WILLA CATHER’S RED CLOUD–Who the heck was Willa Cather and why should we care?

What happens to our collective memory of famous or extraordinary people now long gone, especially when those who knew or revered them are long gone, too? It’s something I often ponder when reading about rural places that proudly proclaim themselves the former hometown of someone the rest of us may not know. Take Iola, Kansas. It boasts the boyhood home of Major General Frederick Funston, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to see it. But Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, in Nebraska?

Even if you don’t know who Willa Cather is, even if you’ve never read any of her works, in Red Cloud you can’t help but be drawn in by the places and characters she wrote about more than 100 years ago. If you have read her novels, Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, population around 1,000, will seem vaguely familiar.

That’s because Willa Cather’s Red Cloud served as the fictional small town in six of her 12 novels, and many of her characters were drawn from townspeople she knew. More importantly, 26 individual sites related to Cather’s life and writings dot the rural town and countryside, from homes to churches to cemeteries. Together, they comprise the largest collection of nationally designated sites dedicated to a single American author in the country. Think about that. There’s something almost spiritual about gazing upon the wallpaper Cather herself picked out and installed as a teenager and later wrote about in The Song of the Lark. In Red Cloud, Cather’s writing leaps out of the page like a stage set.  

How Willa Cather, long gone, came to be remembered

It’s a symbiotic relationship, that between Willa Cather and Red Cloud. Cather put Red Cloud on the map. Red Cloud preserves her legacy and attracts Cather fans from around the world.

Still, it’s no exaggeration to say that Red Cloud, in south-central Nebraska just six miles north of the Kansas border, is in the middle of nowhere, about a 200-mile drive from Omaha and 275 miles from Kansas City. To my mind, that’s one of the reasons you want to go.

Of course, none of this would matter if Cather hadn’t been one of the most famous writers of her time. And her story-telling still holds up. She wrote poignantly about a time and people that no longer exist, when prairie stretched as far as the eye could see and immigrants–mostly German, Czech, Swiss, and Scandinavian–poured in to stake claims and eke out a meager, and sometimes tragic, existence on the land. For those who enjoy historical fiction, this is the real deal.

“The writing is beautiful and nailed what the land was like before it was divided and sectioned off,” a friend of mine said after recently reading My Ántonia, Cather’s most famous book, published in 1918. “It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.”

Who was Willa Cather?

Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, on December 7, 1873, the oldest of seven children. When she was nine, her family traveled by train to Red Cloud and continued 16 miles by wagon to a homestead on the prairie. The emptiness of the landscape shocked her. Cather described her first glimpse of Nebraska in My Ántonia:

“Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it…”

She later wrote about how the vast prairies made a lasting impression: “This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake.”

The Cathers move into Red Cloud

Fewer than two years later, in 1884, the Cathers moved into Red Cloud, population 2,500, where Willa’s father opened a downtown farm loan and insurance business and the family rented a small frame house just a few blocks away. In The Song of the Lark, considered the most autobiographical of Willa’s novels, protagonist Thea’s bedroom serves as the girl’s refuge and a stand-in for Willa’s own room:

“The ceiling was so low that a grown person could reach it with the palm of the hand, and it sloped down on either side. There was only one window, but it was a double one and went to the floor…The acquisition of this room was the beginning of a new era in Thea’s life. It was one of the most important things that ever happened to her…In the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs sleeping room, her mind worked better. She thought things out more clearly..”

Having previously attended a one-room schoolhouse in the country, Willa found Red Cloud both bustling and educational. She learned Greek, Latin, French, and German. She sought out immigrant families, absorbing their cultures and stories. She found great inspiration at the Red Cloud Opera, which regularly hosted traveling companies performing well-known plays and operas.

In 1888, as a teenager, Willa got a crew cut, put on a derby, signed her name as “Wm. Cather M.D,” and donned a mustache to play a man in Beauty and the Beast at the Opera House. She was clearly already her own person.

