virgin earth. Those tracks demonstrated our existence as triumphantly as an Indian is demonstrated by his handprint in ochre on a cliff wall. Not so idiotically as the stranded Ford, this trail and the shack and chicken house and privy at its end said, "See? We are here." Thus, in the truest sense, was '1ocated" a homestead. More satisfying than the wagon trail, even, because more intimately and privately made, were the paths that our daily living wore in the prairie. I loved the horses for poking along the pasture fence looking for a way out, because that habit very soon wore a plain path all around inside the barbed wire. Whenever I had to go and catch them, I went out of my way to walk along it, partly because the path was easier on my bare feet but more because I wanted to contribute my feet to the wearing process. I scuffed and kicked at clods and persistent grass clumps, and twisted my weight on incipient weeds and flowers, willing that the trail around the inside of our pasture should be beaten dusty and plain, a worn border to our inheritance. It was the same with the path to the woodpile and the privy. In late June, when my mother and brother and I reached the homestead, that would be nearly overgrown, the faintest sort of radius line within the fireguard. But our feet quickly wore it anew, though there were only the four of us, and though other members of the family, less addicted to paths than I, often frustrated and irritated me by cutting across from the wrong corner of the house, or detouring past the fence-post pile to get a handful of cedar bark for kindling, and so neglected their plain duty to the highway. It was an unspeakable satisfaction to me when after a few weeks I could rise in the flat morning light that came across the prairie in one thrust, like a train rushing down a track, and see the beaten footpath, leading gray and dusty between grass and cactus and the little orange flowers of the false mallow that The Making of Paths • 273 we called wild geranium, until it ended, its purpose served, at the hooked privy door. Wearing any such path in the earth's rind is an intimate act, an act like love, and it is denied to the dweller in cities. He lacks the proper mana for it, he is out of touch with the earth of which he is made. Once, on Fifty-eighth Street in New York, I saw an apartment dweller walking his captive deer on a leash. They had not the pleasure of leaving a single footprint, and the sound of the thin little hoofs on concrete seemed as melancholy to me as at the moment, the sound of my own steps. · ' So we had an opportunity that few any lon er can have: we . punted an earth: t at seeme creatron-new with t e mar s ofour identitr:_Aria then the earth wi12ed them o~gain. It is possible that our dam still holds a reservoir behind it, that o~ family effort has ~ndowed the country with one more small slough for which nestmg ducks and thirsty coyotes may bless us. It may be that some of the ground cherries my mother brought as seed from Iowa and planted in the fireguard have grown and fruited and been spread by wind and birds. If so, field mice opening the papery husks and dining on the little yellow tomatoes inside may bless us too. There is not much else that we can be blessed for. :13e1:auseof us, uite a lot of the homestead's thin soil lies miles do~ecause of us, Russian thistle and other ~~ds ~ came in wit1!_the whe~ have filled the old fielctsand choked out the grass and made mucili-QjOre_g@CTiltthe i~ ~ri~g~aclc the old natural ~g~. But with those exceptions, we are erased, we are ?ne with Fort Walsh. Though it established itself permanently m more favored parts of the region, the wheat frontier never got a foothold in "Palliser's Triangle," at whose base· our homestead lay, and we ourselves helped corroborate Palliser's 1858 prediction that agriculture would prove impracticable there. Our dream of a wheat bonanza, or failing that, of a home, is as lost a_sthe night wind that used to blow across the prairie's great emptmess and, finding a little human box in its way, moan and mourn under the eaves and through the screens. The homestead, though it was a stead of sorts, was never a home. There was only a handful of real homes on either side of ~e Li~e. Most houses were like ours, shacks made to be camped m durmg the crop season; and some were like Pete and Emil ' 274 • Town and Country never meant to be lived in at all, but only to satisfy the law's requirement. ( The grass grows more sweetly on Pete and Emil than on our place, for during their simple-minded effort to cheat the government out of title to 320 acres their owners plowed no prairie, imported no weeds, started no dust bowl.) Those of us who really tried to farm lived on the prairie as summerers, exact opposites of the metis winterers who knew that country first, and anyone who tries to farm there now will still be a summerer. Nobody, quite apart from the question of school, wants to risk six hard lonely months thirty or forty miles from fuel, supplies, medical care, and human company. As agriculturists we were not inventive. We used the methods and the machinery that were said ,to be right, and planted the crops and the varieties advised by rumor or the Better Farming Train. At least once, tradition did well by us. Because my parents had brought from Dakota the notion that flax is the best crop in a newly broken field, we endowed our prairie briefly, in 1916, with twenty acres of bluebells, I remember the pleasure their beauty brought us all; that was a green and rainy summer, and the sight of lush grass and wildflowers and the blue wave of flax persuaded us for a little while that we did indeed live in the Garden