Competing Visions: The Alternate Wests of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and N. C. Wyeth

Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s text and N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations of Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) present conflicting, gendered versions of the early twentieth-century frontier literature of the US West. While Stewart is careful to describe a strong, independent woman who is more than capable of “proving up” her part of southern Wyoming all on her own, Wyeth ignores Stewart’s portrait of a capable, liberated heroine and paints a far more conventional version of the Woman Homesteader and of the West. More than simply illuminating the differences between author and illustrator, comparing the competing visions of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and N. C. Wyeth adds insight to how the mythos of the US West was created and reified during the early years of the twentieth century. Although Letters of a Woman Homesteader is just one of thousands of texts about the West that Americans produced and consumed at the turn of the last century, the disconnect between its text and illustrations represents the larger struggle over what the US West was supposed to mean and who was permitted to determine that meaning.