The need for female companionship created a common hardship for women on the Plains, especially from the middle 1800s to the early 1900s. Because of the scattered development of the land, with many families receiving as much as 640 acres, homesteaders often built their cabins miles apart. Thus, "isolation from white women . . . shaped most women's responses to the earliest period of settlement," states Julie Roy Jeffrey in Frontier Women. "Although women had their own domestic circles, they missed female friends. A husband might be no substitute for a close friend or relative of their own sex" (55). The letters, diaries and journals of women homesteaders reflect that this loss of intimate friends was one of the leading causes of homesickness and loneliness for America's pioneer women.

Letters to family and friends, many of whom they would never see again, helped fill this void, sustaining ties crucial to the women's emotional survival. Separated, yet bonded together emotionally, frontier women's friendships through their correspondence formed a creation as essential and beautiful as our foremothers' patchwork quilts.

Mari Sandoz recognized the importance of letters to women homesteaders in many of her works. In Miss Morissa, a novel about Morissa Kirk, a pioneer woman doctor and homesteader in western Nebraska in the 1870s, letters formed a link with civilization. When Morissa's fiance learned that she was illigetimate and broke their engagement, she fled to the West to join her step-father on the primitive, male-dominated frontier, "the only white woman for two hundred miles along the Platte" (67). At first, the isolation almost overwhelmed her: "Sometimes the loneliness was sharp as the howl of the coyotes, but continuous, and pushing in like the shadows of the lantern on the dirt floor and the rooty sod walls. Only the red calico curtains and the cut-glass scent bottles seemed of a woman's life" (39). Ironically, a letter from her former fiance made her realize that she did not want to return to the civilized East. She had found a place where she could be respected for herself, not her parentage. She centered her life on her practice, and gradually earned respect for her medical abilities, not only from the community but from other doctors as well. Isolated from the established medical community, Morissa's only professional link with other doctors and hospitals was through letters. She wrote to her university professors, the state medical association, Dr. Walter Reed at Fort Robinson, and other doctors in the West asking about new medicines and procedures for her patients, information she could not find in her outdated textbooks. And when her successes became known throughout the plains, other doctors wrote to her for advice. In the biography of her father, Old Jules, Sandoz emphasizes that Jules, a formidable writer himself who wooed two wives through his letters, kept his second wife, Henriette, isolated by forbidding her to write any letters and taking over her appointment as postmistress.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart, author of Letters of a Woman Homesteader, 1914, and Letters on an Elk Hunt, 1915, is an another excellent example of the isolated pioneer woman and her attempts to create and sustain female ties. Stewart's decision in 1909 to flee the poverty of the city and to file on a homestead distanced her from her family in Oklahoma and her friends in Denver, and the remote Wyoming valley where she staked her claim secluded her even more. The nearest settlement, Green River, lay sixty miles to the north, a six day round trip by wagon over sage-covered badlands. For Stewart, then, letter writing became her primary link with the world. It satisfied several needs, providing not only emotional and creative outlets for her pent-up thoughts and feelings, but also filling her need for female companionship.

Stewart's personal letters provided her with a method of expressing her need for emotional support and for female ties. Her well-known correspondence with Mrs. Juliet Coney, her former employer from Denver and the basis for her two published books, demonstrate such a bond. After moving to Wyoming to homestead, Stewart continued her relationship with Mrs. Coney through letters chronicling her happy, new life in the West. In a February 19, 1914, letter to Miss Maria Wood, a long-time correspondent from Missouri, she explained the bond she felt with Mrs. Coney: "The grandmother I loved so fondly was eighty-four when she died more than three years ago. All my life I have loved old people best and Jerrine is the same way." A sort of mother/daughter bond developed between Stewart and Coney, providing the orphaned Stewart with maternal support.

Later, in another letter to Miss Wood dated May 17, 1916, she further explained her feelings of connectedness with Mrs. Coney: "My beloved was very much alone, her only children, two daughters, were teachers in the Denver schools so Mrs. Coney was alone in her apartments so much. She was always so enterested in evry thing that it was a pleasure to share adventures with her." Although Stewart claimed to have written the letters out of sympathy for the elderly widow, Stewart gained as much from this long-distance relationship as did Mrs. Coney, the one person who had shown the young southerner compassion.

