| Page | Detail | Explanation or Comments |
|---|
| ix | "stimulating extremes of climate" | This is what geographers call a continental climate, and chambers of commerce call a four-season climate. A "normal" July high in Red Cloud, according to the state climatologist, is 91o. A normal low in January is 9o. |
| 14 | "the sorghum patch behind the barn" | Sorghums are useful plants of African origin. Modern farmers on the plains raise some sorghums for forage (hay and silage) and others (generally called "milo" in Nebraska) for feed grain. Cather's reference, however, is to tall sorghum cane grown for the sap, which was used to make sorghum syrup, the common sweetener of farm families. My grandfather Dunekack had a passion for sorghum. It is bitter to the modern palate. See also p. 22. |
| 14 | "rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I" | Cather frequently refers to the "red grass" of Nebraska. She is talking about bluestem, mainly little bluestem in this part of the central plains, although some better lands might support big bluestem. This is an early season grass that turns color in late summer; the color is, as Cather would have it, closer to red than to blue; I would call it an amber maroon. See also p. 38 for "copper-red grass," also pp. 60, 298, 311, 358. |
| 14 | "a thick-set strip of box-elder trees" | Box-elders are a type of maple; on the northern plains they are commonly called Manitoba maple, and some people even tap them to make sugar. The box-elder makes a good shelterbelt plant on the plains because it is relatively drought-hardy. It hosts the colorful box-elder bug, which swarms spectacularly on warm shed walls in the autumn. The box-elder seed-pod has two wings, so that if you tear it in half and throw half into the air, it makes a little helicopter spinning to ground. |
| 15 | "a heavy corn-knife" | This was a long-bladed, heavy knife, almost a machete, that was used to cut corn for forage in the days before corn binders. It was not a kitchen knife. |
| 17 | "That's a badger hole" | What is the deal with Cather and badgers? Badgers everywhere. This may be merely because badgers figure so prominently in the lore of the plains. People love to tell stories about badgers, even though they rarely see them. Mostly they just see the evidence of the badger--the big holes and mounds of fresh earth that result from the beast's pursuit of burrowing prey. Badgers are retiring creatures, but when cornered by farm dogs, they are full of fight, and generally can fend off attack by two dogs. This is not the same species as the European badger. The Nebraska badger was not at all the same beast that the Shimerdas whould have known in the old country. See also pp. 20, 36-37, 68, 73. |
| 17 | "There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows" | Ground-cherries are not cherries at all, but they were grown and used as a fruit substitute by pioneer women on the plains. Before this plains Indians commonly made use of them. The ground-cherry is of the nightshade family and grows somewhat similarly to a tomatillo, that is, the fruit is encased in a papery hood. The fruit, about the size of a cherry, is yellow-orange and tastes like a sweet tomato. Mixed with sugar in a pastry, ground cherries are surprisingly delicious, tasting a bit like peaches. See also p. 30. |
| 19 | "all along it [the road] the sunflowers grew" | Sunflowers (with many species native to the plains) are, of course, a prolific roadside plant, because they thrive on disturbed earth. See also p. 27, for a Mormon myth of origin for sunflowers. |
| 21 | "down in the ravine . . . the cottonwoods had already turned . . . yellow leaves and shiny white bark" | Cottonwoods are trees of the bottom; they live to old age and grow to impressive size only where their roots find a dependable water supply. The fall foliage is yellow turning to brown. |
| 28 | "the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color" | Smartweed is a broadleaf annual weed that sets prodigious amounts of seed in seedheads that turn copper-red in late summer. It grows best on low, moist ground, and usually is not a problem in crops. (If it's wet enough for smartweed, it's too wet for grain.) |
| 28 | "to admire their catalpa grove" | The catalpa was a fast-growing tree commonly raised in plantations for fenceposts. It also makes a fine shade tree and is a delight in spring, when its cluster-blossoms are distinctly fragrant. |
