Wyoming

Candy Moulton: Give Me A Homestead

Published

2 years ago

June 5, 2024

“Any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed,” wrote Elenore Pruitt Stewart in 1913 of her effort to establish a Wyoming homestead for herself and her daughter.

Not only will such women succeed, Stewart wrote in one of her letters to a former employer in Denver on Jan. 23, 1913, but she “will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”

Oh, and she will have calloused hands, dirt under her nails, and most likely freckles on her nose even if she wears a good sunbonnet or hat.

Homesteading was not for the faint at heart as Elenore and her young daughter Jerrine found out.

They had been living in Denver but left the city for the small southwestern Wyoming community of Burntfork in response to an ad placed in early 1909 by Clyde Stewart, whose wife had died.

Stewart wanted to hire a woman who could assist with housekeeping but he wasn’t seeking a mail order bride (at least not in an outright appeal for one!)

Working for Stewart, Elinore and Jerrine enjoyed Wyoming’s wide-open spaces. They went on camping trips and she wrote about some of those adventures in other letters that became her book Letters On An Elk Hunt.

Elinore was a pragmatic woman, who had every intention of filing on homestead land when she made the decision to take her daughter and leave Denver.

Aware of homestead laws, she knew she could qualify for a 160-acre section and that claiming land would give her more opportunity.

Determined to improve her lot in life, soon after she started working for Stewart she filed a homestead claim on land adjacent to his.

And while she may have craved independence, Elinore was also a practical woman. Because a house was a requirement to prove up on any homestead, she and Clyde joined efforts.

Instead of constructing a separate house that was one key component to proving up on a homestead, they built a 12 x 16-foot addition to his house. It straddled the property line of their two homesteads.

This meant it was a single house to maintain and they believed that the two adjacent living spaces fulfilled the requirements of the 1862 homestead law.

The house she and Clyde lived in became a sprawling structure that is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Elinore wanted her own land, and her own house, but once she had set herself up for independence, she and Clyde Stewart got married!

This change in her domestic status put Elinore’s homestead claim at risk since married women could only claim jointly with their husbands.

Further, if a husband and wife filed on separate homesteads, as Elinore and Clyde had done, they needed to maintain separate residences.

Instead of adding on to his house they should have built a separate structure just feet from his home.

Now married and not willing to risk losing the land she had claimed, Elinore relinquished her claim to her new mother-in-law and in that way kept the land in the family.

While the land might not have remained in her name, almost certainly she still felt the attachment and opportunity it offered to her.

For years after she moved to Wyoming, Elinore wrote letters to her former employer in Denver, expressing her interest in and work developing the homestead.

The letters Elinor Pruitt Stewart wrote became a book Letters From a Woman Homesteader. Decades later the material became inspiration for the film “Heartland.”

Homesteading was a long-established practice in the West by the time Elinor Pruitt filed her claim.

When the Homestead Act went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Daniel Freeman was in Brownville, Neb., to claim the ground he wanted along Cub Creek not far from the town of Beatrice, Neb. His claim was recorded as Certificate No. 1, Application No. 1, in the Brownville land office.

More than 400 other men also filed for homesteads that day in other land offices, but Freeman’s land claim is promoted as the first in the nation. His land near Beatrice, Neb., is now a part of Homestead National Monument of America.

The homestead law was open to anyone who met very basic and progressive requirements, including women, most (but not all) immigrants, and, beginning in 1868, African Americans. Eventually, homesteads were found in 30 states.

Because government regulations defined the head of household as the husband, women were forced to forestall marriage for five years if they wished their land titled to themselves, but this did not deter many women who were determined to strike out on their own.

Cases in point are the Chrisman sisters, who lived in Custer County, Nebraska, in the heart of the Sandhills near Broken Bow. Their father and brothers already had homesteads. Lizzie Chrisman was the first of the girls to file a homestead claim near her male relatives, doing so in 1887.

Sister Lutie Chrisman filed her claim the following year. Although both built homes, they took turns living with each other so they could fulfill the residence requirements without being alone.

Younger sisters, Hattie and Jennie Ruth, had to wait until they came of age to file and while Hattie did claim land, the nearby property was all taken before youngest sister Jennie could homestead.

The Chrisman sisters had claimed their own land, but it like the land Elinor Pruitt had claimed, became part of a larger family ranching operation.

Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com

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Wyoming

Wyoming High School Basketball 2A State Tournament 2026

Published

11 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Wyoming High School Basketball 2A State Tournament 2026

The 2-time defending champ Tongue River girls, along with both teams from Big Horn will represent Sheridan County in the small school version of March Madness.

Click here to see results from the regional tournaments.

2A Boys:

First Round:

Thursday, March 5th: (All games played at Casper College)

(#2E) Big Horn vs. (#3W) Shoshoni – Noon

(#1W) Thermopolis vs. (#4E) Sundance – 1:30pm

(#2W) Wyoming Indian vs. (#3E) Wright – 6:30pm

(#1E) Pine Bluffs vs. (#4W) Rocky Mountain – 8pm

Friday, March 6th: (All games played at Ford Wyoming Center)

Consolation Round:

Big Horn/Shoshoni loser vs. Thermopolis/Sundance loser – Noon LOSER OUT!

Wyoming Indian/Wright loser vs. Pine Bluffs/Rocky Mountain loser – 1:30pm LOSER OUT!

