Nebraska by Willa Cather in The Nation September 5, 1923

As soon as I received the list of the published articles and books that were lifted from copyright protection, I noticed this article "Nebraska" by Willa Cather was among those now available in the public domain.  Although it was difficult for me to find the original article, an electronic services college librarian in Tennessee and a friend was able to find a PDF, in The Nation archives.  

Unfortunately, regardless of how many "work arounds" I tried, the PDF was beautifully readable, but I was unable to print the text.  So, I decided, "Why not transcribe it?"

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

And so, here, in all of the beautiful prose composed by Willa Cather, is "Nebraska".  Her essay transcends time and I thank her for this excellent commentary:

The Nation September 5, 1923 Vol. 117, No 3035  page 236

These United States- XXXVII*

NEBRASKA - The End of the First Cycle

By Willa Sibert Cather

The state of Nebraska is part of the great plain which stretches west of the Missouri River, gradually rising until it reaches the Rocky Mountains. The character of all this country between the river and the mountains is essentially the same throughout its extent; a rolling, alluvial plain, growing gradually more sandy toward the west, until it breaks into the white sand-hills of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado.  From east to west this plain measures something over five hundred miles; in appearance, it resembles the wheat lands of Russia, which fed the continent of Europe for so many years.  Like Little Russia it is watered by slow-flowing, muddy rivers, which run full in the spring, often cutting into the farm lands along their banks; but by midsummer they lie low and shrunken, their current split by glistening white sand-bars half overgrown with scrub willows.

            The climate, with its extremes of temperature, gives to this plateau the variety which, to the casual eye at least, it lacks.  There we have short, bitter winters; windy, flower-laden springs; long hot summers; triumphant autumns that last until Christmas- a season of perpetual sunlight, blazing blue skies, and frosty nights.  In this newest part of the New World autumn is the season of beauty and sentiment, as spring is in the Old World.

            Nebraska is a newer state than Kansas. It was a State before there were people in it.  Its social history falls easily within a period of sixty years, and the first stable settlement of white men were made within the memory of old folk now living.  The earliest of these settlements - Bellevue, Omaha, Brownville, Nebraska City - were founded along the Missouri River, which was at that time a pathway for small steamers.  In 1855-60 these four towns were straggling groups of log houses, hidden away along the wooded river banks.

            Before 1860 civilization did no more than nibble at the eastern edge of the Sate, along the river bluffs.  Lincoln, the present capital, was open prairie; and the whole of the great plain to thw westward was still a sunny wilderness where the tall red grass and the buffalo and the Indian hunter were undisturbed.  Fremont, with Kit Carson, the famous scout, had gone across Nebraska in 1842, exploring the valley of the Platte.  In the days of the Mormon persecution, fifteen thousand Mormons camped for two years, 1845-46, six miles north of Omaha, while their exploring parties went farther, west, searching for fertile land outside of government jurisdiction.  In 1847, the entire Mormon sect, under the leadership of Brigham Young, went with their wagons through Nebraska and on to that desert beside the salty sea which they have made so fruitful.

            In forty-nine and the early fifties, gold hunters, bound for California crossed the State in thousands, always following the old Indian trail along the Platte valley. The State was a highway for dreamers and adventurers; men who were in quest of gold or grace, freedom or romance.  With all these people the road led out, but never back again.    

            While Nebraska was a camping-ground for seekers out ward bound, the wooden settlements along the Missouri were growing into something permanent. The settlers broke the ground and began to plant the fine orchards which have ever since been the pride of Otoe and Nemaha counties.  It was at Brownville that the first telegraph wire was brought across the Missouri River. When I was a child I heard ex-Governor Furness relate how he stood with other pioneers in the log cabin where the Morse instrument has been installed, and how, when it began to click, the men took off their hats as if they were in church.  The first message flashed across the river into Nebraska was not a market report, but a line of poetry: "Westward the course of empire takes its way." The Old West was like that.

            The first back-and-forth travel through the State was by way of the Overland Mail, a monthly passenger-and-mail-stage service across the plains from Independence to the newly founded colony at Salt Lake- a distance of twelve hundred miles.

