pioneer spirit
September 27, 2011

I still plan on getting back to my Kathleen Norris reading, but I got subverted by some awesome pioneering women this week.

First of all, it being banned books week, I chose to observe it this year by reading Willa Cather. Since she managed to place no less than THREE books in the top 100 banned books (to which I can only say WTF?!), I had a choice, so I chose "O Pioneers". I will probably end up reading her whole Prairie Trilogy, since My Antonia is a BB as well--and why would I read one and three, but not two?

And I happened upon a move on Showtime the other day that I had to see--a 1979 production called "Heartland", and starring Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrell. It was an interesting piece, and beautifully acted, but with only a small amount of dialogue. It was about a young widow named Elinore Pruitt who traveled to the wilds of Wyoming with her young daughter to become housekeeper to a homesteading rancher named Clyde Stewart. She ends up homesteading her own piece of land--and marrying the rancher. One of those movies that seems more a series of vignettes than a fluid narrative.

But the thing is, I noticed in the credits that it was based on a 1914 book called "Letters of a Woman Homesteader", by...Elinore Pruitt Stewart. Aha!

And to my great glee, I found that PG not only has "Letters of a Woman Homesteader", but also "Letters on an Elk Hunt" by the same author.

Basically, these books are just made up of the letters this woman sent from her wild Wyoming homestead to her dear friend and former employer in Denver. And when you read them, you would never know they were written by a woman with not much schooling. Mrs. Stewart was a charming and captivating storyteller, and she was a sharp judge of character with a delicious sense of humor. I would recommend these to anyone looking for a damned good read.

But...here's the thing. After reading "Letters of a Woman Homesteader", I could weep at the kind of movie they ended up making. They had Conchata Ferrell, Rip Torn, and a funny, sharp, clever book full of scenes and dialogue that those two actors would have absolutely rocked. But they didn't make that movie! Instead, they made a grim, sepia-toned, hardscrabble tale that was no doubt reasonably true. The Stewarts faced most, if not all, of what the movie chose to show. But the humor in these people--the very thing that enabled them to survive and thrive in the hard life they had chosen, was barely there at all. And what we do see of it is entirely due to the marvelous acting talents of Torn and Ferrell. It just makes me so MAD!