Willa Cather’s later life

She was also ahead of her time. After attending college in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska and working as a reporter in Pittsburgh, in 1908 she became managing editor in New York City of McClure’s, one of the most popular magazines of the 20th century. But after touring the American Southwest, she quit just four years later to focus on her own writing. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (based on the experiences and death of a cousin during World War I), was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Princeton and was on the cover of Time Magazine. My Ántonia is on the Library of Congress list of 100 novels that shaped America.

Other novels she wrote include O Pioneers! (1913), which focuses on the immigrant experience of Swedish settlers; The Professor’s House (1925), about materialism vs what matters most; and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), about Catholics establishing a diocese in New Mexico Territory.

Yet the more I learned about Willa Cather, the more complicated she became. She didn’t leave any journals that we know of, which I find very odd for a writer (I’ve kept one since I was 12). She destroyed or forbade the publication of her letters. And although she lived in New York City for almost 40 years with another woman, Edith Lewis, we can only surmise at Cather’s sexual orientation. In a letter to her brother, Willa wrote about authors who “left no ‘representatives’ but their own books–and that is best.” Cather’s novels and short stories are among the best clues we have as to her thoughts and experiences.

Cather’s last visit to Red Cloud was in 1931. On April 24, 1947, she died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73. She’s buried in the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire; the grave of Edith Lewis is beside her. Cather’s simple tombstone has an inscription from My Ántonia: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

Funeral services for Willa Cather were held in New York City and at Red Cloud’s Grace Episcopal Church, which she joined in 1922.

Willa Cather’s Red Cloud

The Homestead Act of 1862 opened millions of acres to settlers as a means to develop the American West (never mind the Native Americans who were already there). Any adult citizen–or intended citizen–could claim 160 acres of unappropriated public land if they lived and improved upon it for five years. In 1867, Nebraska became a state. Both Americans and immigrants seeking a better life flocked to Nebraska, but conditions were harsh. Lack of trees meant many families lived in dugouts or sod houses. Isolation, severe winters that blanketed livestock with snow, drought, and swarms of grasshoppers made life challenging.

Red Cloud was officially founded in 1871, was named after an Oglala chief, and was chosen as the seat of Webster County. All these official beginnings took place in a dugout belonging to homesteader Silas Garber, who later served as a Nebraska governor and the prototype for Captain Forrester in Cather’s novel A Lost Lady (1923).

Webster County in the early 1870s was still prairie and home to buffalo herds; Red Cloud’s first July 4 celebration was interrupted by a buffalo stampede. It didn’t help that millions of locusts darkened the skies and descended in such swarms in 1874, the aftermath looked like a fire had swept through. But homesteaders and entrepreneurs kept coming. Before long, Nebraska’s great plains would be changed forever.

After Red Cloud’s founding, as many as 50 wagons of homesteaders began arriving every day. Soon the town had a hotel, drug store, general store, and newspaper, the Red Cloud Chief, published until 2024. But the real shot in the arm were the railroads, which reached Red Cloud in 1879 and brought with them land grants that were aggressively sold to finance track lines and promote farming and rapid settlement, luring even more Americans and immigrants to Nebraska. It wasn’t long before trains from Kansas City, Denver and Chicago delivered passengers to Red Cloud as many as eight times a day.

Cather wrote about what she knew

It was into this world of flux that Cather found herself after arriving in Nebraska in 1883. In fact, you could say that Red Cloud and Willa Cather grew up together.

The Opera House, train depot, homesteads, homes, and other sites within and outside Red Cloud were ingrained in Cather’s memory and became settings in her works. Willa Cather’s Red Cloud served as the prototype for the small towns in her novels, though she changed their names so that it was Hanover in O Pioneers!, Black Hawk in My Ántonia, Moonstone in The Song of the Lark, and Sweet Water in A Lost Lady. Every one of these novels reveals a little more about Willa Cather’s Red Cloud.

In addition to the Garbers and her cousin, other townspeople became characters in her works. She was often at the home of her neighbors, the J.L. Miner family, who were very well to do and were so influential in Willa’s life that they became the Harlings in My Ántonia.

