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

by Elizabeth Corey and Philip L. Gerber

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877453039
• ISBN13: 9780877453031
• Release Date: October 1990
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 540 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

This book is great!

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.

Don't Miss This!

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. :-)