Heartland

We just watched the 1979 movie Heartland, starring Rip Torn and Conchata Ferrell. If you've seen the silly TV show Two and a Half Men, then you know the actress Conchata Ferrell as the smart mouthed housekeeper. As a younger woman, she was perfectly cast in this old movie. The movie producers knew the strong pioneer role would have been ridiculous for an anorexic wisp of an actress. Rip Torn was also marvelous as the man-of-few-words Scottish rancher, and each word he spoke sure counted.

Every detail in the movie seems natural, especially the isolation and cold of the devastating winter. You'll want to bury yourself under a warm comforter when you watch it. In the realistic scenes (butchering a pig, a calf being born) there's no film trickery or special effects. What you see really happened. The whole movie is understated and quietly beautiful.

And the story was based on real people and events. Elinor Pruitt traveled to Burnt Fork, Wyoming with her daughter Jerrine to take a job as housekeeper to rancher Clyde Stewart, whose wife had died in 1907. Shortly after arriving, she married him and starting writing letters about her life of ranch work, neighbors, scenery, weather and animals. Her letters were serially published in the Atlantic Monthly, then later in a book called Letters of a Woman Homesteader illustrated by N.C. Wyeth (father of Andrew Wyeth.)

I suppose many women wouldn't consider a long horseback ride restful, but here's how she describes a rare day off:

I have done most of my cooking at night, have milked seven cows every day, and have done all the hay-cutting, so you see that I have been working. But I have found time to put up thirty pints of jelly and the same amount of jam for myself. I used wild fruits, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, and cherries…We began haying July 5 and finished September 8. After working so hard and so steadily I decided on a day off, so yesterday I saddled the pony and Jerrine and I fared forth…There was a tang of sage and pine in the air, and our horse was deep in rabbit-brush, a shrub just covered with flowers that look and smell like goldenrod.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart died in 1933, and some of her grandchildren have set up the website elinorestewart.com with photographs of the family and the old homestead, now in ruins.