The West and the prairie: the people, the droughts, the winters, the fires, the plagues, the sweat and the toil, and every evening the cinnamon sunsets. Embracing and evil. Charming and deadly. One moment youth flashes in all its boundless energy; next comes a sudden, searing loss, followed by anguish, followed by despair. Against all this the High Plains roll on and on, flat and endless, silent and unresponsive, their strength in their vastness.
Two other daughters of old Nebraska would endure the hardships of Western frontier life and eventually rejoice in the indomitable spirit of the pioneers.
State historian and writer Mari Sandoz would call Nebraska “the land that is yet to be found.” Her father, “Old Jules,” years earlier had pioneered much of the region and for a while scratched out a living selling rolled-up maps for $25 to those hunting new sections of free land. As a young girl, Mari spread the maps out on their dusty cabin floor and, ignoring her baby brother’s cries, imagined the strips of buckbrush and hackberry leaves, the “Big Muddy” Missouri River and the watery Platte, the Wildcat Range and the Pine Ridge. In her mind’s eye, she saw the hearty cattle and the heaving oxen, the men windburned and footsore, the sad-eyed women glancing backward as the wagons jostled and pulled them deeper into the frontier West.
“It was this gradual climb toward the Continental Divide, with water and grass all the way westward—the direction the white man seems to move over the globe—that made the state the world’s great path of empire,” Mari Sandoz wrote. The weary migrants, she observed, “began to spill off like golden grain sifting from a creaking wagon, leaving little settlements to sprout up all along from the Missouri westward, always headed into the sunset.”
What they often found was a country too fickle to hold down, too broad to understand—an odd May blizzard or an October afternoon that “can be so lovely it stops the heart,” Sandoz wrote. Germans, Irish, Swiss—all were tough before they arrived, tougher if they stayed. Find one man alone in the uncut wilderness, hammering up a fence and putting down roots, and he will be squinting at the sky. Find two or more together, spading a dugout or patching a “soddie,” or sod house, and they will be jabbering about the weather. Find them five years later, and they will never leave.
In the 1890s, those drought and depression years, Sandoz’s father had known an old Pawnee rainmaker who for $10 swore he could command an inch of precipitation to fall on unquenched pastures. For $20 he promised a soaker. No one was wealthy, but Old Jules and his neighbors counted out twenty one-dollar bills and for good luck tossed in a jug of whiskey. The Pawnee danced, sang, and cavorted, and sure enough the skies opened. The happy farmers cheered until the rain turned to hail and the hail pounded their crops into the ground.
Still the settlers kept coming. “One young woman drove the cattle of a relative all the way from Wisconsin to Nebraska, afoot,” Sandoz wrote. “And in my childhood I knew a man and wife, immigrants from Prague, who had pushed a wheelbarrow with their few household goods clear across Nebraska to our region for a homestead.” The first Bohemian to settle in the Nebraska Territory would walk routinely to St. Joseph, Missouri, and back for groceries, a substantial round trip that took him twice across the Missouri River.
More and more wagons pushed farther west, and the Indians’ livelihood eventually gave way. There were too many white men to hold back, too few Indians to resist them. Sandoz recalled an old Sioux who used to plant and dig up potatoes and in his last years would sit and marvel at the modern conveniences immigrants lugged over the prairie. “All his family had died of the coughing sickness because, he said, they had slept in a cornered log shack,” Sandoz wrote. “He would never cross our doorstep but often sat outside on the woodblock for hours, visiting over his pipe.”
An immigrant family pauses on their journey west through Nebraska’s Loup River Valley, 1886. (Library of Congress)
The wagon ruts delivered the settlers deep into the brush and tall grass, tired, sore, lonely, and often scared. Yet life could be enchanting. “Nowhere are the songs of the meadowlarks finer, the wild flowers and the sunsets more magnificent, than on the higher reaches of the state,” Sandoz wrote.
The author Willa Cather and her family left Virginia for a new home in Nebraska in 1883; she was nineteen by the summer the cowboys came barreling through from the Panhandle to the Chicago lakefront. And like the Haumann girls, Cather lost herself in new surroundings. “I knew every farm, every tree, every field in the region around my home, and they all called out to me,” she once said. “My deepest feelings were rooted in this country.”
