Literary Landscapes : Visiting Homelands That Inspired Three Great American Writers : Willa Cather’s Nebraska

There is literary treasure in Nebraska. It rustles through the cornfields and dreams among the willows along the river. It dwells in the attic room of a modest house in an unpretentious prairie town. You can read about it in some of America’s finest novels. And you can visit it. It has hardly changed in 100 years.

One hundred-fifty miles southwest of the state capitol at Lincoln, lies the artistic homeland of Willa Cather, often called America’s greatest woman writer. In novels such as “O Pioneers!” and “My Antonia,” she invested a hard and unromantic landscape with beauty and mythological power.

Anyone who has read her books will recognize the setting. From the quiet streets and broad-porched houses of the town to the vast farmlands wrested from the prairie by hard-working European immigrants, Willa Cather’s Nebraska lives on.

In 1883, when Cather was 9 years old, her family moved from Virginia to a homestead on the Nebraska prairie. The prairie life was hard and after only a year, the family resettled in nearby Red Cloud, a flourishing town of 2,500 people. While her father sold insurance and made farm loans, Cather attended school and explored the village and its surrounding country.

“The ideas for all my novels have come from things that happened around Red Cloud when I was a child. I was all over the country then, on foot, on horseback and in our farm wagons. My nose went poking into nearly everything.”

In 1890, she left home for the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Later she was to settle in Pittsburgh and then New York. Although she never again lived in Red Cloud, the town would figure in her imagination for decades to come.

Red Cloud appears in six of her 12 novels. It is called Black Hawk in “My Antonia,” Hanover in “O Pioneers!,” Moonstone in “The Song of the Lark,” Sweet Water in “A Lost Lady,” Haverford in “Lucy Gayheart” and Frankfort in “One of Ours.” It is the town in several important short stories, notably “The Best Years,” “Old Mrs. Harris” and “Two Friends.”

No wonder Willa Cather would claim that the “years from eight to fifteen are the formative period in a writer’s life, when he unconsciously gathers basic material.” This was certainly true for her.

Red Cloud today is much as it was in Cather’s time and as she described it in “My Antonia”: “a clean, well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green yards about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees growing along the wooden sidewalks. In the center of the town there were two rows of new brick ‘store’ buildings, a brick school-house, the court house and four white churches.”

The wooden sidewalks have vanished in favor of concrete and the town’s population has declined. But there is a 19th-Century quietness in the air. Few automobiles trouble the sleeping streets and children on bicycles smile and wave to visitors.

A good place to start your visit is the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation on Webster Street. Here you can purchase a map of the town and a guide to the Cather sights in the surrounding countryside. Other publications are for sale, including many works by and about Willa Cather.

Just a few steps away, the Willa Cather Historical Center occupies the former Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank. Erected in 1889 of local brick, it is the most attractive and distinctive building in the town’s commercial district. A branch museum of the Nebraska State Historical Society, it displays Cather photographs and first editions along with some of the author’s personal belongings. It is the home of the Cather archives.

Most importantly, this is where you catch the tour to the heart of Red Cloud--the Cather family home.

When the Cathers moved to Red Cloud, they rented a modest, story-and-a-half frame house just one block off the main street. There were seven children in the family and the older ones slept in the attic, an unfinished region heated only by a brick chimney. In the winter months, snow drifted onto the beds through cracks in the rafters overhead. Nevertheless, the children loved this place, where no grown-ups ever came.

Cather was given a private space over the north wing. It became a sanctuary where she could think and dream, the peaceful center of her imaginative life. She decorated it with wallpaper of red and brown roses which she earned money for? by working in the local drugstore.

Amazingly, this room has survived with the rosy wallpaper intact. After the Cather family moved away, the attic was sealed off. Today it is refurnished with many of the author’s own possessions. Cather’s quilt and red-and-black blanket cover a simple bed. A glass-fronted case displays her collection of rocks and shells.

Like Emily Bronte’s room at Haworth parsonage in Yorkshire, England, this tiny room harbors a profound sense of presence. Both Willa Cather and Emily Bronte were fiercely private individuals and their rooms seem to echo yet with the force of their personalities.

A self-guided walking tour of the town rewards you with many other sites associated with the author and her works. These include the Opera House in? which she graduated from high school, the drug store where she earned the money to? wallpaper her little room and the homes of the Miner and Wiener families, close friends who figure in “My Antonia” and “Old Mrs. Harris.”

Of course, much of Willa Cather’s inspiration came from the wide prairie-lands that stretch beyond the town. “I knew every farm,” she wrote, “every tree, every field in the region around my home and they all called out to me.”

Allow half a day to make the 50-mile driving tour of Cather country. For fifty cents, you can purchase a map and guide at the Willa Cather Historical Center.

The tour begins at the Republican River, just south of Red Cloud. Here Willa Cather and her brothers read tales of King Arthur, played at being pirates and dreamed of faraway places. The author immortalized these days in her stories “The Enchanted Bluff” and “The Treasure of Far Island.” In a poem, which she dedicated to her brothers, she remembers:

the three who lay and planned at moonrise, On an island in a western river, Of the conquest of the world together.

Four miles south of the river lies the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie: a 610-acre preserve administered by the Nature Conservancy. Here you can experience the American mixed-grass prairie as it was when Willa Cather, only nine years old, saw it for the first time.

The rest of the tour follows country roads, most of them unpaved but well-maintained and easily negotiated in dry weather. Cornfields and pasturelands roll away on every side. Sometimes an isolated farmhouse nestles in a protected hollow, or an abandoned church stands outlined against an expanse of sky.

This is the Divide, the high land that lies between the Republican and Blue rivers: “where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow.” (“O Pioneers!”)

Here you feel that you’ve come into an old world, untouched by paved roads, unspoiled by industrialization. You visit the site of the Cather’s first prairie homestead, and the home and grave of Cather’s cousin George Cather whose death in France during World War I inspired her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “One of Ours.”

Here, too, lived Anna Pavelka, prototype for “My Antonia.” Especially moving are Anna’s home (now in possession of the State Historical Society but not open) and her grave.

It would seem fitting to end the tour with a visit to Willa Cather’s grave. But though she loved the old Nebraska cemeteries, she herself is buried in New Hampshire. She died in 1947.

GUIDEBOOK

Willa Cather’s Nebraska

Tours: The Willa Cather Historical Center (402-746-3285) is open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to noon and 1-5 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Admission (including tour): $1 for adults, children free. A short tour (11 a.m., 2:45 p.m. and 4 p.m.) visits Cather home. Long tour (1:30 p.m.) visits three additional buildings: Grace Episcopal Church, St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church and Burlington Railroad Depot. October-April, the center is closed Mondays and the long tour is offered only at 1:30 p.m.

Getting there: From Lincoln, drive 92 miles west on Interstate 80 to U.S. 281. Follow 281 south for 56 miles to Red Cloud. Lincoln is served by train and airplane. Nearest railroad stop is in Hastings, 39 miles north of Red Cloud.

Where to stay: Green Acres Motel (402-746-2201), plain but clean, with air conditioning and color TV; double $28. Meadowlark Manor Bed and Breakfast (402-746-3550) is charming old home, lovingly restored; single $27-$34, double $33-$38.

For more information: Contact the Nebraska Division of Travel and Tourism, P.O. Box 94666, Lincoln 68509, (800) 228-4307 or (402) 471-3796.

For more information about Willa Cather and her work, the Willa Cather Spring Conference, sponsored by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, is held yearly on the first Saturday in May. Write to the foundation at 326 N. Webster St., Red Cloud 68970.