The Rim of the Prairie

The Rim of the Prairie by Bess Streeter Aldrich is her second novel. Published in 1925, it preceded her better-known A Lantern in Her Hand. I read that book as a girl and was moved by the romantic picture of the Nebraska pioneers, struggling through hardships to build a farming community on a land which had known only grass. The Rim of the Prairie shows us the same people who inhabit A Lantern in Her Hand, in the mid twenties, looking back at what they accomplished, and mostly they find it is good.

“Nebraska is conquered,” Warner went on…. “Fields are fertile. Orchards are fruitful. Pastures yield their heavy gifts. There are are cattle on a thousand hills. Great consolidated schools, substantial and comfortable, flags without and libraries within, center in many districts. And all in one man’s lifetime!”

Warner and the others look back with pride. They cannot look forward to see a day when the family farms are mostly gone, and the pleasant towns are shrinking. What we have now is commercial agriculture: big fields, big expenses, big crops. The picture above, which I took last year, shows the Nebraska prairie as it is now. Within 150 years, this land has been three different worlds: the tallgrass prairie of the Indians, the homesteads of the pioneers, and the big-field landscape of today.

Aldrich’s novel, written to celebrate the success of the pioneers captures a time when women know that their best cause is home and family, when kind neighbors leave wood by a widow’s back door, and when the snobbish banker’s daughter plays the piano and waits for a husband. Progress is plowing the land and the Indians are recalled only as a menace which is now, thankfully, gone. They sometimes complain about the social changes of a modern world, but they do not fear its technology. They welcome the railroad and the tractor.

Even so, Uncle Jud, who came in a horse and wagon and broke the prairie sod, knows that something has been lost.

“And he’s going to plow up that one piece of pasture of mine that’s real prairie,” he went on. “I got one piece, you know . . . it’s only ten acres . . . but it’s virgin prairie. I been keepin’ that all these years. Every year the teachers bring the children in their classes out ‘n show ‘em. I’m the only one in the whole community, maybe country as far as I know that’s kept any.”

Before I went to Nebraska myself, I visualized the prairie as grass, good grass but just grass, like an uncut suburban lawn. The tallgrass prairie, the areas that get enough rain to support modern agriculture, is much more beautiful than anybody’s lawn. It is a community of plants, rich in its diversity. Like Uncle Jud, be sure to save some for the children to see.

Update -
Click here for some wonderful pictures of the prairie.

Prairie Tree Letters

Lorraine Watkins, with the help of her brother David, has assembled and transcribed a treasury of family letters. Having done a little of this kind of thing myself, I know how many hours of unseen work (and thought) have to go into such a project.

These letters span 100 years from 1843 to the mid 20th century. They bring us the members of the Clark, Hirst and Watkins families, unvarnished and – mostly – unafraid. They are people in their time, unknowing of the times to come.

Religion is important but doesn’t always work.

[Orenus Hart, 1852] The Methodists have just closed a protracted meeting at the Center in their usually noisy Manner. March 3rd After two weeks meeting by night & by day they have succeeded in taking 24 under their charge. For some six months nine of whom they immersed… & some 7 or 8 have lost their good feelings already.

A son and brother goes to the California gold fields.

[R. P. Hirst, 1854] The company with which I am compelled to associate is good company for this country but not moral. Society here is entirely different from that in the states. People have come here as a general thing for the sole purpose of making money…. All the energies of the man both of mind & body are brought to bear on this one point with an intensity that perfectly astonishes one until he becomes familiar with California life.

Money is especially important to a widow with many children and few other resources.

[Mary M. Clark, 1869] I fear that I never shall get up there. I have lost so much property since the death of your Dear Uncle that I don’t expect that I can come. If I could sell out and get a reasonable price for what I have here and had someone to go with me through the Indian Territory believe I would go next spring…. Your cousin Tommy is nearly 18 years old and he is a brave boy.

I could give more excerpts, but they cannot provide the flavor of years of letters which include the insightful and the mundane, along with all the business of daily life: illness, birth of children, death in the family, education, travel, success and failure. Visit the Prairie Tree website for more about this remarkable family and the letters we can all appreciate.

Many have written the story of the immigrant, the hopeful stranger who arrives in a new land. For example, in Hungarian Memories I have told the story of my husband, who arrived in New York from Hungary in 1946. The Prairie Tree letters tell of a different immigrant experience and one that is congruent with my own roots. The forebears came early, met and married one another and moved out in the 19th century to populate a new land which, in many ways, was just a strange to them as New York was to Julius.