But the inspiration for Cather’s best-known novel was Anna Sadilek, a Bohemian (Czech) immigrant hired by the Miner family as a house helper. Anna worked to help support her family after her father, a weaver and tailor by trade, committed suicide and was buried at a rural crossroad (taking his own life prevented internment in a cemetery, but he was later moved to the Red Cloud cemetery next to his wife and son). Anna was later lured west by a man who abandoned her after she became pregnant. Willa took note of it all.

Anna returned to Red Cloud and later married John Pavelka. Together they had 12 children and lived on a farm north of Red Cloud. In 1916, Cather visited Anna and her boisterous brood, which triggered her to write about Anna’s life as Antonia. At the end of the novel, Cather’s description of the farm’s root cellar and Anna’s many children make us feel like we are present in the moment: “Antonia and I went up the stairs first, and the children waited. We were standing outside talking, when they all came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight.”

Nearby Cloverton Cemetery, yet another site associated with Cather, sits on land donated by the Pavelka family. Anna, who died exactly eight years to the day after Willa passed, is buried here, along with her husband and several of their children, including twins who died in infancy. John Pavelka is thought to be the model for Cather’s short story “Neighbour Rosicky,” about a Czech immigrant farmer with a bad heart who reflects on his life and finds joy in simple things over material wealth. I love this passage:

“This was really a beautiful graveyard. He thought of the city cemeteries; acres of shrubbery and heavy stone, so arranged and lonely and unlike anything in the living world. Cities of the dead, indeed; cities of the forgotten, of the ‘put away.’ But this was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind forever stirred. Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-colored fields running on until they met that sky.”  

Red Cloud’s population peaked in 1894 at several thousand residents, but by then the experiences of the earliest settlers had long passed. Luckily for us, Cather gave voice to the people, places, and events that otherwise would be forgotten. She explained what led her to write one of her first novels, Oh Pioneers!, in an article published in the Omaha World-Herald in 1921:

“My deepest feelings were rooted in this country because one’s strongest emotions and one’s most vivid mental pictures are acquired before one is 15. I had searched for books telling about the beauty of the country I loved, its romance, and heroism and strength and courage of its people that had been plowed into the very furrows of its soil, and I did not find them. And so I wrote O Pioneers! “

Red Cloud Today

Willa Cather’s Red Cloud has dwindled to fewer than half its population since she lived there. More than a few of its downtown businesses and homes stand empty, but it’s faring better than many other rural towns I’ve seen in Kansas and Nebraska. As the seat of Webster County, Red Cloud boasts a county hospital, a post office, churches, schools, a community center, a city pool, a funeral home, the locally owned Hometown Market grocery store on its main street, a Casey’s, and a Dollar General. Silos stand witness to the fact that the economy centers on corn and soybeans; cattle are also big.

But I think it’s safe to say that Red Cloud wouldn’t be what it is today without Willa Cather, nor without people like Mildred Bennett who early on recognized that literary tourism could complement the written word. In addition to gathering photographs and documents related to Cather and early Red Cloud, the group founded the non-profit Willa Cather Foundation in 1955 to preserve sites important to Cather’s life and writings.

Today those sites include the Opera House, the Farmers and Merchants Bank, the Cather Childhood Home, the Burlington Depot, the Pavelka Farmstead, the Cather Second Home, the Miner House, the Catholic and Episcopal churches, and the historic Moon Block, home to the National Willa Cather Center.

How to experience Willa Cather’s Red Cloud

In today’s fast-changing world, there’s something reassuring about a small town you can recognize from novels written a century ago. The bones of Willa Cather’s Red Cloud are the same, and many of the older homes would have been there when Willa walked its streets. The east side of town still has the modest homes that Cather wrote belonged to the “humbler” people, some with a horse in the yard, while newer homes occupy the west side, most of them ranch style and none of them ostentatious.

Your first stop should be the National Willa Cather Center on North Webster, the town’s wide brick main street in the two-block downtown. It contains a museum and the nation’s largest literary archive dedicated to the writer, as well as a bookstore, a gift shop, and showings of a 45-minute documentary narrated by Ken Burns.

