[4] After departing her beloved East with great reluctance, Mary Hallock Foote found herself inspired by the "real West" country and the varying peoples she encountered there.

[5] Recording her travels, Foote wrote stories for 'back-East' readers as a correspondent to The Century Magazine and other periodicals, illustrating them with wood engravings made from her drawings.

After 1905, when she and her husband built North Star House (also known as Foote Mansion) and made permanent settlement in Grass Valley, California, she presided for some 30 years over many historic social and civic events there.

Thirty-four years after her death, historian Rodman Paul's 1972 edition of Foote's unpublished memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, helped to spur renewed interest in her life and work.

Her work—the numerous stories for books and periodicals, with her drawings and woodcut illustrations; the correspondence from western outposts; her novels and nonfiction—gained her notice as a skilled observer of the frontier and an accomplished writer.

Wallace Stegner's novel Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize, 1972) is based directly upon Mary Hallock Foote's extensive personal correspondence.

[1] On the opposite hand, Stegner used passages taken directly from Foote's letters and her reminiscences without providing specific credit; this resulted in controversy that still today haunts his reputation within the literary community.