A little western tour--vi

 

Clearly, the Cathers made it on "the divide." This house, set back in the trees on a gravel road south of Bladen, NE, is a B and B today, if you're interested. And it should be. It was--and still is--a show house. Even if the builder's niece, a woman who won a Pulitzer Prize and unending literary glory, never lived here, this fine country estate is stunning for its region of rural Nebraska. 

There's a cemetery just down the road, a cemetery that could just as well be called "the Cather cemetery" and likely is, given the number of family members buried therein. 

Unfortunately, I hadn't read the tour's small print close enough to know that G. P. Cather, the fallen World War I hero--the mortal remains of the first officer from Nebraska to be killed in the "War to End All Wars," isn't here. Neither is Willa herself, who left Red Cloud, Nebraska, for good when she left for college, even if Red Cloud never really left her. She's buried out east--that I knew. But I thought G. P. would be here, so I got out of the car at a woebegone country graveyard I hadn't visited on previous trips, and I looked around a bit, picking up at least two ticks, one of whom found me intimately before I discovered him.

The Cather cemetery is not well kept--just sayin'. Somebody--I'm told there are still Cathers in the area--really should take a mower out there or let a dozen sheep loose. It's a kind of mess right now, but it's definitely a Cather cemetery.

Those whose mortal coils reside there include some descendants, at least one of which became a famous story-teller himself, a man, an artist responsible, at least in part for one of our long-ago favorite series, Hill Street Blues, a urban television drama set in an unknown city about as far away as could be from Cather Township.

Cather Township cemetery is not a particularly upbeat place (some cemeteries can be, by the way). It's downright unruly, given the particular interest is holds for people as silly about the past as I am. Then again, without two of its most famous family members, in whatever sheer fame Willa has received, the Cather Township cemetery earns little more, at best, than an asterisk.

I got back to the car, read the map a bit closer, and discovered that G. P. wasn't here but down the road in Bladen, a stop I didn't figure on but had to make. 

Didn't get far down the road either before discovering one of those blasted ticks.