O Pioneers!

This year our book club read My Antonia (1918) by Willa Cather (to replace a book we did not want to read) and last year we read The Song of the Lark (1915) So, when I found O Pioneers! (1913) at a Goodwill store a couple of weeks ago, I decided to finish off this trilogy of novels.

The title comes from a Walt Whitman poem “Pioneers, O Pioneers!.” The poem praises the youth and strength and vigor of the people who came to the prairie to settle and work the land, and that’s what Cather’s stories of the hardy European immigrants who made new lives for themselves in Nebraska did. Life was hard in the 1870s mid-West. Settlers built themselves sod huts to live in, worked from sunrise to sunset at manual labor to plow the land, and endured unbearable heat in the summer and cold in the winter. They had to be tougher than whatever the land threw at them just to survive, much less thrive. (Good thing they were stronger than the whiny, entitled, fearful people of today.)

Of the three books, The Song of the Lark is the outlier.  Thea Kronborg leaves her home in Colorado to become an opera singer while Antonia Shimerda and Alexandra Bergson struggle with the land to build lives for themselves and the generations that will follow them. The thing that the three of them have in common is the will to fight for what they want and to do what they need to do to achieve their goals, no matter how hard it is and how much it takes out of them.

My least favorite heroine is Thea Kronborg, not because she left her home, but because she seems to be so self-absorbed that she easily overlooks the family and friends that sacrificed so much to help her realize her dreams. Antonia works hard to support her parents and siblings and then her own large family. After her father dies, Alexandra puts her head for business to work to make the family farm bigger by buying more and more land, providing for her brothers who did the heavy labor but never would have been able to accumulate the wealth that Alexandra did. The land is in the blood and sweat, the makeup, of these two women and they symbolize all the people whose strength and determination built this country. Getting through a mid-West winter is hard enough with all the comforts we have now. I can’t imagine what it was like for these pioneers and I salute them.