            When silver ore was discovered in the mountains of Colorado near Cherry Creek- afterward Camp Denver and later the city of Denver- a picturesque form of commerce developed across the great plain of Nebraska: the transporting of food and merchandise from the Missouri to the Colorado mining camps, and on to the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake. One of the largest freighting companies, operating out of Nebraska City, in the six summer months of  1869, carried nearly three million pounds of freight across Nebraska employing 515 wagons, 5687 oxen and 600 drivers. 

        

            The freighting began in the early spring, usually about the middle of April, and continued all summer and through the long, warm autumns. The oxen made from ten to twenty miles a day. I have heard the old freighters say that, after embarking on their six-hundred mile trail, they lost count of the days of the week and the days of the month..  While they were out in that sea of waving grass, one day was like another, and, if one can trust the memory of these old men, all days were glorious.  The buffalo trails still ran north and south then; deep, dusty paths the bison wore when, single file, they came north in the spring for the summer grass, and went south again in the autumn. Along these trails were the buffalo "wallows" - shallow depressions where the rain water gathered where it ran off the tough prairie sod. These wallow the big beasts wore deeper and packed hard when they rolled about and bathed in the pools, so that they held water like a cement bottom. The freighters lived on game and shot the buffalo for their hides. The grass was full of quail and prairie chicken, and flocks of wild ducks swam about on the lagoons. These lagoons have long since disappeared, but they were beautiful things in their time; long stretches where the rain water gathered and lay clear on a grassy bottom without mud. From the lagoons the first settles hauled water to their homesteads, before they had dug their wells.  The freighters could recognize the lagoons from afar by the clouds of golden coreopsis which grew up out of the water and waved delicately above the surface. Among the pioneers the coreopsis was known simply as "the lagoon flower".

            As the railroads came in, the freighting business died out. Many a freight-driver settled down upon some spot he had come to like on his journeys to and fro, homestead it, and wandered no more. The Union Pacific, the first transcontinental railroad, was completed in 1869. The Burlington entered Nebraska in the same year, at Platsmouth, and began construction westward. It finally reached Denver by an indirect route and went on extending and ramifying through the State. With the railroads came the home-seeking people from overseas.

            When the first courageous settlers came straggling out through the waste with their oxen and covered wagons, they found open range all the way from Lincoln to Denver; a continuous, undulating  plateau, covered with long, red shaggy grass. The prairie was green only where it had been burned off in the spring by the new settlers or by the Indians, and toward autumn even the new grass became a coppery grown. This sod, which had never been broken by the plow, was so tough and strong with the knotted grass roots of many years, that the home seekers were able to peel it off the earth like peat, cut it up into bricks, and make of it warm, comfortable, durable houses. Some of these sod houses lingered on until the open range was gone and the grass was gone, and the whole face of the country had been changed.

            Even as late as of 1885 the central part of the State, and everything to the westward, was, in the main, raw prairie. The cultivated fields and broken land seemed mere scratches in the brown, running steppe that never stopped until it broke against the foothills of the Rockies.  The dugouts and the farm-houses were three or four miles apart, and the only means of communication was the heavy farm wagon drawn by heavy work horses. The early population of Nebraska was largely transatlantic.  The county in which I grew up, in the south-central part of the State, was typical. On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the French Catholic settlement in the next county and hear a sermon in French or into the Bohemian township and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church with the German Lutherans. There were , of course American congregations also.

            There is a Prague in Nebraska as well as in Bohemia. Many of our Czech immigrants were people of very superior type.  The political emigration resulting from the revolutionary disturbances of 1848 was distinctly different from the emigration resulting from economic causes, and brought to the United States brilliant young men both from Germany and Bohemia.  In Nebraska our Czech settlements were large and very prosperous.  I have walked about the streets of Wilbur, the county seat of Saline County, for a whole day without hearing a word of English spoken. In Wilber, in the old days, behind the big, friendly brick saloon- it was not a "saloon," properly speaking, but a beer garden, where the farmers ate their lunch when they came to town- there was a pleasant little theater where the boys and girls were trained to give the masterpieces of Czech drama in the Czech language.  "Americanization" has doubtless done away with all this. Our lawmakers have a rooted conviction that a boy can be a better American if he speaks only one language than if he speaks two. I could name a dozen Bohemian towns in Nebraska where one used to be able to go into a bakery and buy better pastry than is to had anywhere except in the best pastry shop of Prague or Vienna.  The American lard pie never corrupted the Czech. 

