woman homesteaders

Chicago native Florence Blake risked her life in a bull pasture; traveled to Devil’s Tower and Yellowstone Park; and attended many all-night dances—all part of her life as a single woman homesteader in Campbell County, Wyoming in the early 1920s. She lived in Wyoming seven months each year.

Two years after they were married in 1910, a Lander bank took almost everything from John and Ethel Love’s sheep ranch in central Wyoming. Still, despite floods, blizzards, wild dogs, rattlesnakes, barbed-wire cuts and the Spanish Influenza the family remained—and Ethel, in her letters and journals, kept track.

In 1909, Elinore Pruitt answered Burntfork, Wyo. rancher Clyde Stewart’s Denver Post ad for a housekeeper. She soon married Stewart and achieved her dream of becoming a homesteader. Her vivid letters about her experiences were published in the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader, bringing her nationwide fame.