Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919 (American Land and Life Series) [Hardcover]

Philip L. Gerber (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0877453020 | ISBN-13: 978-0877453024 | Publication Date: December 1990 | Edition: 1st

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Early in this century, a person with determination could change the course of a life by heading west to homestead in places like South Dakota--and, as Elizabeth Corey demonstrates in letters to her family in Iowa, that person could be a single woman. A lively and informative correspondent, Corey uses a multitude of details to flesh out the quotidian activities on her 160-acre claim: designing a brand to mark her stock, sitting for exams to maintain her teaching credentials, juggling meager funds for building materials to improve her property, shooting a rabbit in her garden ("I had to give him a little persuasive gun talk to get him to stay for dinner") and dressing in "three layers of wool all over" as protection from the bitterly cold winters. Often her descriptions bubble with good humor: she suggests a law requiring that all marriage proposals be oral; when they're written, there's no way to stop the man from asking. However, elsewhere Corey ends with the plaintive postscript, "I'm so homesick." Gerber's work includes Critical Essays on Robert Frost. Illustrations not seen by PW .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 462 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr; 1st edition (December 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877453020
• ISBN-13: 978-0877453024
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,171,133 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Miss This!, June 12, 1999

By 

Emily (Corvallis, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919 (American Land & Life) (Paperback)

I came across this book purely by accident in the library, and since the title sounded interesting, I decided to check it out just to see what the letters were like. I was expecting dry letters written by a hardened woman. Boy, was I wrong -- I love Bess! She's so funny, and her letters back home are wonderfully descriptive. At 21, she left Iowa to stake a claim in South Dakota. I'm only about a third of the way through the book right now, and she's living alone in a tiny 2-room house on her claim, getting up at 5 to walk two miles through the snow to the schoolhouse where she teaches. At night, she writes these letters home, describing her day in great detail. This book is a treasure. I'm ordering a copy for my home library right now. :-)

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is great!, October 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919 (American Land & Life) (Paperback)

What a courageous woman Bess Corey was to go into the unkown territory of mostly crude men and make a home for herself. She didn't let anyone take advantage of her, yet she was sweet. She was an honest, humorous, hardworking woman. This book kept my interest from beginning to end. The only disappointment was that she didn't write more letters! This would be a great book for anyone who wants to really understand how America was built.