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Willa Cather’s Nebraska: The Divide, Geologic Deep Time, and Indigenous Erasure in O, Pioneers!

by Jack Love

Introduction

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is a unique novel that employs environmental language prevalent in American Literature of the 19th and early 20th century. Though O Pioneers! is set on the Divide in Nebraskan farm country, there are moments in the text where Cather references past geological epochs when the entire lands of Nebraska were submerged beneath primordial oceans. In other instances, she compares the western landscape to prehistory when stones and soils were still being carved by slow-moving glaciers. I argue that Cather’s use of oceanic imagery and the geologic past obfuscates the more recent history and existing presence of indigenous peoples on the Nebraska Divide. In O Pioneers!, these repeated references to deep time serve as rhetorical tools that justify and even celebrate white American westward expansion. No space is given to an indigenous perspective of the landscape. Instead, Cather’s Nebraska is either an ancient, empty frontier shaped by geologic forces, or a series of fenced away properties constructed according to western land relations. Ultimately, it is because O, Pioneers! depicts the landscape as either empty or owned by European migrants that indigenous presence in the same space is minimized so drastically.  

The Nebraskan Frontier and Geologic Oceans

In the first few pages of the narrative, readers are introduced to the small town of Hanover, Nebraska. The town sits on the “Nebraska tableland […] trying not to be blown away” (Cather 1913: 5). The structures and homes in the town did not have “any appearance of permanence,” and Alexandra Bergson and her Swedish immigrant family labor endlessly on the barren land (Cather 1913: 5). Cather writes, “But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of society that struggled in its sombre [sic] wastes” (Cather 1913: 10). Early in the novel, Cather illustrates the Nebraska tablelands in the typical frontier fashion where humanity struggles against nature unceasingly. Nature stands in hostile opposition to society, and as the narrative progresses, Alexandra Bergson becomes the figure who seems to have the capability to finally “overcome” the Nebraskan fields. 

Alexandra Bergson’s figure complicates the typical frontier language that places nature in opposition to society. For example, while traveling the countryside, Emil Bergson, the younger brother of Alexandra, investigates his sister’s radiant and joy-filled face as she looks about the vast fields: “For the first time, perhaps, since the land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning” (Cather 1913: 35). The windblown prairie of the Divide, which at first seems hostile to human habitation, is a pastoral and beloved place in the eyes of Alexandra Bergson. Such imagery serves as a reminder that even regions in the Great Plains are “haunted by the ghosts of the Cretaceous Western Interior Sea” where “the memories of the ancient sea manifest in the teeth of Megalodon and other oceanic fossils found along riverbanks and in the rich soils of the tilled fields” (Dobrin 2021: 16). As Sid Dobrin argues in Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative, the sea impacts all lands on the globe, even places like Nebraska that seem so removed from the salt waters of the world ocean. (Dobrin 2021: 229). Willa Cather’s novel seems to anticipate Dobrin’s point. By describing Alexandra Bergson’s connection with Nebraska in this way, O, Pioneers! seems to set forth a blue ecocritical paradigm that places great emphasis on the sea. However, as I will show, Cather also utilizes the ocean as a rhetorical device for American expansion.

Cather’s oceanic imagery suggests that the Nebraska Divide was only recently raised from the watery depths of earth. As Alexandra Bergson travels with her brother, the countryside “seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until the tears blinded her” (Cather 1913: 35). The narrative intimates that Alexandra is the only human living on the Divide, or in Hanover at the very least, who can appreciate the beauty of the windblown environment. This imagery also suggests that Alexandra and her Swedish family are among the first humans to dwell on the land—a claim that is patently false. Because of Alexandra’s fondness for the rolling prairies, “the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before” (Cather 1913: 35). The “human will” in this passage is Alexandra Bergson’s individual devotion to the land. Her love for the environment allows her a degree of control over it greater than any other human before her. This is a common theme throughout the novel. Alexandra’s older brothers who work alongside her envy her expertise and general affinity for the landscape; other European immigrant families struggle to pay off their loans farming the countryside; and a French immigrant named Amédée even suffers from a violent illness while laboring in the fields. Alexandra Bergson, on the other hand, has a particular devotion to her fields that allows her mastery over the windswept lands. The narrative even suggests that she ushers her region of Nebraska into human history. Take, for instance, the final sentence of the ocean imagery paragraph: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman” (Cather 1913: 35). O Pioneers! poses that the history of the Divide derives from the heart of Alexandra Bergson. 

Indigenous Absence and Presence in O, Pioneers!

This use of ancient geologic oceans in Cather’s novel privileges the frontier narrative where American and European migrants rapidly moved westward, “taming” the landscape and transforming it into a replica of European-American society. By suggesting that Alexandra is the first human to love and admire the Divide since its emergence from the primordial waters, O Pioneers! completely obscures indigenous presence on that very same landscape. While Sid Dobrin is right to draw attention to the way oceanic environments impact even the most landlocked places, Cather’s novel demonstrates how the use of geologic time and oceanic imagery can serve a colonial purpose. Indigenous erasure in O Pioneers! goes further than just one textual example. When Carl Linstrum, Alexandra’s love interest in the narrative, returns to Hanover after traveling about the country, the two discuss the changes to the land since his last visit. Though he is genuinely surprised at the change Alexandra has brought to her fields, he is not shocked by occurrences which have preoccupied those laborers who work the land—births, deaths, marriages, and conventional occurrences of human life. He tells Alexandra, “Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years” (Cather 1913: 63). Again, the novel meditates on the distant past and the persistence of habit in human and nonhuman life. Yet, indigenous human life is notedly absent from Carl’s comment. The “two or three human stories” he details extend only to Americans and European immigrants toiling the Divide. After all, Carl makes this comment only after Alexandra begins to reminisce on her deceased father and mother who first brought their family to the American West. Though Carl is speaking very generally, he is not referencing any form of indigenous life in this sweeping claim. When he gestures beyond this immediate history of pioneer life, Carl imagines a slightly more distant past void of humanity completely. The larks that sing over the prairies for thousands of years seem to do so in the absence of any human presence. Consequently, the narrative once again imagines the Nebraska Divide as a relatively new plot of land only recently inhabited by humans. Indigenous peoples do not figure in any way onto this landscape in the mind of Carl or even the narrator of the novel.

