Letters on an Elk Hunt — A 1914 Frontier Woman Outwriting MFA Graduates

I have a complaint. Elinore Pruitt Stewart writes letters to her elderly friend Mrs. Coney back in Denver, and every single one of them makes me feel like I'm eavesdropping on somebody else's mail - which, technically, I am, since the woman's been dead for decades - and she has the audacity to be funnier, sharper, and more observant than half the MFA graduates whose papers I slogged through in grad school. A woman homesteader in 1914 Wyoming with no formal literary training writing circles around people who've read all of Derrida. This is why we still read the classics.

I found this one on a Saturday morning when Denise dragged me to the farmers market and I needed something to listen to while she debated the merits of three identical bunches of kale. Three hours. Perfect length for a kale negotiation that somehow stretched into lunch.

The Woman Who Wouldn't Stop Looking

What gets me about Elinore is her relentless curiosity. This isn't a book about elk hunting - the title is basically false advertising, and I say that with affection. It's a book about a woman who cannot stop noticing things. The cast of characters on this 1914 wilderness expedition reads like a Chaucer pilgrimage filtered through the American West: you've got Professor Glenholdt digging around for "the tip-end bone of the tail of a brontosaurus," two geology students who talk about nothing but strata and formation (I have colleagues like this, except they talk about standardized testing), a moving-picture man named Harkrudder, and poor Mr. Murry with his tiresome accordion that nobody asked for.

And then there's Mrs. O'Shaughnessy - kind-hearted, opinionated, the friend everyone needs on a camping trip. She ends up adopting two orphans by the end of this excursion, which is either the most generous or the most impulsive thing I've ever heard of happening on a hunting trip.

But my favorite running bit is Elinore's husband, Mr. Stewart, who keeps physically preventing her from rubbernecking at other people's romantic dramas. She spots two long-lost lovers reuniting and he drives the horse away, saying he wouldn't want anyone gawking at him. Elinore writes to Mrs. Coney that he "couldn't urge Chub fast enough to prevent my seeing and hearing what I've told you." That line is perfect domestic comedy. A hundred and ten years old and it still lands.

Where the Prose Lives (and Where It Wanders)

This reminds me of what Hemingway said about prose being architecture, not interior decoration. Elinore's letters are the opposite of Hemingway - they're all interior decoration, all warmth and digression and personality - but they work because she's genuinely observing the world rather than performing observation. She describes Wyoming scenery with real specificity, and you can feel the awe without her ever reaching for a word she doesn't own.

The pacing is uneven, which is what happens when your source material is actual letters written over several months of travel. Some passages drift into travelogue territory that feels more like a nature journal than storytelling. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the actual elk hunting, and they're straightforward about it - if that bothers you, fair warning, but Elinore doesn't linger on violence. She's more interested in the people around the campfire than what's hanging from the game pole.

Now, the LibriVox production. Let's be honest about what LibriVox is: volunteers reading public domain texts for free. You're not getting a single professional narrator who's going to give you distinct voices for Elinore versus Mrs. O'Shaughnessy versus the geology students. The reading is earnest and clear, but it's volunteer work, and it sounds like volunteer work. No one's going to mistake this for an Audible Studios production. The prose deserves to be savored, and I wished at times for a narrator who could really lean into Elinore's dry wit - someone who understands that pause is punctuation, that Elinore's humor lives in the spaces between what she says and what she means. At three hours, though, it's a small commitment, and the material carries itself even when the performance is simply serviceable.

Who Rides Along on This One

If you loved Letters of a Woman Homesteader - which is the predecessor and honestly the better-known book - this is its natural continuation. If you've never read either, start there. But if you're someone who gravitates toward epistolary writing, toward voices from ordinary people in extraordinary landscapes, toward early twentieth-century Americana that hasn't been polished into nostalgia - this is a genuine artifact. My students would hate this. I love it. Hilary Yancey's Rural Diaries scratches a similar itch - different century, same fundamental pleasure of watching a real person figure out an unconventional life and write about it honestly.

It's also fascinating as a snapshot of a world in transition: horses and wagons alongside automobiles, folk medicine meeting real physicians, a motion picture man tagging along on a frontier hunting trip while war breaks out in Europe. Elinore doesn't editorialize about any of it. She just writes what she sees, and the historical weight accumulates on its own.

The Grade I'd Write in Red Ink

Three hours of a real woman's voice from 1914, free on LibriVox, funny and warm and occasionally slow in the way that actual letters from actual people tend to be. The production won't blow you away, but the writing will sneak up on you. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for - though at three hours, you could finish it during a single particularly long one. (Principal Martinez, that's hypothetical.)