of the World. But I remember ·them also for the evidence they give me now of how uneventful and lonesome the homestead must have been for two boys who had read everything in the shack ten times, had studied the Sears Roebuck catalog into shreds, had , trapped gophers in increasing circles out from the house until the gopher population was down to bare survivors, had stone~ to death the one badger they caught in a gopher trap, had lost m a big night windstorm their three captive weasels and two burrowing owls, and had played to boredom every two-man game they knew. We couldn't even take our .22's and go killing things, for we had no money for cartridges, not even shorts, not even the despised BB's. . \ . To keep us from our interminable squabbling, my father said we could reap as our own crop all the flax that had grown up too close to the pasture fence for machinery. We cut our flax with butcher knives and threshed it by beating it against the inside of a washtub. It took half an hour to realize a cupful, but we kept at it until we had filled two flour sacks. It brought us, as I recall, The Making of Paths • 275 about ~our dollars-:-memorable money. But I have a more lasting souvem~ of that .piece bored laboriousness. Cutting at flax stalks with :11Ykmfe, I slammed my hand into a cactus clump and drove a spme clear through my middle finger. There was no pull~ng it out, for it was broken off at the skin, and so I waited for it to fester out. It never did. It is there in the X-rays yet, a needle of authentic calcified Saskatchewan, as much a part of me as the bones between which it wedged itself. Wh~n _hefirst broke sod, my father took pride in plowing a furrow six mches deep, as straight as a string, and nearly a mile lo.ng. He started at our pasture fence, plowed straight south to the Lme, turned ea~t, plowed a few rods along the border, and turned north agam to our fence, enclosing a long narrow field that in a demonic burst of non-stop work he plowed and disked and harrowed and planted to Red Fife wheat. It was like putting money on a horse and watching him take the lead at the first turn and go on pulling away to the finish. T~at first summer, 1915, the wheat came up in thin rows-a m1racle, really, considering that we ourselves had done it and in so short a time. Rains came every few days, and were foll;wed by long hot days with sixteen hours of sun. The earth steamed things grew like plants in trick photography. We looked away fr~m the field for a minute and looked back to find the wheat ankle high looked away again, and back, and found it as high -as our knees'. Gophers mowed big swaths, cutting it to get at the tender joints, an? so we went up and down the mile-long field with traps and .22 s and buckets of sweet-smelling strychnine-soaked wheat. That summer, according to the prize they gave us, my brother and I collected more gopher tails than anybody in southern Saskatchewan. of We lived an idyl of miniature savagery, small humans against r~dents. Experts in dispensing death, we knew to the slightest kick and reflex the gophers' ways of dying: knew how the eyes p~pped out blue as marbles when we clubbed a trapped gopher with ~ stak~, knew how a gopher shot in the behind just as he ~o".'e mto his hole would sometimes back right out again with nd1~ulous promptness and die in the open, knew how an un~uned carcass would begin within a few hours to seethe with little black scavenger bugs, and how a big orange carrion beetle 276 • Town and Country working in one could all but roll it over with the energy of his greed, and how after a few days of scavengers and sun a gasbloated gopher had shrunk to a flattened wisp of fur. We were as untroubled by all our slaughter as early plainsmen were by their slaughter of buffalo. In the name of the )Vheat we absolved ourselves of cruelty and callousness. Our justification came at the end of that first summer when my father, who was just six feet tall, walked into the field one afternoon and disappeared. The wheat overtopped and absorbed him. From a field of less than thirty acres he took more than twelve hundred bushels of Number One Northern. It was our last triumph. The next spring my father went out early to prepare another field and plant the old one .. We joined him late in June, after driving all day in a drenching downpourload soaked, us soaked, horses streaming, old Red the cow splashing alGlngbehind with her hipbones poking up under her slicked wet hide like a chairback under a sheet. My father had barely got the crops in-thirty acres of wheat, twenty of flax. Then we sat for two weeks in the mouse-smelling shack, playing checkers and reading, while the rain continued to come down. We wondered if the seed would be washed out of the ground, it rained so. The cat prowled unhappily and lost his reputation for being housebroken, because he would not go out in the wet. Between soakers we inspected the fields. A thin combing of green, then sturdy rows, then ankle high-it grew like weeds. Though I trapped for gophers, I caught few; they had drowned in their holes. The cat grew thin for lack of field mice. G9ing to the vegetable garden for our usual summer job of picking off potato bugs and piling them at the ends of the rows and burning them with kerosene, we found hardly a bug on the vines. Nothing throve on that rainy prairie but wheat and flax. Rich farmer's sons, we grew lavish in our selection of next Christmas's gifts from the Sears Roebuck catalog. For weeks on end water stood in the burnouts; every low spot was a slough; the rezavoy lapped the top of the dam. Like effete visitors to a summer resort area, we swam in water over our heads. We had no hot