Because of her own compassion and sensitivity to Mrs. Coney, the homesteader chiefly centered on the positive events that she could share with her beloved friend. Rather than venting on her concerned correspondent her frustrations with the bitter cold and isolation of the winters, the demanding physical labor of ranching and the primitive housekeeping arrangements, Stewart focused on the simple joys of family life, the rewards of her garden and the beauty of nature. She described an autumn outing in 1909 in which she and her daughter, Jerrine, explored the area surrounding her homestead:

In "(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," Elizabeth Abel proposes that "through intimacy which is knowledge, friendship becomes a vehicle of self-definition for women" (416). By stressing the positive aspects of her new life with Mrs. Coney, Stewart put the negative elements of her pioneer experience into better perspective, thus creating a more healthy emotional environment and a more constructive self-definition.

Mrs. Coney, in turn, showed Stewart the same compassion and warmth. Although only one known letter from Mrs. Coney still exists, the old woman's concern for her absent friend is very evident. A March 10, 1914, letter shows that she, too, relished the relationship: "I am hoping for a letter from you soon for I am sure I look for yours as eagerly as you do for mine." However, Coney warned: "But don't you get a lot of superannuated old parties on your hands--for they will depend on you and you have duties of your own." She added maternally, "We have been looking over our books and I am going to send some to Jerrine--they are not new, but I hope she won't mind that, for the reading is just as good. And I am going to put in one or two for you." When the Stewart/Coney letters are read with this personal relationship in mind, one can see how the Denver widow became a source of strength and focus for the woman homesteader during this difficult transition period in her life.

Stewart's correspondence with Mrs. Coney and later with her daughter, Mrs. Florence Allen, fulfilled another need for the woman homesteader. Stewart wanted to be a writer but needed an outlet for her creative attempts. Her Denver employer, well-educated and personally involved with Stewart, proved to be the perfect audience. Stewart's first letters from Wyoming contained a series of incidents based on several colorful personalities, composites of her neighbors and family. Mrs. Coney enjoyed the story/letters so thoroughly that she sent them to Ellery Sedgwick of the Atlantic Monthly for publication. Although Stewart alleged that none of her first series of letters to Mrs. Coney were meant for the public, when she discovered the universal appeal of her Letters of a Woman Homesteader, she was so delighted to have her writing published that she began tailoring her correspondence to this effect. Stewart continued her successful epistolary format in her second book containing more letters to Mrs. Coney, Letters on an Elk Hunt. This time, however, the Atlantic Monthly commissioned her writing in advance, and her audience became more universal.

After Mrs. Coney died, Mrs. Allen, a teacher, continued to provide the same creative outlet, especially after Atlantic Monthly began rejecting her work. Nearly all of the short stories Stewart wrote after Houghton Mifflin published her two books were addressed Mrs. Coney's daughter, usually on her mother's March 9 birthday, a sort of tribute to her beloved friend.

Stewart based her stories, almost always in epistolary form, on personal experiences, embroidering them to add interest and color. Several stories resulted from a five hundred mile journey by wagon over the Rocky Mountains when Stewart and her three sons returned to Wyoming from their Boulder stay. Stewart's open and curious nature coupled with her creative imagination found ample subjects for literary exploration. An inexperienced young man attempting to cross Berthoud Pass became a story about "Goof," an ignorant but likeable orphan on his way to establish a ranch for homeless boys. "Mollie-Jane," a southern lady who escaped from her overly protective sons to run a sheep-ranch in the sage-covered badlands might have been inspired by the hospitality of a homesteader on the trail, and a visit to a ranch with an ancestral portrait gallery perhaps prompted the tale about Jessie and the cattle rustlers. People and events in her own Wyoming valley became the basis for other story-letters Stewart wrote to Mrs. Allen, such as the moonshine stories and the tale of the lone star quilt, all based on her neighber, Ma Gillis.

As a creative outlet, Stewart's letters could, according to Abel, "organize the meaning of her world" (431) through the characters and situations she created in her stories. In 1915, in "The Return of the Woman Homesteader," Stewart considered the effect of World War I on newly-immigrated pioneers in a story about selling War Bonds. Would they be patriotic to their homelands or to America? How would they feel if their son died in battle? What was her personal response be to these "foreigners"? Through her creative interpretation of personal experience with universal issues, Stewart could understand better the role such newcomers played in America. The publication of her story/letters, first serially in Atlantic Monthly and later in book form by Houghton Mifflin, helped bring these issues to the public's attention, thus enabling her to contribute politically as well as creatively.

