Pioneer Life on the Prairie: A Wagner Matinée

History and Old Stuff...

When we look back at pioneer days on the prairie, it's easy to imagine the lives of the settlers as more idyllic than most actually were.

We've all watched "Little House On the Prairie," and many of us have read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books! The world would be a poorer place without the wonderful stories of her childhood that Laura recorded for us. She truthfully recorded many of the difficulties and dangers that her family faced, and she wrote with great good cheer and a determined optimism. I don't doubt that her family had that attitude and that it helped them to survive many hardships, but it gives a rosy hue to the picture that Laura paints.

Willa Cather wrote realistically about the grim circumstances some homesteaders found themselves in. In her stories about Nebraska, she noted that many were ill-suited for life on the raw prairie. Some came from cities and had no experience at all with farming. They knew nothing about plants and animals. Others lacked the financial resources and emotional strength to hang on through droughts, grasshopper attacks, tornados, blizzards and prairie fires.

Here is a vignette of one woman's life from Cather's short story, "A Wagner Matinée"

My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the homestead.

Quoted from "A Wagner Matinée" by Willa Cather. Originally published in Everybody's Magazine in 1904.

"A Wagner Matinée", source of the quotation above, is the story of a woman and her nephew. He was brought up as a rough homestead boy, though he learned Latin and music under his aunt's care and training. As an adult, he goes to the city and becomes a suave and polished gentleman (on the surface at least). His aunt has undergone an opposite transformation, from a talented lady musician to an overworked prairie pioneer and farm wife. Both aunt and nephew have opportunity at the matinée to recall and marvel at their former and current lives.

It's a poignant and touching look at a relationship, and I found myself identifying to an extent with the nephew, a person who left the homestead and went far away. I'm sure the nephew is a representation of Willa Cather herself. She went to New York City and became a successful editor and writer, but she could never forget where she was from -- Red Cloud, Nebraska, was part of her. She knew it deeply. That's what makes her stories so powerful and authentic, even 100 years later.

"A Wagner Matinée" is also a look at the darker side of the homestead experience. Loss and sacrifice are part of the great story of America's homesteaders. I pay lip service to that fact often, but I was still surprised at the bleakness I saw and felt as I was drawn into this story.

I took my Mennonite neighbor to the chiropractor today. While I was waiting, I read a couple of Willa Cather stories. I have been thinking about this one ever since.



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Barn of My Childhood

Memories of a wonderful barn

I was blessed with a wonderful barn when I was a child, and because I remember that barn so fondly, I still have an affection for barns. (You may have noticed that barns are a recurring theme on this blog.)

I would estimate that the barn of my childhood was built before 1920, and possibly as early as 1900. [See the comment below from Hills of KS.] It was part of the headquarters of the A & D Cattle Company, a ranching operation in southern Rock County, Nebraska, located just a mile south of the Duff post office. Duff's location is recorded on this mail service map from 1897 and this map from an 1895 U.S. atlas.

The barn was built for workhorses. My brother and I have discussed how many horses the barn would have held, and we agree that 40 horses is a conservative estimate. It was one of the biggest barns in Rock County.

The core of the barn was two stories with a big haymow upstairs. Two "sheds" wrapped around the barn's core on the north and west sides.

The east side of the barn had three doors at ground level that faced our house. A large sliding door on the south end led into the horse stalls in the south part of the barn. The small door in the center opened to the walkway between the stalls and the inner rooms. The large sliding door on the north side had ample width to drive a team of horses and a wagon into the long north shed.

In the center of the barn on the ground floor, there was a large stout set of pens where a stallion could be kept and a couple of tightly built rooms where grain and feed were stored.

The haymow (the second floor of the barn) had a large door that was used for bringing up loose hay. A grapple-hook, attached to the roof beams, could grab a big handful of hay through the door and dump it on the haymow floor.

By the time we moved to the ranch in 1958, the days of workhorses had gone by and the big old barn had undergone some "repurposing". Eight or ten of the big 2-horse stalls had been left in the south shed for saddlehorses. Near the south door that opened to the corral, a long horizontally mounted post held saddles and saddle blankets.

The stallion's pen in the center of the barn had been equipped with a stanchion where cows who needed assistance with calving could be contained. The center rooms of the barn were still used for storing bagged cattle feed. The west shed of the barn had become one big pen where a little group of cattle could be kept.

When we moved to the ranch, some loose hay still lay in piles in the haymow, but later, my dad stored square bales of hay there, brought in by a bale elevator through the small haymow door. I don't remember the big haymow door ever being opened or the grapple hook used.

The long north shed had several stanchions on one end of it where we milked cows. We used the back end of the north shed when we tied up calves and tamed them so they could be washed and groomed and led about. (My dad sold show cattle.)

In the summer, there was respite from the sun in the barn and in its shade across the yard, but its greater purpose was the shelter it provided in winter.

I remember frigid winter days when the winddriven snow felt like tiny arrows and the air froze my nostril hairs. Inside the barn, the air was not as cold as outside and out of the wind, the chill was easier to endure. In the bitter cold of winter, my dad parked his tractor inside the north shed overnight and closed the sliding door. The tractor had to be started every day so hay could be fed to the cattle, and the barn helped.

My parents moved to Missouri in the early 1970's. My dad had a bad leg that bothered him in cold weather, and he needed a shorter, milder winter. Hard times soon came to the agricultural sector, and the couple who bought the ranch from my folks went into bankruptcy and then got divorced. (Or maybe it was the other way around -- I'm not sure.) The ranch and some adjoining land was eventually bought by a family from out-of-state (maybe Texas?). They also came upon hard times.

