[1] She began writing rhymes in childhood, and when ten years old was paid US$2 for a poem entitled, "Signs of Spring", which was published in Our Young Folks, then edited by John Townsend Trowbridge.

[1] Along with several other young writers, including: C. A. Stephens, William S. Walsh, Robert M. Walsh, Helen Gray Cone, Eleanor C. Donnelly, Mary Sheldon Barnes, Theodora Robinson Jenness, F. ("Fern") Hamilton, and Edwin Roth Champlin ("Clarence Fairfield"), Bumstead got her start as a writer at Our Young Folks.

Her earliest recollections are of the great West, with its prairie billows crested with pleasant homes, its balmy breezes and its sweeping gales.

She began to write rhymes in her childhood, and when ten years old a poem she wrote was published in "Our Young Folks".

Remarkably well-informed and having an analytic mind, she was a keen, though kindly, disputant, accepting nothing as proved which did not stand the test of reason.