In her later years, when her illnesses prevented Stewart from travelling about the countryside and encountering "adventures," she lived them vicariously through her fiction. No longer able to ride a galloping horse in a stampede or scurry up and down the ridges of the badlands because of her deteriorating health, she adventured out only on paper in such stories as "The Wild Horse Hunt." Through what Abel terms "imaginative identification," Stewart could again feel the sun on her back and the wind in her hair, hear the rhythmic trot-trot of Brownie and smell the sagebrush and wild roses in the mountain air.

A born story-teller, Stewart needed an outlet for her talent and a way to construct meaning from her experiences. Her remote Wyoming valley homestead prevented her inclusion in the literary circles of her era, but her letters to Mrs. Coney and Mrs. Allen filled that void. According to Bruce Redford, in The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, "Instead of assuming interest, great letter-writers create it: details are pruned and inflections calibrated according to the identity and interests of the recipient. The finest familiar letters are always correspondent-specific: they play to a particular audience" (10). Although Stewart did not aggressively pursue publication when the Atlantic Monthly began rejecting her stories, she chose as her audience educated women like Mrs. Coney and her daughter who appreciated her talent and encouraged her creativity.

Stewart's writing also helped relieve the long winter days isolated from female companionship. Letters, according to Elizabeth Hampsten in Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910, "were clearly a substitute for conversation." This was especially true for Stewart, for she often called her letters "pen-chats" and the tone became that of an intimate conversation with an invisible guest, relieving her lonliness through an imaginary visit. On December 1, 1911, she wrote to Mrs. Coney: I feel just like visiting to-night, so I am going to "play like" you have come. It is so good to have you to chat with. Please be seated in this low rocker; it is a present to me from the Pattersons and I am very proud of it (LWH 137).

Other long-term, long-distance friendships based entirely on correspondence existed between Stewart and several other women. In 1914, shortly after her letters were first published in Atlantic Monthly, Miss Maria Wood of Lexington, Missouri, wrote a letter to the editors of the magazine expressing her delight and admiration of the articles, and they forwarded the letter to Stewart. In her second response to the lame and elderly Miss Wood on February 19, 1914, Stewart cemented the friendship destined to last her lifetime:

At first, Stewart's letters burst with description about her new home and experiences. She described her cabin, garden and children, especially delighting in sharing the joys of homesteading. She wrote on October 9, 1915:

As the years passed, Stewart's "penchats" became more personal and less descriptive of frontier life. When financial hardship neccessitated a temporary move to Boulder, Colorado, Stewart confided her homesickness to Miss Wood in a 1924 letter:

To Miss Wood she could also philosophize about life, just as she would with a neighbor sharing a cup of coffee or gossiping over a back fence. On April 27, 1925, more reconciled to life in Boulder, Stewart wrote:

Even more than with the Coney relationship, Stewart's correspondence with Miss Wood provided both women with an intimate female companion, a chance to share happiness in times of joy, concern in times of sickness or disappointment, and support in times of loss.

Stewart valued her epistolary friends and their letters. "Please don't entirely forget me," she pleaded in a 1909 letter to Mrs. Coney. "Your letters mean so much to me and I will try to answer them promptly" (LWH 22). For Stewart, letters served as important emotional and creative outlets and as a source of female companionship, linking her to an outside world and an audience with whom she could share her experiences. "Women on the American frontier," state Elinor Lenz and Barbara Myerhoff in The Feminization of America, were "isolated by vast distances and worn down by the relentless day-to-day struggle for existence." Yet, they nevertheless managed "to knit together a woman's support system, a web of social interactions and mutual assistance that helped them cope with the harsh conditions of their lives" (59). For the American pioneer woman, letters helped accomplish this support network. Each of the women with whom Stewart corresponded filled a special need for the homesteader, and she, in turn, gave of herself differently to each of them. Elinore's need to write, to chronicle the events of her life and to share her thoughts with others compelled her to fill page after page with her expansive script, a gift not only to others but also to herself.

Although scholars have long been aware of the importance of epistolary fiction in our literary history, the psychological and social importance of women's letters, especially in America's western heritage, has been overlooked. In Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, Nina Auerbach believes that "the unformulated miracle of the Community of Women is its ability to create itself" (11). Relationships continued and formulated through letters created an important community of women in isolated pockets of America where none existed. Letters written and received, like the pieces in a patchwork quilt, became blankets of emotional comfort on the lonely frontier.

Bibliography