Indigenous presence in Hanover is not completely neglected in Cather’s novel. However, Cather typically gestures to indigenous presence through indirect references. Like many other American writers, she characterizes indigenous peoples in North America as “fossil others,” to use Dana Luciano’s term from How the Earth Feels: Geologic Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States. For Luciano, the “fossil other” is a particular rhetorical tool within the larger trope of indigenous extinction that “remade land for the support of settlers, imagining not just polities but entire ecologies designed to promote the growth of settlements” (Luciano 2024: 24). The indigenous extinction trope was a common metaphor of nineteenth century and early twentieth century American frontier discourse. It is a geologic fantasy that imagined indigenous peoples as endangered or doomed to extinction, thus justifying the colonial expansion westward. Luciano cites a host of American literary figures who utilized the indigenous extinction trope and geologic rhetoric more generally, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to transcendental thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even Walt Whitman, whose poetry inspired the title of Cather’s novel, employs geologic language in some of his prose work (Luciano 2024: 32). Luciano explains, “[t]he fossil other designated those ‘archaic, stunted, undeveloped forms’ of the human that fell off from the flow of life and were preserved unchanged as relics of other, now-surpassed worlds” (Luciano 2024: 25). When Cather acknowledges indigenous presence in Nebraska, she does so from the perspective of Luciano’s fossil other.

For example, when Alexandra Bergson is still a young child, her father and older brothers worked the inhospitable land after crossing the Atlantic from their home in Sweden. For the Bergson family, North America was “depressing and disheartening” (Cather 1913: 13). The houses in Hanover were small and built of sod; the roads were only “faint tracks,” and “the fields were scarcely noticeable” (Cather 1913: 13). Human presence in the region is minimal, and the narrative makes it clear that this mere scratch of human intervention applies not just to the present but also the past. The narrative continues, “The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings” (Cather 1913: 13). Even though Cather is talking about two separate instances linked through simile (plow record and rock record), the two parallel illustrations become entangled. The “feeble scratches” Cather sketches here are purely metaphorical, but they resonate with the idea of the a “plow record” that documents the history of human agricultural labor in the prairie soils of the Divide. In both, human presence manifests in earthen sediment, whether it be soil or stone. By suggesting that the “plow record” is like some “indeterminate” scratches on stone that could signify ancient humans or glacial markings, Cather draws a line between her Nebraska setting and this imagined “rock record” scenario. Just like this imaginary stone, then, O Pioneers! consistently leaves indigenous presence indeterminate or obscure through water-based, deep time images like glaciers rolling across the wild North American prairies. Cather is quick to move back to geologic deep time, but she rarely acknowledges the indigenous presence on the landscape in between these old ages of the earth and European-American settler colonialism of the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

At the end of the novel, speaking to Carl Linstrum, Alexandra claims, “‘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’” (Cather 1913: 160). Though this comment does reflect a certain environmental consciousness, Alexandra still only speaks of American-European migrants who live on the Divide. If she is the first to “love” and “understand” the land since it first emerged from the ancient waters, then only those who come after her can “own” it. Hence, indigenous peoples do not figure into Alexandra’s conception of property rights whatsoever despite their continued presence on the Great Plains today. For this reason, one might easily question how well Alexandra, and perhaps Willa Cather by extension, understand the Nebraskan Divide. 

Willa Cather’s fiction shows us the way 19th and 20th American writers imagined deep time well before the Anthropocene became a common focal point of environmental study in our current century. As useful as geologic thought can be, Cather’s novel illustrates how deep time itself can also serve as a tool for settler colonialism. The Nebraska we see in O, Pioneers! only becomes a habitable place with a historical background after Alexandra Bergson and her fellow migrants settle the land. Beforehand, it was just an empty, wild place where indigenous presence itself is almost completely ignored.


About the Author

Jack Love is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at Texas A&M University where he studies American Literature and ecocriticism. He has published work in the Oxford Handbook of American Street Literature (forthcoming), Christianity & Literature, and JAWS. He has presented his work at international venues including ASLE, the Living with Water Online Seminar Series, and the 2023 PhD seminar at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, Netherlands.

Email: jlove@tamu.edu. Bluesky: jlove4.bsky.social.


References

Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! 1913. Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003.

Dobrin, Sidney I. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative. Taylor & Francis, 2021.

Luciano, Dana. How the Earth Feels: Geologic Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Duke UP, 2024.

 

Jack Love
Jack Love

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jack Love (May 21, 2025). Willa Cather’s Nebraska: The Divide, Geologic Deep Time, and Indigenous Erasure in O, Pioneers! HCA Graduate Blog. Retrieved June 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13zp2


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