            Cultivated, restless young men from Europe made incongrous figures among the hard-handed breakers of the soil. Frederick Amiel's nephew lived for many years and finally died among the Nebraska farmers.  Amiel's letter to his kinsman were published in the Atlantic Monthly of March 1921, under the title, "Amiel in Nebraska."  Camille Saint- Saens's cousin lived just over the line in Kansas. Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer was a "hired hand" on a Dakota farm to the north of us.  Colonies of European people, Slavonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Latin, spread across our bronze prairies like the daubs of color on a painter's palette. They brought with them something that this neutral new world needed even more than immigrants needed land. 

            Unfortunately, their American neighbors were seldom open-minded enough to understand the Europeans, or to profit by their older traditions.  Our settlers from New-England, cautious and convinced of their own superiority, kept themselves insulated as much as possible from foreign influences.  The incomers from the South, from Missouri, Kentucky, the two Virginians were provincial and utterly without curiosity.  They were kind neighbors - lent a hand to help a Swede when he was sick or in trouble. But I am quite sure that Knut Hamsun might have worked a year for any one of our Southern farmers, and his employer would never have discovered that there was anything unusual about the Norwegian.  A New England settler might have noticed that his chore-boy had a kind of intelligence, but he would have distrusted and stonily disregarded it.  If the daughter of a shiftless West Virginia mountaineer married the nephew of a professor at the University of Upala, the native family felt disgraced by such an alliance.

            Nevertheless, the thrift and intelligence of its preponderant European population have been potent factors in bringing about the present prosperity of the State.  The census of 1910 showed that there were then 228,648 foreign-born and native-born Germans living in Nebraska; 103, 503 Scandinavians; 50,680 Czechs.  The total foreign population of the State was then 900,571, while the entire population was 1,192,214. That is, in round numbers, there were about nine hundred thousand foreign Americans in the State, to  three hundred thousand native stock.  With such a majority of foreign stock, nine to three, it would be absurd to say that the influence of the European does not cross the boundary of his own acres, and has had nothing to do with shaping the social ideals of the commonwealth.

            When I stop at one of the graveyards in our own county and see on the headstones the names of fine old men I used to know: "Eric  Ericson, born Bergen Norway....died...Nebraska." "Anton Pucelik, born Prague, Bohemia......died, Nebraska," I have always the hope that something went into the ground with those pioneers that will one day come out again.  Something that will come out, not only in sturdy traits of character, but in  elasticity of mind, in an honest attitude toward the realities of life, in certain qualities of feeling and imagination.  Some years ago a professor at the University of Nebraska happened to tell me about a boy in one of his Greek classes who had a very unusual taste for the classics- intuitions and perceptions in literature. This puzzled him, he said, as the boy's parents had no interest in such things. I knew what the professor did not: that though this boy had an American name, his grandfather was a Norwegian, a musician of high attainment, a fellow student and lifelong friend of Edvard Grieg.  It is in the great cosmopolitan country known as the Middle West, that we may hope to see the hard molds of American provincialism broken up; that we may hope to find young talent which will challenge the pale proprieties, the insincere, conventional optimism of our art and thought.

            The rapid industrial development of Nebraska, which began in the latter eighties, was arrested in the years 1893-97 by a succession of crop failures and by the financial depression which spread over the whole country at that time - the depression which produced the People's Party and the Free Silver agitation. These years of trial as everyone now realizes, had a salutary effect upon the new State.  They winnowed out the settlers with  a purpose from the drifting malcontents who are ever seeking a land where man does not live by the sweat of his brow.  The slack farmer moved on. Superfluous banks failed, and money lenders who drove hard bargains with desperate men, came to grief.  The strongest stock survived, and within ten years those who had weathered the storm came into their reward. What that reward is, you can see for yourself if you motor through the State from Omaha to the  Colorado line. The country has no secrets; it is open as an honest human face.       

