Complete with its original N.C. Wyeth illustrations is this outstanding first-person chronicle of life on the American frontier.

Elinore Pruitt, a widow and mother who washed clothes for a living in Denver, planned to work as a housekeeper for some rancher while learning all she would need to know about homesteading a place for herself. In 1909 she went to work for Clyde Stewart, whose ranch was near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, and within six weeks she married him. "Ranch work seemed to require that we be married first and do our sparking afterward," she wrote Juliet Coney, her former employer. She maintained her independence by filing on a quarter section adjacent to her husband's land and proving it up herself. Her...

ELINORE PRUITT STEWART (1876-1933) caused a literary sensation in 1914 when her Letters of a Woman Homesteader was published. A self-educated pioneer in southwest Wyoming, she wrote letters to keep her mind busy amidst the hard physical labor of carving a home out of wilderness, and to keep her friendships fresh in that remote place

In this followup of the next year, Stewarts missives are short stories in themselves, letters written about events in the summer and fall of 1914 and intended for later publication, as those of her first collection were not. The joy of Stewarts writing is in the...