As a student Mary Hallock Foote befriended American artist Helena de Kay Gilder. The two maintained a very close friendship throughout their lives, shared a lengthy correspondence via letter, and used each other for critiquing their work. Mary Hallock Foote also benefited from Gilder’s husband Richard Watson Gilder, who commissioned her art while he was an editor for Scribner’s Monthly. It was through the Gilders that Mary Hallock Foote was also introduced to a circle of fellow artists including, Mary L. Stone, Mary Birney, Maria Oakey, and several popular writers.

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. She soon was drawing it, and writing and telling about it. 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. She is best known for her stories of place, in which she portrayed the rough, picturesque life she experienced and observed in the old West, especially that in the early mining towns. She was one of America’s best-known women illustrators in the 1870s and 1880s. She wrote several novels, and illustrated stories and novels by other authors for various publishers.

After Helena died, Mary wrote a novel about her that put her into Mary’s life out west. It’s titled “Edith Bonham” The two women wrote to each for fifty years. William Stegner stole some of the letters for his “Angle of Repose” novel.