WILLA CATHER
Glacier Creek Preserve
Omaha, Nebraska
By Conor Gearin
“The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.” One of Willa Cather’s most famous lines, from the 1918 novel My Ántonia, mainly refers to the color of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), one of the key grasses of the mixed grass prairie where she grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The species has a bluish color in spring but matures to a copper-red in autumn that reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.
The first place I connected Cather’s words to little bluestem wasn’t in farm country but instead at Glacier Creek Preserve on the outskirts of Omaha. Years of restoration transformed terraced crop fields into a glimpse at the flora of mixed grass and tallgrass prairies accessible to city dwellers. In the Midwest, we’ve lost nearly all of our native grasslands to agriculture, meaning that if you grew up in a city like Omaha or St. Louis — my hometown — your first look at a grassland was probably a restored site down the road like Glacier Creek. This modest-sized preserve offers a glimpse of the most threatened type of ecosystem in the world. As a biology teaching assistant, I would help lead university students at the preserve in collecting soil samples, estimating plant biomass, and identifying bird species.
When Cather was a student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in the 1890s, Omaha was a cultural destination, and she wrote incisive theater reviews to help establish herself as a writer. Her fiction reflects this early view of the big city. Especially in My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, Omaha looms as an urban hub, reachable by train for a cosmopolitan weekend outing, the place to go for fancy fabric and renowned actors. Cather’s careful depictions of small-town Nebraska take their meaning partly from the contrast she draws to these growing cities a few rail stops away.
Later in her career, Cather returned to Omaha on a brief Midwestern speaking tour. At a 1921 gathering of the Nebraska League of Women Voters in the tea room of the stately Brandeis department store in downtown Omaha, Cather advised the audience not to imitate other places. “It seems to me as I travel out through the great middle west, the people are trying to imitate New York,” she said, as quoted by the Omaha World-Herald. “Red Cloud and Hastings are trying to be like Omaha; Omaha and Chicago are trying to be like New York. One thing I like about New York is that there we wear the kinds of hats we like, we wear the kind of clothes that please us.”
The remark feels strikingly contemporary. Reading it, I think of how today’s Midwestern communities often converge on a suburban sameness: small towns grasping for big box stores, larger cities sprawling out subdivisions into farm country. The result is a landscape that’s hard to distinguish from hundreds of others, their quirks of ecology smoothed over and refashioned with evenly distributed brand names. But I think, too, of the distinguishing features that remain: the grasses and herbs of eastern Nebraska I saw in the field and through the microscope; the improbably steep slopes of the Loess Hills across the Missouri River; all the different kinds of live music wafting out of bars in Omaha’s Benson neighborhood on a First Friday. I think of Omaha’s cultural legacies — the Indigenous peoples of the Oceti Sakowin; Black families that arrived in the Great Migration; generations of immigrants from throughout Europe, Asia, Mexico, Central America, and more recently Sudan, Nigeria, and other African nations — and how those legacies often appeared in the students of my commuter campus. Foregrounding these, it’s harder to write off the city as interchangeable with any other in the Corn Belt.
Historically, Omaha has looked to Cather’s words for help in establishing a sense of place. When I lived there, my local library was the Willa Cather Branch. There’s a Willa Cather elementary school and a Willa Cather playground. Despite living 200 miles from Red Cloud, many people in Omaha (like their fellow Nebraskans) have felt better represented in her fiction than in contemporary works like The Great Gatsby — where the Great Plains are a grim wasteland, a place to escape.
But it would be a mistake to portray Cather as some kind of saint of Midwestern culture. Her legacy is more complex than that. She left Nebraska for New York to make her way in the literary world. She also largely erased Native Americans in her writing and essentially celebrated white settlement on Indigenous lands. Her view of Midwestern uniqueness was hitched to pioneer exploitation.
We’re not beholden to that limited view. Instead, I see Cather’s work as a starting point that many writers have riffed on throughout the past century. The thread of her legacy that stands out to me now is the awakening of a Midwestern ecological consciousness, distinguishing the particularity of one place from another. That awareness offers another way to envision the future of a place, one away from evenly-spread amenities and toward a unique trajectory linked to local ecology and culture — a celebration of difference.
If I imagine standing at Glacier Creek Preserve now, I can look southeast toward downtown Omaha, north and west toward farmland, and south toward recently built subdivisions. Despite suburban sprawl, I wouldn’t mistake the view for St. Louis or Chicago. The sources of Omaha’s uniqueness haven’t been completely smothered. But the threats to grassland habitats are as dire as ever. Looking around at the little bluestem, switchgrass, and side-oats grama, I think about Cather’s hunch that if we could articulate the special character, the this–ness of a landscape, that might tell us something about how best to relate to that place. If writers and naturalists — myself included — could help more people see grasslands as vital, with inhabitants that have names and life histories, I wonder what new shape our communities might take.
Conor Gearin is a writer from St. Louis living in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Atlantic, The Millions, New Scientist, and The New Territory, where he is a contributing editor. He writes a newsletter called Possum Notes.
Willa Cather Special Edition
Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!
Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.
Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.
Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory
