The Prairie Reads Over My Shoulder and Has Opinions About Everything

What little time I can carve out for writing recently has been spent with Willa Cather's My Ántonia. Pencil in hand, I've marked passages where the Nebraska prairie becomes more than just a backdrop. Where it pulses with life, it reflects the inner worlds of characters and breathes alongside them. It's research, but it's the best kind. The kind that makes you want to abandon your notes and just write.

According to the Prairie, It Made All the Decisions

I'm writing a book about immigrant homesteaders in Hamlin and Kingsbury Counties in the Dakota territories, around 1875 to 1900. These weren't people who lived on the land. They were shaped by it, in ways both brutal and beautiful. The prairie wasn't a stage where their lives played out. It was a force that entered into them. It determined who survived and who didn't. Who thrived and who broke. Who learned to love the emptiness and who spent their lives longing for the forested hills of Norway or the villages of Bohemia.

So I'm not writing the land as a setting. I'm writing it as a character.

Cather Gets It: The Prairie Has Moods

This is where Cather comes in. She understood something essential about writing the Great Plains. The landscape isn't neutral. It has moods. It reflects and amplifies human emotion. It holds memory.

In My Ántonia, when the narrator, Jim Burden, is young and everything seems possible, Cather presents a prairie of "long, sweeping lines of fertility." The "changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea." When Ántonia, disgraced and isolated, is working like a man in the fields, Cather shows her bent to face the snow, "looking more lonesome-like than usual." Darkness gathers as she drives cattle home alone. The land mirrors the soul.

But Cather does something even more sophisticated. She uses landscape to show transformation. When Jim returns after twenty years away, he's terrified he'll find Ántonia "aged and broken." Instead, he finds her surrounded by an explosion of life. Children bursting from the dark fruit cave into sunlight. An orchard protected by triple hedges. A farm elevated on a "swell of land" that overlooks everything. The landscape itself confirms that Ántonia hasn't just survived. She's become a "rich mine of life, like the founders of early races."

The Prairie Hired a Bird as Its Spokesperson

For my Dakota homesteaders, I'm using the meadowlark, with its clear, fluting song, as a recurring motif. The meadowlark is a bird of open country. One that thrives where trees are scarce. Its song is one of the first things that would have struck those Norwegian, Bohemian, and German immigrants as profoundly different from the old country. Not better or worse. Just utterly, irrevocably other.

I'm thinking about how that song might weave its way through the story. A sound that irritates in the first lonely spring. That goes unnoticed during years of grinding work. That becomes the very sound of home. The meadowlark doesn't change, but what do the characters hear when they listen to it? That changes everything.

Turns Out the Prairie Is Complicated (Who Knew)

When writing historical fiction about homesteaders, there's always a risk of romanticizing the past. Or making it unrelentingly grim. The truth is more complex. Yes, the Dakota prairie was harsh. Blizzards that killed. Droughts that starved. Winds that drove people mad. But it was also beautiful. Those endless skies. That particular quality of light. The way a field of wheat could look like a golden sea.

"The immigrants who stayed, who made it, who built lives there, they weren't just enduring the landscape. They were shaped by it. Some came to love it. Others discovered something about themselves they hadn't known was there. I want to make the land a character, to capture that complex relationship: the prairie as antagonist and companion, mirror and teacher. The force that either breaks you or reveals who you truly are.

The Prairie Wants Me to Get the Details Right

I'm deep in the research phase. Reading homesteader diaries and land office records from Hamlin and Kingsbury Counties. Studying historical weather patterns and crop prices. Trying to understand what it meant to break sod with a walking plow. To live in a dugout with dirt sifting from the ceiling. To watch your children die of scarlet fever because the doctor was forty miles away.

By reading Cather, I'm learning how she turns landscape into language. How she makes a field of wheat or a gathering storm carry emotional weight. Because facts alone won't bring these people back to life. Dates, weather records, and grain prices are at best mildly interesting. What matters is capturing how the land shaped the settlers: their dreams, their struggles, their defeats. How a meadowlark's song on a May morning could mean everything or nothing, depending on whether the land was, in that moment, friend or foe.

That's the story I'm trying to write. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

What do you think? Do you have connections to homesteader ancestors? I'd love to hear your family stories in the comments.