The Willa Cather Memorial Prairie

"This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand," said the author. "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." —Omaha Bee, October 29, 1921.

The “middle ground” includes the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. Much has changed on that 607-acre tract of mixed-grass landscape next to the Kansas boarder in Webster County. If you have not visited lately, a trip to this particular “middle ground” might be worth your time.

For my own part, I admit that I am not completely familiar with every inch of the Cather Memorial Prairie. I know the east end next to Highway 281 very well because when I taught, my students “camped” there each fall for an hour or so to do assignments. However, until a year or so ago I had not investigated the western section. Then one day in June of 2006, my husband Ron and I decided to walk to the west end. We shared a picnic lunch and then set off.

As we left the more familiar land next to the highway, we encountered fairly rough terrain. Soon we came to hillsides covered in wild flowers. One hill was covered with wild roses in full bloom—reminding me of Emil and Marie in O Pioneers!. The grass became taller and lusher as we neared the windmill (which one can barely see from the east entrance to the Prairie). We discovered a second deep valley with a creek winding through it from south to north. My goal was to see if we could find some antique barbed wire fences. Those western fences, however, were relatively new. I was both disappointed in not finding old wire and pleased at the same time because new fence is usually trouble-free. It was an exhilarating, long walk. We looked up at a perfect turquoise blue sky that day with the wind bending the grass below and us too as we headed into the breezes. We decided to follow the fence to the north side and then head back toward our vehicle.

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As most members and friends of the Foundation know, the Cather Memorial Prairie was purchased some thirty-two years ago by the Nature Conservancy through the generosity of Frank Woods, Jr. In 2005 the Nature Conservancy turned the land over to the Cather Foundation, along with a significant endowment, which will enable the Foundation not only to maintain the land but also to improve it. To this end, a Prairie Management Committee has been established with a membership that has very impressive credentials in the area of grasslands management.

Over the years, many non-native plants have invaded the Prairie. The “mission” of the Prairie Management Committee is to restore the native grasses and eliminate those plants foreign to Nebraska mixed-grasslands. So, how does one go about doing that? The answers are multiple and not particularly simple.

First the Management Committee took a walk one fine day to begin identifying native plants vs. invasive plants. Everyone was impressed by the variety of native plants found and the rarity of some of these plants. For my part, I went along with the experts on the walk, determined to learn to identify plants on this vast expanse. I took with me a pencil and drawing paper. Eventually I gave up. Now, however, Cindy Bruneteau has put together a pamphlet that lists many of the native plants and includes color photographs. Today, using her guide, anyone can take a walk on the Prairie and identify many spectacular and rare plants. (For more information about these plants, interested individuals can contact Cindy Bruneteau, Education Director at the Cather Foundation. Cindy is the Cather Center representative on the Prairie Management team.)

Ridding the Prairie of invasive plants requires multiple solutions. Jim Fitzgibbon, chair of the Prairie Management Committee has invoked some of those solutions. He has almost single handedly cut down well over a thousand cedar trees, which have been spreading rapidly throughout South Central Nebraska in recent years. In addition, he has hand-sprayed and/or spaded up tons of noxious weeds.

Controlling invasive grasses requires some long-term solutions, one of which is cattle grazing. I admit that at one time I was determined to remove the cattle from this property. I can remember taking students to the Cather Prairie when there were no cattle and therefore no “cow pies” and few insects and other pests. When cattle were re-introduced, these irritations grew—more cow pies, more insects, etc. However, I have relaxed my opposition. Cattle, like the native buffalo of long ago, are an important part of the ecological health of the landscape. If grazing is properly controlled, cattle can help eliminate some of the non-native grasses and encourage growth of native plants. Again Jim Fitzgibbon enters the picture. Jim has helped with and/or supervised the building of fences to divide the prairie into three relatively equal-sized paddocks. Next year the land will be leased and cattle will be rotated among the paddocks in a timely fashion with the goal of controlling non-native grasses. Farmer/ranchers in the area confirm that this system can work to eliminate unwanted grasses.

