Elinore Pruitt Stewart — 1909, ‘Letters of a Woman Homesteader’

In the spring of 1909 a widowed laundress named Elinore Pruitt left Denver with her small daughter Jerrine, answered a Denver Post advertisement, and went west to keep house for a Scottish-born rancher named Henry Clyde Stewart at Burntfork, a hamlet in the high sagebrush country of southwestern Wyoming, near the Utah line. In early May she filed a homestead claim of her own on a quarter-section adjoining his, and on May 5, 1909 she married him — then concealed the marriage for years so as not to jeopardize her claim, since the law barred married women from holding land in their own name. Out of that life she wrote the letters that made her famous.

Elinore poured her new world into long, witty, closely observed letters to her former Denver employer, Mrs. Juliet Coney, a widowed schoolteacher from Boston. Coney sent them on, and the Atlantic Monthly published them before Houghton Mifflin issued them as a book in 1914, ‘Letters of a Woman Homesteader,’ followed by a sequel, ‘Letters on an Elk Hunt,’ in 1915. The letters are funny, generous, and ruthlessly practical, full of neighbors, cooking, childbirth on the range, blizzards, and the plain physical labor of a working ranch — and they became the classic firsthand account of a woman homesteading in her own voice.

Her most quoted argument is also her central one. Writing to Mrs. Coney, she insisted that homesteading was women’s work as surely as men’s: ‘any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.’ Having scrubbed other people’s laundry to feed herself and Jerrine, she meant the comparison literally: a homestead, she argued, beat washing for wages.

The complicating truth, which Elinore left out of the published letters, is that she never proved up her own claim. The Homestead Act let single women file in their own right but required married women to claim only jointly with a husband, and required spouses on separate homesteads to keep separate residences — impossible once she was living with Clyde. In 1912, after the birth of her sons, she regretfully relinquished her claim to her mother-in-law, Ruth Stewart, to keep from losing it outright; the family later bought the land back. That tension — between the fierce ideal of the self-sufficient woman homesteader and the legal reality of a married woman’s claim — is part of why the ‘Letters’ remain so widely read and argued over more than a century later.

Oscar Micheaux — 1905, the Homesteader Who Became a Filmmaker

Before he was the most important Black filmmaker of the silent era — before forty-some features, before the Walk of Fame star — Oscar Micheaux was a homesteader on the South Dakota prairie. Born January 2, 1884, near Metropolis, Illinois, the son of formerly enslaved parents, he worked his way north and west, put in years as a Pullman porter, saved his wages, and in 1905 bought a relinquishment and filed on land in Gregory County, on the recently opened Rosebud country. He was, as far as anyone has found, the only Black homesteader for many miles in any direction.

Micheaux did well at first. He broke the sod, brought in crops in the good years, and expanded his holdings across several claims in Gregory and the newly opened Tripp County until he was farming on a scale most settlers never reached. His ambition was openly to prove that a Black man could succeed at the white frontier’s own game. But the same forces that broke so many Plains homesteaders — drought, falling prices, debt — closed in on him in the 1910s, compounded by a disastrous marriage and a father-in-law who, in Micheaux’s telling, helped wreck the enterprise. By the late 1910s the homestead was gone.

What he salvaged from the failure was a story. In 1913 he published his first novel, ‘The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer,’ a thinly fictionalized account of his own homesteading years told through a character named Oscar Devereaux, and he sold it himself, door to door, across the farm country he knew. He wrote more books, rewrote the same material as ‘The Homesteader’ in 1917, and then, when a film company tried to buy that novel on terms he disliked, he decided to make the picture himself.

The homestead failed; the storyteller it produced did not. Out of a busted South Dakota claim came the man who would direct ‘Within Our Gates,’ ‘Body and Soul,’ and a body of independent ‘race films’ made by and for Black audiences across three decades — a career that began, quite literally, in the sod.