Elinore Rupert Stewart

Elinore Rupert was a young wife and mother. Then suddenly she became a young widow with a two-year-old daughter to support. Her husband had been killed in a railroad accident. About 1910, the time of Elinore's hardship, she lived in Denver. It was a noisy, sooty, smelly city far from the free open spaces and sweet smelling air that Mrs. Rupert yearned to experience.

To provide a meager existence for herself and her child, Elinore worked as a laundress and a house cleaner in Denver. Her minister, aware of the young woman's trials and desires, advised her to advertise for a position as a housekeeper for a rancher further westward.

Elinore did as her minister suggested, hoping that she would find a satisfactory position with someone who could, and would, teach her about land and water rights, someone who would help her locate her own homestead. In time, Elinore Rupert's ad was answered and she found herself traveling further west with her little daughter to an area she'd never been before to work for a man who would be a complete stranger.

Mrs. Rupert's destination was the remote and windswept plains of southwestern Wyoming. At the end of her journey she would meet, and become employed by, Clyde Stewart, a Scottish cattle rancher. Stewart's ranch lay near Burnt Fork, some 60 miles from the railroad. Elinore would serve as housekeeper, cook, and doer of just about anything else that needed doing on the Stewart ranch. But now she would, at last, find independence--or so she thought.

Later, in a letter to a friend back in Denver Elinore describes Clyde Stewart as being "absolutely no trouble," and having a "burr as thick as his wrist." Stewart also played the bagpipes, she would write, noting that the rancher pronounced the instrument as "bugpeep." To Elinore's dismay, it seemed that the only tune Stewart could play was "The Campbells are Coming," and attesting to the sense of humor Elinore must have possessed, she added that often she wished the Campbells would hurry up and get there.

Elinore's new-found independence took the form of marriage to her new employer a short six weeks after arriving at the Stewart ranch. As she explained the situation: "Ranch work seemed to require that we be married first and do our sparking afterwards." But Elinore did not feel she had any cause to bemoan her hasty actions. She felt "extremely comfortable." She had her own horse, and her own shotgun with which she was to shoot sage chickens. There was also two trout streams nearby for fishing.

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