Water is another major issue on the Cather Prairie. It is interesting to note that this tract of land has only one windmill and a reputation for not having sufficient underground water to furnish more windmills. However, we have learned to our surprise that natural springs abound. The general consensus had been that there are three natural springs on the Cather Prairie. Then Jim Fitzgibbon located eight more! By fencing off some of these springs, Jim has been able to keep cattle from tramping the springs shut and cutting off the water flow. The free-flowing springs are now beginning to provide ample water in the paddocks for cattle. When the Prairie was transferred to the Cather Foundation, we were in the midst of a long period of drought; however, with the recent rains and the working springs, water abounds, as evidenced by the accompanying photograph.

If you really want to take a walk on the Cather Memorial Prairie, you might be interested in the hiking paths that have been designed and will soon be created. Already, this stretch of land is a Nebraska birding site. Creative ideas continue to come forth for other ways to improve the quality of the landscape. The future of the Cather Memorial Prairie is bright. However, there is still much to do. If you are interested in volunteering, contact Cindy Bruneteau at the Cather Center; contributions are welcome and will be used wisely to continue improvements on what we hope will become one of the most outstanding examples of unbroken mixed-grass prairie in the country—a fitting tribute to the great American author whose name is indelibly stamped on this rich, “wine-stained” stretch of earth.

My Ántonia and the BIG READ

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” — My Ántonia

One of the most positive and exciting things happening in our country right now is the BIG READ sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). According to the NEA website, “The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of its citizens.” In carrying out this mission, the BIG READ has embraced sixteen American novels with the intention of offering grants to organizations such as libraries and literary societies to present programming connected to any one of the sixteen books. These books are representative of the best that American literature has to offer. I have decided to write about this because the NEA has chosen Willa Cather’s My Ántonia as a selection for the BIG READ.

The choice of My Ántonia is an especially wise decision. The quality of language and imagery in this novel is without precedent. Moreover, the narrative of this American tale is uncommonly inspiring. In the beginning of the novel Cather talks about the beginnings of a country and the materials necessary to mold community: "There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." She then goes on to define for the reader what those materials are. I believe she is talking about three basic elements: land, people, and culture. These are, of course, the elements that make up the beginnings of every society. To see these elements coagulate in My Ántonia is to relive the making of America in every locale across this broad land and with all of the diversity associated with land, people, and culture—a nice reminder to citizens today of what we are all about.

It is important to emphasize that Cather, in telling the story of My Ántonia, is the rare American novelist who describes the beginning of a society in uncommonly positive and inspiring terms. The novel ends in triumph. The reader comes away with hope and the expectation of a bright and abundant future for a new society founded in the heart of America.

I am particularly interested in the cultural aspect of the novel. In My Ántonia Cather asks her characters to share their stories—stories of the old world and the new; stories having many ethnic origins. As individuals, we repeat our own stories and we learn the stories of others. These stories together become the myths and legends we all know in common. The stories are part of our culture and define who we are as Americans; and one of Cather’s special gifts in My Ántonia is her ability to tell stories in ways that make abundantly clear the positive aspects of our diversity as Americans. Yes, NEA made a prudent decision when they chose My Ántonia for the BIG READ—through this beautifully written novel, we learn something of who we are in the context of hope and bright anticipation of what we can become.

Because My Ántonia is being read in communities across the country, the Cather Foundation is taking part in the BIG READ in a variety of ways. Our own Cather scholars from the Cather Foundation Board of Governors are making presentations and are participating in BIG READ panels. I have given presentations myself. The “Willa Cather and Material Culture” photography exhibit of special artifacts connected to Cather’s life and literature is now traveling from state to state as part of the BIG READ initiative.

If you have not checked out the BIG READ website, you might want to go to http://www.nea.gov/national/bigread/index.html. For more information about how you can use Cather Foundation resources to enhance programming connected to My Ántonia in your community, contact us at http://www.willacather.org/ or email wcpm@gpcom.net.

