1 quotes by Elinore Pruitt Stewart (1876-1933), American (Wyoming Homesteader Writer)

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Elinore Pruitt Stewart

We saw many deserted homes. Hope's skeletons they are, with their yawning doors and windows like eyeless sockets. Some of the houses, which looked as if they were deserted, held families. We camped near one such. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and I went up to the house to buy some eggs. A hopeless looking woman came to the door. The hot winds and the alkali dust had tanned her skin and bleached her hair; both were a gray-brown. Her eyes were blue, but were so tired-looking that I could hardly see for the tears. "No," she said, "we ain't got no eggs. We ain't got no chickens. You see this ground is sandy, and last year the wind blowed awful hard and all the grain blowed out, so we did not have no chance to raise chickens. We had no feed and no money to buy feed, so we had to kill our chickens to save their lives. We eat them. They would have starved anyway.

This quotation provides a woman’s view of the hardship of the desert trail to the West where ghost towns were already present along the trail. Her phrase “Hope’s skeletons” is one of the vivid descriptions of the deserted houses along the trail to the West. Her letters were so well written and descriptive that they were published in the Atlantic Monthly.

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About the Author

Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Born: June 3, 1876
Died: October 8, 1933
Nationality: American
Profession: Wyoming Homesteader Writer

Biography

Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a homesteader in Wyoming, and a memoirist who between 1909 and 1914 wrote letters describing her life there to a former employer in Denver, Colorado. Those letters, which reveal an adventurous, capable, and resourceful woman of lively intelligence, were published in two collections in 1914 and 1915. The first of those collections, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, was the basis of the 1979 movie Heartland.

ELINORE PRUITT STEWART