It still astonishes Nebraskans to think that Red Cloud, the small town in the heart of Webster County, Nebraska, is home to an American author considered the equal of Ernest Hemingway of Ketchum, Idaho, and William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi.

Red Cloud, pop: 962, knows that the late Willa Cather made it famous. She featured the town in fictional form in many of her novels. This year, the community is celebrating the author’s 150th birthday (Dec. 7, 1873). The celebration is heartfelt, because Cather told their stories – stories that editors on the coasts cared little about.

Portraying the lives of everyday Nebraskans like the ones she knew in Red Cloud helped Cather rise to prominence as a writer. Simply put, she gave voice to the prairie, to the farmsteads and to the people.

In a 1923 essay titled, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” Cather wrote of a time before 1860, when “civilization did no more than nibble at the eastern edge of the State, along the river bluffs.” Nebraska’s capital, Lincoln, was no more than an open prairie. The Great Plains westward was still a “sunny wilderness” filled with tall, red grass, “and the buffalo and the Indian hunter were undisturbed.”

The pioneering period was nearing an end at the time of her family’s relocation from Virginia in 1883, yet much of the land had yet to be broken for agriculture.

A 9-year-old Cather was already homesick for Virginia when her family arrived in Red Cloud on a Burlington coach, where they departed the depot by farm wagon to her grandparents’ homestead. The family settled northwest of Red Cloud on The Divide, the high country between the Little Blue and Republican River valleys. There Cather found herself among immigrants, with their exotic languages and unfamiliar cultures. She absorbed the languages and customs, not knowing she would later populate her stories with characters who resembled the people she encountered as a child.

In her seminal book, O Pioneers!, Cather describes the houses on The Divide as small and tucked away in low places. “The roads were but faint tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable,” she wrote. In the decades to follow, Cather would see the landscape transform from a larger prairie ecosystem that ran from western Canada to central Texas into “a vast checker-board marked off in squares of wheat and corn.”

It’s meaningful to have these intimate reflections (albeit reflected in works of fiction) to showcase real scenes on a radpidly changing prairie.

The Cathers stayed on the farm less than two years before moving into Red Cloud. They rented a small house, and Cather was given a room on the north side of the attic, separate from the larger space shared by the other children. She lovingly referred to the room as her “rose bower” and recalled it in her third novel, The Song of the Lark.

Owing to the attic being closed off for decades, the original rose-patterned wallpaper was undisturbed and discovered when the National Willa Cather Center acquired the house in 1960. Faded and tattered, it still adorns the walls today and will undergo delicate cleaning and conservation work in spring of 2024. The Willa Cather Childhood Home is one of just 22 National Historic Landmarks in Nebraska. It is now open to visitors for guided tours after a 15-month restoration project.

 

A Nebraskan at Heart

Cather labored over words and sentences with as much love and determination as a farmer who cultivates their land.

After high school, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska and balanced her studies as a full-time student while also supporting herself as a columnist and theater critic. After graduation she would spend a decade working as a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh before relocating to New York City and later becoming the managing editor at McClure’s magazine. Perhaps her admission that her heart never got across the Missouri is true.

“I had searched for books telling about the beauty of the country I loved, its romance and heroism and strength and courage of its people that had been plowed into the very furrows of its soil,” she recalled. “And I did not find them. And so I wrote O Pioneers!

From 1,400 miles away, she wanted to demonstrate love for her “own people” by writing something that “would seem interesting or true.” But her books weren’t her only gift to her home state. When times were tough in the 1930s, she supported friends who faced hardships through gifts of cash or goods. Christmas boxes were routinely sent to farm wives she met in childhood, and she directed anonymous gifts to local charities.

The triumphs and trials of her characters are her gift to humanity through the ages. She gave us strong and determined women, like Alexandra Bergson, who inherits an interest in her family’s farm and grows it into a prosperous enterprise. There are numerous male protagonists, whose lives readers can’t help but follow with intrigue. One that stands out is Claude Wheeler, who finds purpose in the army before losing his life on a battlefield during the Great War.

Almost the entirety of Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, One of Ours (1922), is based on historical people and events. Claude was modeled after Cather’s cousin, Grosvenor Phillips Cather. As the novel chronicles his pre-war life on the farm, his marriage and untimely death in France, an unfamiliar reader would be hard-pressed to discern fact from fiction. Cather once referred to the novel as the best compliment she could pay to Nebraska.

 

Scenes from Red Cloud

Many acquaintances inspired some of Cather’s most well-known fictional characters. There were Willa’s neighbors, the Miners, who resided in a fine Italianate style home now preserved as a historic house museum. The Miner family became the model for the Harling family in Cather’s critically acclaimed novel, My Ántonia (1918). She dedicated the book to the daughters of the Miner household, Carrie and Irene.

There is no shortage of settings that help us more fully understand Cather’s life and literature. The center of culture in Red Cloud during Cather’s youth was the opera house, where traveling companies performed a rotation of popular plays and operas. The building was restored in 2003 and now houses a gallery space and a performing arts venue.

Another quintessential backdrop is the Burlington Depot, the gateway for Cather’s homecoming and leave-taking. The depot itself has been relocated, but the historic site invites all to explore the history of the railroad and its role in settling the Plains.

Beyond characters and settings, one is left with the intense emotions that are stirred while reading Cather’s work. In One of Ours, she wrote, “Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.”

Reading Cather’s work enables us to consider enduring human stories with themes that are present in our lives today: love and loss, frustration and determination, tragedy and discovery.

When Cather died in 1947, her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, selected her final resting place and designed her tombstone, which features these memorable words from My Ántonia: “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

Cather stands as the lone Pulitzer Prize winner in the National Statuary Hall Collection of the U.S. Capitol, indelibly distinctive in leading her readers beyond Nebraska into the depths of the human heart.

 

About the Author: Ashley Olson is the executive director of the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, where she oversees operation of the museum and the nation’s largest collection of nationally designated historic sites dedicated to an American author. A devoted tourist and hobby photographer, she has pursued Cather’s spirit in places the author lived, from the remote settings of Walnut Canyon National Park, Arizona and Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, to the dense neighborhoods of New York City and Pittsburgh.