Much of the state was grass and dirt, and homes and farms were three or four miles apart. Wagons were drawn by heavy workhorses, barns raised with the muscle of neighboring men. In the spring, homesteaders put their shoulders to the plow and broke the virgin ground into chunks.
In an essay titled “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” Cather told of pioneers gathered in an eastern Nebraska log cabin to witness the installation of a new telegraph machine. When the gadget began to click, the men removed their hats, “as if they were in church.” The first wire to flash west across the Missouri River into Nebraska was not a market report; there would be plenty of those to come. First to arrive was instead a line of poetry: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.”
To Cather, “the old West was like that.” For her, writing one of her early novels, O Pioneers!, “was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way.” Thirty years after leaving the West, Cather, in her New York apartment, could still recall her first day out there. She and her family loaded up on an April morning and drove across the tallgrass prairie to her grandfather’s ranch near the Kansas–Nebraska line. “I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side of the wagon box to steady myself,” she remembered. “The roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything.”
In time she learned to adore the soft side of the hard West. The wild plum jam, picked and mashed and canned. Quilts embroidered with state flowers. The black soil, the bronze prairie, the opal sky. A hundred miles in every direction the golden wheat strands swaying, as if sweeping off to Russia. All around her Cather listened to the Bohemian accents and with her pen created the velvety brown eyes of her future heroine, Ántonia Shimerda. From a child’s perspective, the land was bursting with life—young like Willa, vast swaths of it still unlearned and untouched.
“Whenever I crossed the Missouri River coming into Nebraska,” she said in her later years, “the very smell of the soil tore me to pieces. I was always being pulled back into Nebraska.” She remembered the fat prairie chickens, the quail hidden in the high grass, and the wild ducks paddling around the lagoons. From those lagoons the first settlers toted water on their backs to their homesteads. Men, women, young families, and old pioneers were “warm, mercurial, impressionable, restless, and over-fond of novelty and change,” Cather said.
The West was not always so cherished. For decades it was scorned by Easterners as the “Great American Desert.” With little rain or too many downpours, thin topsoil or hard clay, and the Rockies’ peaks a barrier to progress, it seemed nothing would come of the vast region. For many, the useful West ended at the Missouri River bluffs, and not a footfall farther.
Even as far back as 1838, when Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts had opposed a measure to fund a mail route between Independence, Missouri, and the Columbia River Gorge, the vast Western expanse appeared to be a ghost preserve for migrant Indian tribes to squabble over. “What use have we for such a country?” Webster asked.
President Lincoln opened the land when he signed the Homestead Act of 1862. Then the settler planted his boots on it, dug his shovels in, built a home, and raised a barn. He hoped his crops would take root and strain for the sky. Then maybe he
could earn enough folding money to buy fence rails. He had horses to feed and cattle to shelter. He dowsed for water below the earth and prayed for rain from above. Often high mortgages and farm supply loans threatened to close down his place. But if he stayed for five years, if he improved it and reaped a life from the harsh land, then that quarter section of 160 acres would be his.
Settlements in Nebraska grew by 324 percent in the 1860s and 135 percent in the ’80s. Where once there had been no white population, now one million filled its farthest reaches. By 1890 more than three million people had elbowed into Nebraska, Kansas, and North and South Dakota.
The best spots were seized near rivers or streams or along hillsides that sheltered settlers against the wind. Still more trains followed of white-top wagons carrying more settlers, farmers, and ranchers pouring in.
“You must make up your mind to rough it,” cautioned a pioneers’ guide from 1870. “You must cultivate the habit of sleeping in any kind of surroundings, on a board and without a pillow, indoors or out. I have been to sleep on horseback. You must be prepared to cook your own dinner, darn your own socks if you wear them, and think yourself fortunate if you are not reduced to the position of a man I knew, who lay in bed while his wife mended his own pair of trousers.”