Semi-Finals:

Big Horn/Shoshoni winner vs. Thermopolis/Sundance winner – 6:30pm

Wyoming Indian/Wright winner vs. Pine Bluffs/Rocky Mountain winner – 8pm

Saturday, March 7th:

Friday Noon winner vs. Friday 1:30pm – Noon at Ford Wyoming Center Consolation Championship

Friday 6:30pm loser vs. Friday 8pm loser – 3pm at Natrona County High School 3rd Place

Friday 6:30pm winner vs. Friday 8pm winner – 7pm at Ford Wyoming Center Championship

2A Girls:

First Round:

Thursday, March 5th: (All games played at Casper College)

(#2W) Wyoming Indian vs. (#3E) Big Horn – 9am

(#1E) Sundance vs. (#4W) Shoshoni – 10:30am

(#2E) Tongue River vs. (#3W) Greybull – 3:30pm

(#1W) Thermopolis vs. (#4E) Pine Bluffs – 5pm

Friday, March 6th: (All games played at Ford Wyoming Center)

Consolation Round:

Wyoming Indian/Big Horn loser vs. Sundance/Shoshoni loser – 9am LOSER OUT!

Tongue River/Greybull loser vs. Thermopolis/Pine Bluffs loser – 10:30am LOSER OUT!

Semi-Finals:

Wyoming Indian/Big Horn winner vs. Sundance/Shoshoni winner – 3:30pm

Tongue River/Greybull loser vs. Thermopolis/Pine Bluffs loser – 5pm

Saturday, March 7th:

Friday 9am winner vs. Friday 10:30am winner – 9am at Ford Wyoming Center Consolation Championship

Friday 3:30pm loser vs. Friday 5pm loser – 10:30am at Ford Wyoming Center 3rd Place

Friday 3:30pm winner vs. Friday 5pm winner – 5:30pm at Ford Wyoming Center Championship

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Wyoming

Wyoming Crow Hunters Can Blast All They Want, But Nobody Eats The Birds

Published

23 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Wyoming Crow Hunters Can Blast All They Want, But Nobody Eats The Birds

Mention of bird hunting might conjure up images of hunters and their dogs huddling in freezing duck blinds or pounding the brush in hopes of kicking up pheasants. But crow hunting is a thing in Wyoming too.

“It’s about the sport of it,” Dan Kinneman of Riverton told Cowboy State Daily.

He started crow hunting when he was 14 and is about to turn 85. He’s never tried cooking and eating crows or known anybody who has.

Instead, shooting crows is essentially nuisance bird control, as they’re known to wreak havoc on agricultural crops.

“All the ranchers will let you hunt crows. I’ve never been refused access to hunt crows. They all hate them,” he said.

In Wyoming, crow hunting season runs from Nov. 1 to Feb. 28. No license is required, and there’s no bag limit. Hunters can shoot all the crows they want to.

It’s a ball for hunting dogs too, Kinneman said.

“My yellow Labrador retriever, he doesn’t care whether it’s a crow or duck. In fact, he likes crow hunting more than duck hunting, because there’s more action,” he said.

Crow hunting requires skill, patience and a good set of decoys, an experienced Wyoming hunter said. The upside is, there’s no bag limit, hunters can blast all the crows they want. No one eats them, though.

Don’t Expect It To Be Easy

Kinneman said that in the days of his youth, crow hunting was as simple as driving around and “shooting them out of trees with rifles.”

However, as the number of people and buildings potentially in the paths of bullets grew, such practices fell out of favor. Crow hunting became more regulated.

And it evolved to resemble hunting other birds, such as waterfowl.

Meaning, hunters started setting out decoys, hiding in blinds and using calls to tempt crows to within shotgun range.

Kinneman is no stranger to hunting of all types. He’s taken numerous species of big game in Wyoming and elsewhere. And in July 2005, he shot a prairie dog near Rock Springs from well over a mile away.

He hit the prairie dog from 2,157 yards away. A mile is 1,760 yards.

But bird hunting has always been his favorite.

“It’s my life,” he said.

He has a huge collection of duck, goose and dove decoys. And two tubs full of crow decoys.

The uninitiated might think that going out and blasting crows would be a slam dunk.

That isn’t so, Kinneman said. He likes crow hunting for the challenge of it.

“Hunting crows is hard. They are a lot smarter than ducks and geese,” he said.

Pick Up After Yourself

Even though he doesn’t eat crows, Kinneman said he never just left them littering the ground where he shot them.

“I never let them lay out there. I always picked them up and disposed of the carcasses,” he said.

That’s good ethics and it shows respect for the ranchers, he said.

“Leaving them (dead crows) out there would be no different than just leaving all of your empty shotgun shells out there,” he said.

“You have to pick up after yourself, or the ranchers won’t let you back onto their land,” he added.

Slow Year

At his age, Kinneman isn’t sure how much longer he’ll be able to get out crow hunting. And this year has been a total bust.

“I love doing it. But this year there are no crows,” he said.

The Riverton area is along major crow migration routes.

Picking a good hunting spot is a matter of “finding a flyway” that the crows are on and then setting up a spread of decoys and a blind along the route.

But with an unusually warm winter, the crow flyways have been practically empty, he said.

Migrations Are Off Everywhere

Avid birdwatcher Lucas Fralick of Laramie said that warm, dry conditions much of this winter have knocked bird migrations out of whack.

“I do know that because of the weather, migrations are off all over the place,” he said.

One of his favorite species is the dark-eyed junco, a “small, sparrow-like bird,” he said.

They usually winter in the Laramie area and leave right around March. This year, they were gone by November, he said.

“They’re a cold-weather bird,” he said.

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.

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Wyoming

Wyoming State Parks surpasses five million visitors in 2025

Published

1 day ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

Wyoming State Parks surpasses five million visitors in 2025

Wyoming State Parks is thrilled to announce that system-wide visitation surpassed the 5-million-visitor milestone in 2025. With an estimated 5,048,419 total visitors, the agency saw a 5% increase over 2024, marking its highest visitation levels since the 2020-21 recreation surge. This continued growth reaffirms Wyoming’s reputation as a premier destination for recreation, history, and culture. […]

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