You can also pay for guided tours that give access to historic sites owned by the Willa Cather Center, some of them with exhibits that give a broader perspective of Cather and Red Cloud’s history. The most popular tour is of the Cather Childhood Home, which contains some furniture and objects belonging to the Cathers. The Three-Building Tour adds the Opera House and Farmers and Merchants Bank, while the Seven-Building Tour includes those as well as the depot, the St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church, the J.L. Miner House, and Grace Episcopal Church. You can also pick up a leaflet and map at the Willa Cather Center for self-guided tours to 24 places around town that include the sites listed above, though you won’t be able to enter any of them.

If you have more time, I highly recommend paying for the guided Country Tour, for which you drive your own car 50 miles on a circular route to 20 sites, including the Pavelka Farmstead, Cloverton Cemetery, churches, and other places, passing silos, farms, irrigation pivots, wind turbines, cows, dried-up ponds, and prairie along the way. It’s a good overview of rural Nebraska.

Otherwise, outside of harvest time, you’re likely to find Red Cloud a sleepy little town (its busiest tourist seasons are the annual Street Car Days in summer and the Willa Cather Spring Conference, which attracts Cather fans from around the world). While I saw some kids riding bikes or a few people walking downtown during my three-day visit, the town seemed eerily empty. The only activity I saw on a Saturday night were crows and starlings scavenging in the middle of main street. I suppose that’s why some residents like it.

“Ten or twenty years ago, I thought I would move some place better, but there is no place better,” says Mark Davis from behind the wine bar at On the Brix, located on Webster. “For raising a family, it’s hard to beat Nebraska, and it’s hard to beat small towns.”  

Cather would concur. In a letter to her childhood friend, Carrie Miner Sherwood, Cather wrote: “I am not exaggerating Carrie, when I confide to you that I would rather go to Red Cloud than to any of the beautiful cities in Europe where I used to love to go.”

For me, being in Willa Cather’s Red Cloud made me yearn for the days before digital distractions, when we walked and took notice of the things around us instead of staring into a phone, when theater, movies, books, and stories were the only things that transported us out of our existence into another world.

That’s why I love Cather. I envy her observations and use of words, the way a short phrase like a “fussy white fence” around a house lets us know exactly what kind of people live there. I’m especially drawn to her descriptions of nature, with prairies a reoccurring theme. Be sure to visit the free Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, where you can roam 612 acres of native prairie under an endless sky, getting a feel for what Cather herself might have experienced. In My Ántonia, she wrote:

“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea…and there was so much motion in it, the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

“There’s something interesting about Cather’s work in that you can go back and read it time and again,” says Tracy Sanford Tucker, director of Collections and Curation at the National Willa Cather Center. “There’s something there you can take away and feel hopeful.”

Indeed. If you read Willa Cather when you were young, you should go back and read her again. If you’ve never read her, pick up a novel and read about a place, a time, and a people from long ago. Because, really, Willa Cather’s Red Cloud is the story of us all.

Eating and staying in Willa Cather’s Red Cloud

For Cather fans, the best place to stay is the Cather Second Home Guest House, an Airbnb owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation. You can rent a room or the whole house.

The Cathers lived here from 1903 to 1944 after Willa left home, but she came for visits. Staying here made me feel Cather’s presence more than anywhere else, as though layers of time, of voices, activity, family, coexisted with my own. My favorite spot was the wrap-around front porch.

Another option is the 27-room boutique Hotel Garber, named after Silas Garber and occupying a rehabbed 1902 building in downtown Red Cloud. It’s also home to Red Cloud’s fanciest dining option, Forrester’s Restaurant and Lounge.

The largest restaurant in town is The Palace Lounge, in business for over 50 years and attracting lots of locals for its Saturday dinner buffet and steaks. Juan’s Bar & Grill serves sandwiches, burgers, and tacos and because it’s a bar, is open later than the other options.

Alley Cats Bowling is the quirkiest place to eat, located in a downtown six-lane bowling alley and famous for its Reuben sandwiches with homemade corned beef. Otherwise, a refined place for a glass of wine, cocktail or local craft brew along with a charcuterie board is On the Brix, located in the restored Moon Block next to the National Willa Cather Center.

For more blogs on famous people (which I find very hard to write, by the way), see Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin and Finding Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada, Spain.