winds, no hailstorms, no twisters, no grasshoppers. Every natural pest and hazard was suspended. Excep.t one. Rust. We got a flax crop, but The Making of Paths • 277 no wheat_ at all, not a bushel. In town, where my father had planted his potato field and hired the Chinese to look after it, we ha1 a bumper crop of spuds, so big that storage had to be found for a good part of it. Those were the potatoes that were in the cellar of Joe Knight's hotel when it burned down. Bad luck, surely. And yet if bad luck had not begun for us in 191? we would simply have been a year or so longer on the hook. As it was, 1917 gave us our seed back, 1918 gave us only a little b~tt~r, and 1919 serveq us up such blistering hot winds that we d1dn t even bother to call in the threshers. One more year and we would have proved up on the homestead and been Canadians all the way instead of only halfway. But when you have stood for three summers in a row turning from the rainy east to the windy southwest, and propitiated one and cursed the other and every time, just when you have been brought to the point 'of hope by good spring rains, have felt that first puff out of the southwest hotter by far than the air around you, you are not likely to requir~ further proofs. My father did not grow discouraged; he grew furi- · ous. When ~e matched himself against something he wanted a chance to wm. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity, and we had stopped walking the paths and making our marks on the face of the prairie. But how much of my remembering senses is imprisoned there whe_reI would not for a thousand dollars an hour return to live! I retam,. as surely as a salmon returning to its spawning grounds ~ter six years at sea knows its native stream, and turns in unerringly from_sal_twater, the taste and smell of the rezavoy when we swam m it among the agitated garter snakes and frogs. (Where they came from, God alone knew. There were none in that semi-desert when we built the dam, but next spring there were pollyw~gs. My mother firmly believed it rained them). I could detect 1ust as surely, if someone offered me a cup of it now the clay-tasting, modified rezavoy water that we drank-th~ water from a well-hole dug eight or ten feet from shore so that the seepage from the open slough would be filtered by earth. It took a good amount of earth and earth flavors with it in passage and it was a~out_as full_of wigglers as the rezavoy itself. In late s~rnrner we boiled it, but 1t never lost its taste. The water of Coteau Creek ' 278 • Town and Country by contrast, had a slick, soapy taste of alkali about it, and if we had to drink it for any length of time, as we did the last two summers, it gave us tbe trots. There was a whole folklore of water. People said a man had to make a dipperful go as far as it would. You boiled swee~ corn,. sa!. Instead of throwing the water out, you washed the dishes ~ it. Then you washed your hands in it a few times. Then y~u stramed it through a cloth into the radiator of your car, and if your car should break down you didn't just leave the water to evaporate in its gullet, but drained it out to water the sweet peas. We learned to drink with an eye on the dipper so as to keep from sucking down wigglers. When we went on a day's visit to some farm and had a good clean drink out of a deep well, ~e made jokes that the water didn't seem to have much body to it. All we lacked to put us into the position of the surveyors and hunters who had drunk slough water in that country in the 187o's was a few buffalo to fill our tank with urine and excrement. As much as we starved for a decent drink we starved for shade. No one who has not lived out on a baking flat where the summer days are eighteen hours long and the midday temperatures can go up to a hundred and five degrees has any business talking about discomfort from heat. The air crisps the skin and cracks the lips. There is not a tree for fifty miles in any direct~on, not even a whisker of willows, to transpire moisture into the air or shade one inch of the scorched ground. The wind that hundreds of miles .to the west started up the mountains warm and wet had dropped its moisture on the heights and come down our side wrung dry-dry and gaining temperature at the rate of one degree for every four hundred feet of altitude lost. It hits the Plains and comes across Alberta and Saskatchewan like the breath of a blowtorch. There is no cloud, not one, to cut off the sun and relieve the glare even for a minute. The horizons crawl with mirages. Maybe, far back along the crest of the mountains, out of the straining sight of Plains dwellers as far east as ourselves, there may lie the pearly bank called the Chinook Arch, but that would be no comfort to us even if we could see it-only a confirmation of the foehn wind. Searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and he?