They’ve all disappeared, except “a few of the very toughest and hardiest,” which settle “only in the bottom of the draws and gullies.” The settlers felt themselves “too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.” Even wild flowers, a symbol for youthful spirit if ever there was one, are snuffed out by the brutality of the plains. In the novel’s opening section, this “dark country” feels like “the end of the earth” the expanse is so immense that it seems “to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.” To some extent, Cather is speaking literally: the settlers’ houses are built out of the sod itself, and so tiny, that they are invisible to the eye sweeping across the plain-“you did not see them until you came directly upon them.” But the landscape’s vast dreariness also wreaks psychological damage. It is in this context that one should read Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which follows the lives of several mentally unstable Nebraskan homesteaders between 18. American farmers were doomed to insanity.

It was too late to reconfigure the organization of the land, and the spirit of isolation-or self-reliance, to give it a grander name-had become ingrained in the local character. By 1908 the problem had become so dire that Theodore Roosevelt created a Commission on Country Life to improve social conditions for farmers and eliminate “the disadvantages which are due to the isolation of the family farm.” Roosevelt’s commission ended in failure. Since greed tended to prevail over comity, the Great Plains bred depressives and sociopaths. As the size of a settler’s plot increased, so did the distance he would have to travel to visit his neighbor. That meant towns, or even villages, were almost inconceivable. The legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, decreed that a settler had to live on his acreage for five years in order to perfect his title. In The Americans, the historian Daniel Boorstin traced the madness of the farmers to the Homestead Act of 1862.

Willa cather pioneers