Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919

Paul Corey; Wayne Franklin

ISBN 10: 0877453039 / ISBN 13: 9780877453031

Published by University of Iowa Press, 1990

About this Item

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.85.

Seller Inventory # G0877453039I4N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877453039
• ISBN 13: 9780877453031
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

In July 1909 twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Corey left her Iowa farm to stake her claim to a South Dakota homestead. Over the next ten years, as she continued her schoolteaching career and carved out a home for herself in this inhospitable territory, she sent a steady stream of letters to her family back in Iowa. From the edge of modern America, Bess wrote long, gossipy accounts - 'our own continuing adventure story,' according to her brother Paul - of frontier life on the high plains west of the Missouri River. Irrepressible, independent-minded, and evidently fearless, the self-styled Bachelor Bess gives us a firsthand, almost daily account of her homesteading adventures. We can all stake a claim in her energetic letters.

Review

"Once I started reading the letters, it was extremely difficult to skip over some and not read every one, word for word Each letter provides such rich details of this woman's life in regard to her daily activities, her interaction with neighbors, the difficulties of homesteading in Dakota, and, perhaps most unusual, many of her private feelings about herself and her life there." Dorothy Schwieder"