-t-warped light, and not a tree. The band of shade thrown by the shack narrows The Making of Paths • t\83 as the sun climbs, until at noon it is gone. It will be two hoursbefore .it is wide enough on the other side to shelter a boy's body. There 1s no refuge except inside. The green blinds are drawn, the canvas flap~ are. rolled down over the screens of the sleeping porch; the light 1s dusky and comforting to the eyes. But the still air is hotter, if anything, than that outside. Outside, the wind dries sweat before it ever bubbles through the little wells of the pores; inside we are sticky and labor for breath. The wind bellies the canvas in the porch, leaks past. Driven from the still heat of the shack, we look out the door into the white glare of the yard and the hallucinatory writhing of the horizon, and are driven back in again. On such a day my mother would not try to cook anything on the F~orence.kerosene stov~. She would have milk, butter, eggs, anyth~ng perishable, down rn the semi-cool hole under the trapdoor m the floor, down among the spiders. Bacon, ham, dried beef, about .the only meats we can use because they are the only ones that will keep more than a day, are buried deep in a box of oats to ke~p them cooler and moister. Hung in the air they would grow rancid, be blown by the flies, harden like rock. During the hot-wind days the gingersnaps that are our standard cookies are so dry and hard they fly into fragments when we take a bite; if they should grow soft we would take it as an almost certain sign of coming rain. At meal time the trapdoor is raised and up come crocks of tepid milk, often "on the turn," and the dish of butter. We dine, these days, primarily on homemade bread and butter sometimes with peanut butter, sometimes with brown sugar, som~times with a slather of Karo. syrup or molasses. But eating, ordinarily our purest pleasure, is no fun. There is a headachy crankiness around the table, the flies are infuriating. Before it has been on the table fi~e minutes, the butter is ghee, yellow liquid that we scoop up w~th spoons to spread our bread. Put down into the hole again, it w~ll bar.den into a flat, whitish, untasty-looking sheet sprinkled with a nme of salt like an alkali flat. When spread, it is coarse and crumbly, without buttery consistency and with a rancid taste. Sometimes, in spite of the twists of flypaper hanging in a dozen places from the ceiling, and the big treacherous sheets spread 2B0 • The Making Town and Country around on tables and boxes, all of them murmurous with trapped flies we will find in the melted-and-congealed-again butter a bla;k kinked leg or a transparent wing. . . And what of the insects caught in that heat-softened, mcredibly sticky fly paper? I used to watch for minutes at a time ~s some fly, gummed and stuck with glue, his wings plastered to his body, his legs,,fused, dragged himself with super-fly eff?rt tow~rd the edge of a sheet, and made it, and rested there,. shme~ wi~ the death he had dragged with him, and then tned with his stuck-together forefeet to wipe his head and clean himself. A fly could often drag himself a good way through the warmed glue, but even if he made it to the edge he didn't have a chance. I used to put pencil circles around some struggler still hopefully mopping his head with his slimed feet, and come back later to see if he had got clean and got away. He never had: Once I caught my mother watching me, and together, for a w~ile, we. stared at the sheet of gummed paper loud with the buzzmg of flies whose feet were caught but whose wings were still free. V:'e watched a few get their wings caught too, so they could only slide ~nd crawl. My mother's lips drew up as if she tasted something nasty. "What's the matter, sorry for the old flies?" I said. "It's a parable," she said, and crumpled· the sheet up and stuck it in the sheep~~gon stove we used in chilly weather. , . ( A parable, indeed. In spite of my mothers flimsy prete~se that / we were farmers of the kind her Iowa parents were, drawmg our full sustenance from the soil and tending the soil as good husbandmen should; in spite of her cow and her dasher chu:° a~d her cloths of cottage cheese dripping from the clotheslme; m spite of her chickens and eggs and vegetable garden, she was not 1 fooled. It was not a farm, and we were not farmers, but wqrurt miners and traJ:>Pedones at that. vVe had flown in carelessly, t loofing for something, and got ourselves stuck. The only question now was how to get free. She knew it was failure we were livin ; and if she did not realize, en or ever, at it~ more than family failur~ that.~ the failure of a s ste and a dream, she knew the !.amily fa~ better than any of u~. Given-her choice in the matter, she might have elected to go n farming-get some better land s~mewhere, maybe in the Cypress Hills; and become one of the stickers. She of Paths • :883 had the character and the skills for it as my father did not. But she likewise had impulses toward a richer and more rewarding life, and ambitions for her sons, and she must have understood that compared to what a Saskatchewan homesteader considered lus oppo,tunity, five yea,, of ~fan exile would have been a relatively comfortable outing. She had gone to school only through the sixth grade. It woul never have occurred to her to think that her family and thousands of others had been betrayed by homestead laws totally inapplicable on the arid Plains; or that she and hers h~d been victimized by the folklore of hope. She had not education enough to know that t,!le mass i~lse that had started her pare~ts from Ulvik on the Hardanger Fjord, ruid_startedber and my father fromTowa into Dakota and on across ~e border, had lost its legitimacy beyond the hundredtli merid- • I~n. She knew nothing about minimal annual rainfall, distrib~bon of precipitation, isohyetal lines. All she knew was that we were trapped and licked, and it would not have helped her much to be told that this was where a mass human movement dwindled its end. -to_,,.....,......, / 'l'or her s"akeI have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it-could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness which I must think ~ good thing to know? Who ever came mo;e truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon ...

 

Option 1

Low Cost Option
Download this past answer in few clicks

15.89 USD

PURCHASE SOLUTION

Already member?


Option 2

Custom new solution created by our subject matter experts

GET A QUOTE