What is the Middle Ground?

My name is Betty Kort and I am the executive director of the Cather Foundation, an international literary organization headquartered in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Today I am posting an introductory blog that will set the course for what I am calling the Middle Ground. I want to begin by talking about Red Cloud. Because famed American writer Willa Cather made Red Cloud the setting for six of her novels and because of the tremendous influence this small, frontier town had on Cather’s body of writing, Red Cloud has become one of the most famous small towns in America. The Cather Foundation, founded in 1955 in the town of Red Cloud, seeks to encourage the reading of Cather’s fiction and preserve the artifacts and sites of the Red Cloud of the 1880s that so influenced Cather as a writer. We are thus both a literary organization and a historic museum—and that would be enough—but we are so much more. And this ill-defined more is part of what this weekly blog will be about.

It was Cindy Bruneteau, our new Education Director, who suggested that I start this blog for the willacather.org website. (She is shaking things up just a bit at the Cather Center.) As I rolled my eyes and walked away, she threw out the added taunt that I name my weekly blog. Though I immediately dismissed the whole idea, I woke up the next morning knowing that there is a tremendous amount of middle ground within the Cather Foundation that is not readily apparent. And so the Middle Ground begins . . .

Landscapes and Seeing. We count on artists and writers to help us see details that we might otherwise skim over or perhaps altogether miss. Willa Cather was an especially keen observer, catching and recording the details that make her writing come alive. I like to think that she came perilously close to being a visual artist in the traditional sense. Over time I have learned that not everyone consciously sees the world in the same way. Some of us need to have the details pointed out. This was brought home to me over and over again by my high school students during twenty-plus years of teaching.

My annual fall fieldtrip to the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie required that my eleventh grade English students explore the landscape of the Prairie. I asked them to draw something close by and then, on another sheet of paper, concentrate hard while drawing a line that represented the contour of the distant horizon of the prairie. (The students almost universally thought that their single line across the sheet of paper representing the horizon was, to put it mildly, a waste of paper.) The key to their experience, however, was that the students had to do their assignments while sitting quietly for a considerable length of time in the middle ground—that space out on the prairie between the fence next to the highway that contains the Prairie and that elusive, distant horizon line to the west. This middle ground is thrilling—and their journals made this clear. Out in the middle, there is action—lots to see and hear and feel and write about. Most of the students had never had the experience of sitting out in the middle of a desolate landscape, forbidden to talk or move around or do anything at all except observe, draw, and write. For most of them, it was an epiphany.

Middle Ground. I would guess that most of us familiar with the Nebraska prairies would admit that while driving down a road, be it the Interstate, a country road, or even on Highway 281 next to the Cather Memorial Prairie, we tend to notice the fences and the ditches along the highways and byways, and we have a sense of the horizon line off in the distance. It is easy and convenient to skip the middle ground. We need to be reminded that there is always a foreground, a middle ground, and a background and that we need to slow down and consciously take in that all-important middle ground if we want to know what is happening. I like to think that this middle ground is the road that Cather was speaking of in her short story, “Old Mrs. Harris,” as opposed to the end, be it a fence or the horizon line of our lives: “The road is all,” according to Cather.

It is the middle ground of the Cather Foundation that I will explore in this blog. I want to emphasize that this is NOT just the middle ground of the Cather Prairie or Nebraska or the Midwest. The fingers of the Cather Foundation—and Willa Cather’s writing—extend around the globe. The landscape of the Cather Foundation canvas is indeed large—in fact, global—and the middle ground of the Cather Foundation landscape is filled with details that I want to bring to our readers’ attention. Thus, as you read this blog, you will see postings about the Foundation with settings in places such as France, China, India, Afghanistan, Washington, DC, Omaha, and, yes, Red Cloud too. The Cather Foundation is enormously multifaceted, and our members and friends do not always have the opportunity to realize the full scope of activities that are underway during any given season in any give location—the middle ground of the Cather Foundation starts with Red Cloud and ends somewhere on the other side of the world.