When I visited seven or eight years ago, someone was still living in the ranch house, but the barn was in a sad state of disrepair. Much of the roof and some of the siding had fallen off the north shed, so that weather could blow onto the haymow floor, the very heart of the building.

I've heard that the ranch has changed hands again since then. I hope that maybe the new owners will have the desire and the resources to restore and preserve the barn, but it may have deteriorated so much that it's not practical to do so.

Willa Cather wrote in O Pioneers!, "The land belongs to the future. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while." Something similar could be said about the buildings people have made on the Nebraska prairie. People have built, used and loved them, but they are temporary.

Notice how the studs of the north wall are exposed.

I talked a bit about this barn in my post, "Kids and Kittens." I will write another time about the fun we had as children playing in the barn, especially in the haymow.


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Another Day of Recovery

All In The Family...

Dennis is doing better day by day. Today he got his catheter out and he now has to get out of bed to pee. (He doesn't travel far because he's still wired in several places.)

With better health, Dennis is becoming very irritable. He doesn't remember much about his first couple days, so he thinks he's not progressing fast enough, I guess.

The doctor prescribed some muscle relaxers today. Dennis drifted in and out of sleep all afternoon, talking crazy and gesturing wildly all the while. The combination of the pain killers and the muscle relaxers really sent him to a different place.

I made Dennis promise that he'd call the nurses when he has to get up in the night. Then I told the nurses that they'd better check on him frequently because I was afraid for his safety if he tried to climb out of bed alone.

When I got home, I discovered that the water heater is leaking -- badly. I turned off the water and electric to it and tried to sop up some of the water that's on the floor, despite the plastic dish-with-a-drain that the water heater sets in.

The clothes drier quit working the day that Dennis got home and I haven't had a chance to get a repairman out here for it yet. I don't want to say that "surely nothing else can go wrong", because it might!

I've been keeping my sanity at the hospital by reading. I've been wanting to read my new book of Willa Cather short stories, but they require more focus than I can muster under the circumstances. So instead, I've read two juvenile books, It's Like This, Cat by Emily Neville and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster.

Today, I took along All Creatures Great and Small by James Harriot. I'd forgotten what a heartwarming and amusing book it is. I enjoyed it so much that I think I'll re-read another of his books when I finish this one.

A Bit of Willa Cather that I Soaked Up

Not Easily Classified...

Yesterday evening, as I waited in the stadium parking lot for Isaac to get out of the football game, I read "Flavia and Her Artists", the first story in a book I've recently acquired: Collected Stories by Willa Cather.

The story is about taking people seriously, people who take themselves seriously, people who take themselves too seriously and genuine vs. artificial people. There are other themes too, such as artist vs. non-artist and intellectual vs. non-intellectual.

Flavia is a rich and pampered woman who is obsessed with surrounding herself with "the best" people. She has worked hard through the years of her marriage to assemble a group of well-known personalities who live as guests in her home. She appreciates them as trophies. She is a shallow thinker herself, but she attempts to soak up the intellect of her artists and project it as her own.

Finally, one of the artists cruelly exposes her superficiality, and while her guests take a malicious pleasure in it, it is soon clear that they have been exposed as well. Flavia's husband seems to perceive and yet to completely overlook her pathetic phoniness for no apparent reason except that probably he loves her.

I suppose one moral of the story is that when you get too serious about pretending to be something you're not, you're likely to be found out, and that can be hurtful to everyone who is connected to you and really can make your whole world just fall apart.

It must have been a good story because my thoughts have returned to it repeatedly today when I've had time to think. Life has been proceding at breakneck pace and while there has been the odd spare moment, I haven't been able to collect my wits enough to write anything in the blog. Now I finally have time to write but I am too sleepy to think, so all I have to offer is what I soaked up from Willa Cather.

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Wilder, Cather, and Sandoz - Writers of the Prairies

History and Old Stuff...

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) saw the Great Plains when it was still virgin prairie and wrote about it from a child's viewpoint for children. I am a big fan of Laura's writing. We have visited the Little House on the Prairie Museum at Independence, KS, and also the Wilder House and Museum at Mansfield, MO (twice!) What a thrill to see Pa's fiddle and to visit the very room where Laura wrote her stories by hand on a tablet of paper.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born only six years after Laura, but she wrote about the settlement of the Great Plains with an adult viewpoint for adults. Willa Cather's birthdate is similar to my great-grandparents. Some of my great-grandparents came to America and the Nebraska prairies as immigrants, very much like those around Red Cloud (Nebraska) whom Willa Cather wrote about. I have always loved Willa Cather for seeing and recording the very soul and spirit of that historic place and time.

Many people have told me that I should read Mari Sandoz (1896-1966). She wrote many books about the Nebraska Sandhills and the Great Plains, but I have only recently bought several of her books. I have started reading Love Song To The Plains, and I've posted a quote from it -- the opening paragraph of the book -- here in the sidebar.

My mother's family were early residents of Sheridan County, Nebraska, as was Mari's family. My grandmother and many other people from Gordon thought Jules Sandoz was a crazy, dangerous old coot, and that Mari painted too glowing a picture of him in her book, Old Jules. I heard this talk when I was a child, and my opinion of Mari Sandoz was tainted by their remarks. I didn't know that Mari herself had been abused both physically and mentally by her father, yet wrote of his accomplishments as a pioneer with respect.


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