Two of the West’s best-known writers found inspiration in the landscapes of Nebraska, and in both cases the literature and the landscape endure.
Mari Sandoz grew up in the Sandhills of northwest Nebraska. She is best remembered for her biographies, “Crazy Horse” and “Old Jules,” a story of her father, plus other books drawn from the landscape: “The Buffalo Hunters,” “The Cattlemen,” and “The Beaver Men.” Her “Love Song to the Plains” pays homage to the place that shaped her and influenced everything she ever recorded with pen or typewriter.
Sandoz won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America for her juvenile book, “The Storycatcher” and received the Saddleman Award (now called the Owen Wister Award) given for lifetime achievement from the group in 1964.
Sandoz was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
“Old Jules,” the stark biography of her father, published in 1935, is one of Sandoz’s most well-known books. She focused her work on the pioneers of the Nebraska Sandhills and native people always providing vivid descriptions of the people and the places where they lived their lives.
The Mari Sandoz Heritage Society encourages and promotes an understanding of her work.
The Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State College includes details about Sandoz and her work in the Carmen and John Gottschalk Mari Sandoz Exhibition Gallery.
Willa Cather’s Prairie Connections
Also making a name for herself by writing the stories of Nebraska’s pioneers is Willa Cather, who spent her early youth in Red Cloud, Nebraska, arriving there with her family when she was 9 years old.
Although she made her home in the prairie town only six years during her childhood, Cather called upon her experiences there, and most of all upon the people she knew there, for scenes and characterizations in the novels that won her critical acclaim.
Red Cloud is the inspiration for the town of Sweet Water of “A Lost Lady,” the Frankfort of “One of Ours,” the Haverford of “Lucy Gayheart,” the Black Hawk of “My Antonia,” and the Hanover of “O Pioneers!”
Among the individuals Cather knew who show up in her work, the best-known character is Antonia, in “My Antonia,” drawn from the real-life Annie Pavelka. The Harling family in the book is based upon the family of her best friend, Carrie Miner.
The Pavelka homestead located near Bladen, Nebraska, became a setting for “My Antonia.” It is part of a Bohemian settlement in Webster County and is now included on the National Register of Historic Places, due to its Bohemian influence and also because of Cather's writings.
Cather used other real places for her scenes and settings. The Garber Grove and Garber house in Red Cloud sit within a thick growth of cottonwood, which marks the original site of the Red Cloud Stockade, the Silas Garber house, and his earlier dugout.
Cather wrote “A Lost Lady” about Lyra Garber, wife of Silas, the man who once served as Nebraska's governor. The homestead of Cather's uncle, George Cather, southwest of Bladen, became the setting for her Pulitzer Prize winning novel “One of Ours.”
The Republican River itself became a predominant setting – almost a character – in several of Cather's works.
Located just south of Red Cloud is the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, a 600-acre area now owned by the Nature Conservancy. The prairie characterizes the land Cather and her family found when they arrived in Nebraska, and it had a profound, and lasting influence on Cather.
Cather once wrote: "This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life."
The people of Red Cloud and Webster County call the area Catherland. They promote it with an annual conference devoted to Willa Cather's work. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the conference, which will be held June 5-7. The Nebraska State Historical Society also has preserved Cather's childhood home.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