            The old isolated farms have come together. They rub shoulders. The whole Sate is a farm. Now it is the pasture lands that look little and lonely, crowded in among so much wheat and corn.  It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every farmer owns an automobile.  I believe the last estimate showed that there is one motor car for every six inhabitants in Nebraska. The great grain fields are plowed by tractors. The old farm houses are rapidly being replaced by more cheerful dwellings, with bathrooms and hard wood floors, heated by furnaces or hot-water plants.  Many of them are lighted by electricity, and every farm house has its telephone. The country towns are clean and well kept. On Saturday night the main street is a long black line of parked motor cars; the farmers have brought their families to town to see the moving-picture show.  When the school bell rings on Monday morning, crowds of happy looking children well nourished- for the most part well mannered, too, - flock along the shady streets.  They wear cheerful, modern clothes, and the girls, like the boys, are elastic and vigorous in their movements. These thousands and thousands of children- in the little towns and in the country schools- these, of course, ten years from now, will be the State.

            In this time of prosperity any farmer boy who wishes to study at the State University can do so. A New York lawyer who went out to Lincoln to assist in training the university students for military service in war time exclaimed when he came back:  "What splendid young men! I would not have believed that any school in the world could get together  so many boys physically fit, and so few unfit."

            Of course, there is the other side of the medal, stamped with the ugly crest of materialism, which has set its seal upon all of our most productive commonwealths.  Too much prosperity, too many moving-picture shows, too much gaudy fiction have colored the taste and manners of so many of these Nebraskans of the future.  There, as elsewhere, one finds the frenzy to be showy; farmers boys who wish to be spenders before they are earners, girls who try to look like the heroines of the cinema screen; a coming generation which tries to cheat its aesthetic sense by buying things instead of making anything.  There is even danger that that fine institution, the University of Nebraska, may become a gigantic trade school. The men who control its destiny, the regents and the lawmakers, wish their  sons and daughters to study machines, mercantile processes, "the principles of business"; everything that has to do with the game of getting on in the world - and nothing else.  The classics, the humanities, are having their dark hour. They are in eclipse.  Studies that develop taste and enrich personality are not encouraged. But the "Classics" have a way of revenging themselves. One may venture to hope that children , or the grandchildren, of a generation that goes to a university to select only the most utilitarian subjects in the course of study - among them , salesmanship and dressmaking - will revolt against all of the heaped-up machine-made materialism about them. They will go back to the old sources of culture and wisdom-  not as a duty, but with burning desire.

            In Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must face the fact that the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and that no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun.  The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing, but it is still there, a group of rugged figures in the background which inspire respect, compel admiration.  With these old men and women the attainment of material prosperity was a moral victory, because it was wrung from hard conditions, was the result of a struggle that tested character.  They can look out over those broad stretches of fertility and say: "We made this, with our backs and hands." The sons, the generation now in middle life, were reared amid hardships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be very much interested in material comfort, in buying  whatever is expensive and ugly. Their fathers came into a wilderness and had to make everything, had to be as ingenious as shipwrecked sailors. The generation  now in the driver's seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long corn-rows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-made; cloths, food, education, music, pleasure. Will the third generation - the full-blooded, joyous one just coming over the hill- will it be fooled?  Will it believe that to live easily is to live happily? 

            The wave of generous idealism of noble seriousness, which swept over the State of Nebraska in 1917 and 1918, demonstrated how fluid and flexible is any living , growing, expanding society.  If such "conversions" do not last, they at least show of what men and women are capable. Surely, the materialism and showy extravagance of this hour are a passing phase!  They will mean no more in half a century from now than will the "hard times" of twenty-five years ago- which are already forgotten.  The population is as clean and ful of vigor as the soil; there are no old grudges, no heritages of disease or hate. The belief that snug success and easy money are the real aims of human life has settled down over our prairies, but, it has not yet hardened into molds and crusts.  The people are warm, mercurial, impressionable, restless, over-fond of novelty and change. These are not the qualities which make the dull chapters of history.

The next article in the series These United States, to appear in The Nation of September 19, will be Montana: Land of the Copper Collar, by Arthur Fisher.