The guide also warned, “Learn to ride as soon as you possibly can; a man or boy who cannot ride is, in a new country, about as valuable as a clerk who cannot write in a city office.” Those who took the stagecoach were told, “Never shoot on the road as the noise might frighten the horses. Don’t discuss politics or religion. Don’t grease your hair, because travel is dusty.”
A hearty bunch they were, struggling with stubborn oxen, broken wheels, rutted tracks, fleas and manure, sudden lightning bursts, high-water creeks, and, all too often, isolation, loneliness, and boredom.
George Washington Franklin arrived in Nebraska in the fall of 1885 from too-crowded Iowa, slogging two weeks over the rugged trails. A year later Thomas Jefferson Huntzinger wagoned from Akron, Ohio, to Independence, Kansas, then walked the rest of the way to Colorado. He established a claim there, then hurried on a train back to Missouri, where he hitched up a team and a double-box wagon. Then he drove back.
In 1887, Wallace Hoze Wilcock cleared Illinois and headed for eastern Colorado. He dropped off his wife and two babies in Nebraska and pushed on alone to Colorado. There he staked his claim. But by the time he returned to Nebraska, collected his family, and made it back to his new home in Colorado, sixty other homesteaders had already crowded in.
Towns sprang up like wild prairie mushrooms. Soddies were scooped out of the dirt, the hillsides, and the river beds, their walls braced with cheesecloth to hold back the winter frost. Men mixed lime and sand to shore up the rafters. Black-and-white newspaper pages, once read, were pasted in like wallpaper, then read again standing up. Newspaper sheets also doubled as winter blankets.
When someone fell sick, often the cures were warm manure for snakebite, warm urine for earache, and roasted mouse for measles. Warts? Toss a bean into the well over your left shoulder. Rheumatism? Carry a potato in your pocket. If a prairie photographer swung by, the family gathered outside, Ma or Grandma in the only chair, Pa and the rest of the family standing erect and stone-faced beside the others. None of them smiled. A dog might wag its tail. Sometimes a pig rutted.
But the families persevered; they endured. By 1877, the community of Antelope County, Nebraska, had grown in eleven years to 1,500 people, two flour mills, two sawmills, six post offices, nine stores, five lawyers, three preachers, and that most precious commodity of all, a town doctor. Tiny Haigler, Nebraska, was a mere frontier village in 1885, about thirty settlers trying to hang on as more adventurous immigrants rolled past them searching for greener pastures. In a few years’ time, Haigler sported a brand-new school building, a two-story city hall, two churches, two hotels, and a pair of dueling money lenders.
Just getting “out there” was tough enough. On June 5, 1864, George Edwin Bushnell wrote in his traveling diary from south central Nebraska: “(Sun.) Saw 2 Antelopes, and yesterday morning saw an Elk. Passed three ranches to-day, passed 47 wagons, and traveled 40 mi. and camped on The Platte bottom, 40 mi. from Ft. Kearney.”
June 13: “(Mon.) Passed 5 Indian graves, about 7 ft. from the ground on scaffolds. Near the Junction House, we passed 262 wagons today.”
June 22: “(Wed.) Saw the peaks of the Rocky Mountains 130 mi. distant.”
In 1874, Cora A. Beels rode west with her family. She was seventeen and her parents were divided about the journey. They rode by rail to Wisner, Nebraska, then continued in a lumber wagon another thirty miles to Norfolk. “A tire came off of one of the wagon wheels, and all the rest of the way my father walked beside that wheel keeping the tire pounded on with a stick,” she recalled years later. “So our progress was very slow. And with every added mile the spirit of our gentle mother sank still lower.”
At Norfolk, in northeast Nebraska, the Beelses’ first home was a one-room board shack with two small windows and a loft. “Our kitchen was a large dry-goods box, set on end before the door,” Beels said. “The cooking was done on a gasoline stove.” Hungry Indians knocked at their door seeking ginger cookies and other handouts. Prairie fires lit up the sky; one blazed for three nights. June floods roared through the Norfolk valley, swamping the grain fields, the rainwater rising above the baseboards of pioneer huts. Yet despite the uncertain journey and the tensions between her determined father and unhappy mother, Beels at eighty-four remained proud of what they had endured. “The blood of pioneers flows in my veins,” she said.
