A little western tour--iii

It seemed ridiculously simple, the promise as sweet as the balmy smell of new-cut hay. Sure it would be difficult. It wasn't a choice for sissies, and what you'd have to suffer for a year or two are conditions that wouldn't be inviting. That's here in the poster. Sort of.

But it was the promise of land, of ownership, of the freedom that goes with it. It was the dream of land of your own that drew them. Immigration posters like this one, created by railroad companies, came in a Babel of European languages--German and Dutch and Danish and a score of others. This particular poster hangs in the old railroad depot in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where a crew of specialty builders are, as we speak, retooling the place for eager readers of the novels of Willa Cather who visit.

Sure as anything, the promise held some white lies. After all, what's up there at the top of the poster and labeled "The Start" isn't inaccurate. In and around Red Cloud, when immigrants starting flowing in for their 80 acres of promise, they started, when they could, with clay shelving draws, like this one, convenient slashes in the ground, from which they could easily--well, with some sweat--create a dwelling to keep out the rain and snow and hail and wind and what not else. All you needed was a spade to make a home.

And what the old immigration poster shows is pretty much that. It's not a lie--well, if it is, it's a white one.

Sorry about the fuzziness, but even if it it was a sharper image it would be deceptively unclear. But, you know, it's not a damnable lie--"the start" is a soddie dugout in the side of the hill, the railroad never completely out of picture. Was it all a dream? No, some hard work was required. Might there be some unwelcome visitors from the animal kingdom?--sure. But the cause was righteous, wasn't it? Real possibilities for "your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to be free." 

And the second year. By the time the sun would rise on a perfect June morning, you'd have trees--cottonwoods and green ash--to keep off the sun, bring some relief from the stark sea of grass as far as you could see. Some shade for the weary. 

If you worked at it, the third year, or so the railroad company promised, there would be a handsome, mammoth crop of wheat just across a road that last year didn't even exist. And now how about a two-room frame place built from lumber cut from some river valley?--no more dirt floor, no more bugs and vermin. Sounds good, eh?

"Land for sale," the poster says, in Danish. Doesn't lie either, but it deals in half truths because there's no image extremes. A woman who grew up in the region told me years and years ago that how her uncle's family had moved from northwest Iowa to a neighborhood close by, intending to settle his family on cheap ground. Come warm May days, he sewed corn, just as he'd always done in Iowa. By July, the field was knee high, but a huge wind, hot as hades, blew in from the southwest and took out every last stalk. The next day already, she said, he put everything they owned on the wagon and started back east. 

By the fourth year, the cramped quarters of the little frame shack becomes something of a play house because just behind there's a brand new palace. This good land is that rich with promise. You buy this super cheap ground and after a spell of hardship any hard worker can weather, there's a kingdom here, a kingdom for everyone.

There's a church down the road--and neighbors just a spittin' distance away, life itself sprouting from soil so rich it births whole neighborhoods. Don't miss the brand new house either. The dugout's still there in the side of the clay shelving draw, but now it's a fruit cellar. And there's a new great house--two stories, bedrooms for all the kids and space for Grandma too. 

In six years, you've got a home more welcoming than anything left behind, a home that grows opportunities, a community.

Come one, come all. 

The truth is, many didn't find it as rich as the illustrations, but some did. The truth is, family life in a soddie was never a picnic and always more delightful in reminisce. The truth is, people died, were killed. Willa Cather's neighbor, Tony Shimerda's father, took a gun to his head when what once seemed to possible turned into total darkness.

But some made it. 

The Great Plains was the stage for two incredible epics running at one--the immense story of an endless stream of emigrant Euro-Americans like my own great-grandparents, who chased--and sometimes even created dreams that begat new life out here where once the buffalo roamed.

That's one huge story, and if you look closely at that slash of clay shelving above, and try to imagine yourself, spade in hand, creating a dugout for your family, it's hard not to be silenced, hard not to be awed. 

But there's another, too, because this land once belonged to the buffalo and the Native people who hunted them, a tribe of human beings whose way of life was clearly in the way of what?--of progress.  

Theirs is a story we seldom tell. We'd rather not.