In 1878, Lucy Alice Ide and her husband, Chester, crossed the plains in a prairie schooner. They launched from Wisconsin and joined a wagon train of forty-one migrants bound for the Washington Territory. The journey spanned four months and thirteen days. One man fell sick en route, bleeding from his lungs. He left the wagons and continued by rail.
When the wagons reached Nebraska, and thunder and lightning brought an all-night rain, Ide wrote in her diary, “If this is the style of Nebraska, I do not care to stop here long.” Farther across the state, the caravan stopped for church and a Sunday sermon. “It does us good for it has been four weeks since we heard the last one,” she wrote.
On Plum Creek in central Nebraska, the Ides visited the local jailhouse. “There was a lady confined in the jail for the murder of her husband, and two men in for murder. The lady looked very sad—did not look as though she was guilty; she had her little girl with her.”
They continued despite more storms and more horses spooked by thunder; one horse became so agitated it tore away with a “wild snort.” Ide wrote, “We just got in order, our wagons chained together and then firmly staked down.… We got to bed without our supper. Only a bite of bread and dried beef.” Her spirits sank. “I have not a very good opinion of Nebraska so far,” she confided.
They passed four horse carcasses lying on the roadside, felled by lightning. The caravan maneuvered around twenty-five telegraph poles knocked down by high bursts of wind. Seven cattle toppled over dead, struck by railcars. Each morning Ide searched the new day’s horizon. “Still nothing but cattle and ponies as far as you can see in any direction,” she wrote. “The same dead level prairie.” And then at last, “we saw for the first time those cloud-capped, snow-covered, ever-to-be remembered, Rocky Mountains.”
Emily Towell rode with forty other covered-wagon families from Missouri to Idaho in 1881. She was fifty-two years old, her husband Alexander sixty-six. “The parting from our relatives and dear ones was very sad and heart rending,” she wrote in her diary. “There were many tears shed as last fond farewells and goodbyes were said. Our hearts were heavey [sic] and laden.…” They crossed up through Iowa, dipped into Omaha, and plunged onto the Nebraska plains. Sometimes they followed the railway tracks as trains sped past them. “The passengers had a great deal of fun waving,” she recalled. “They motioned with their hands, pointing westward.”
Near Plum Creek, Frank McCloud, the infant son of some traveling companions, died. The group camped long enough to bury the boy and rest the horses, one “so lame that it was impossible to go further.” Another time a mare frightened by a train galloped into barbed wire. Near Sidney in the Nebraska Panhandle, a jolt in one of the wagons set off a burst of gunfire. Two children were killed and their mother and another child wounded.
In an 1894 essay published in the Outlook, journalist Charles Moreau Harger wrote that “there is no poetry in living from necessity in a wagon or a one-roomed house.” Out on the Nebraska plain, a schoolteacher lamented how she too often stayed the night in the sod homes of her students. “I slept upon the floor,” she wrote in her diary. “And festive bedbugs held high carnival over my weary frame.” A Nebraska frontiersman mailed a letter to his nervous wife back in Michigan, reassuring her that she would like the new cabin he was building, but maybe not all the dreariness around it. “If we find any peace or happiness on this earth,” he pledged to her, “I suppose 99% of it will be within our own home.”
Charles Morgan, in eastern Colorado, remembered homesteaders scooping up buffalo chips and other animal dung, carting it home in wheelbarrows for winter fuel. A recently arrived pioneer woman would don gloves to gather the dung. She later would skip the gloves but remember to wash her hands. Before long she never wore gloves or washed at all. Mothers cut up their few dresses and sewed clothes for their children. They scrubbed the clothes in cold-water buckets, without soap. The little ones lay naked under the covers, waiting for the summer wind to dry their clothes.
In one family, the oldest child died the same day another was born. Neighbor women sewed a burial gown while their husbands hammered and planed a casket; the child went to her rest like a “sweet little doll.” In Kit Carson County, Colorado, Martha Gilmore Lundy headed up a community drive to plot the first local cemetery. A farmer offered an acre of land; others chipped in money to string a barbed wire fence to keep out the hungry coyotes.
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