| 28-29 | "rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly home" | Prairie dogs soon became rare in central Nebraska, as they live only on unbroken range, not in cultivated ground, and because stockmen exterminated them whenever they could. (These days, though, many are more tolerant of the burrowing creatures, indeed like having some of them around.) The decline of prairie dogs also meant the decline of the burrowing owl, a small owl that lives in prairie dog holes, but does not eat prairie dogs. See also pp. 31, 42-43. |
| 30 | "white Christmas melons" | This one has me puzzled, as I find conflicting accounts of just what is meant by a Christmas melon, sometimes called a Santa Claus melon. I'm hoping someone will help me out with this term. |
| 34-35 | "a big melon patch . . . Peter trundled a load of watermelons. . . . I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate" | This needs research, but watermelons appear to loom large in Russian culinary culture, and certainly some of the most important germplasm in watermelon varieties popular in America today was of Russian origin. American plant explorers in Russia at turn of the century brought back seed for the fine melons they found there. |
| 36 | "ripe cucumbers . . . a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in" | I know that various Eastern European cultures cooked cucumbers, but I still need enlightenment as to Bohemian customs along these lines. |
| 63 | "an attack of quinsy" | Quinsy was the 19th-century term for inflamed tonsils. |
| 79 | "bringing in a little cedar tree . . . fresh-smelling little tree in a corner of the sitting-room" | Red cedar is a native evergreen of the central plains that during winter turns from dark (almost blackish) green to reddish-green. Cut as a Christmas tree the red cedar is wonderfully aromatic and also sappy; if you pop corn and toss it on the fresh cedar branches, it sticks, making a snow-bough effect. |
| 90 | "mottled, pin-headed guinea-hens" | Guinea fowl are of African derivation. Their flesh is dark and thus no longer popular, although tasty. The guinea hen is a protective mother and an assertive fowl. Guineas are, in fact, too darned independent, preferring to roost in trees rather than in coops, and thus frequently falling to predators. Their raucus cry is so penetrating that my Grandfather Isern told me they kept the rats away. |
| 115 | "Our neighbors burned off their pasture before the new grass made a start" | The burning of bluestem pastures was a traditional practice among pastoralists of the central plains. In the mid-twentieth century ecologists and range scientists condemned the practice, and it largely died out, but burning persisted in the Flint Hills of Kansas, and long-term research eventually vindicated pasture burning as sound practice. The annual burn in April is also one of the most spectacular regular events in farming and ranching on the plains. |
| 116 | "Mrs. Shimerda was baking bread, chewing poppy seeds as she worked" | Poppy seeds are a favorite culinary item among many eastern European groups, and especially among the Bohemians. Poppy seeds came from traditional annual varieties raised specifically for seed. Poppy-seed is still a favorite filling for kolaches. |
| 122 | "The buffalo-peas were blooming" | Cather here mentions a delightful prairie plant also known as buffalo bean, Indian pea, and ground plum, or more fully as groundplum milkvetch. It has intricate, lavender blossoms and lacy leaves, and it sets an interesting fruit that can be eaten or pickled. |
| 122 | "the larks . . . were singing straight at the sun" | Western meadowlarks such as Cather would have known in Nebraska do indeed tilt their heads back and trill their songs into the sky, throats throbbing. See also p. 225. |
| 128 | "It took but a few minutes to release the gases pent up in the poor beast" | Horses and cattle that became bloated from improper feed, such as green alfalfa, might die unless the gas was released from their stomachs. This was done by puncturing the belly of the animal with a device called a trocar, a sharp instrument with a hollow core; in the absence of a trocar, and knife or some other sharp object would be used. |
| 131 | "July . . . makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world" | Popular imagery today rates Nebraska (home of the Huskers) the corn state and Kansas the wheat state. In the 19th century, though, corn was the principal crop of Kansas farmers as well. |
| 143 | "to husk corn for the neighbors until Christmas" | In the days before mechanical corn pickers, corn harvest continued until snow flew and sometimes longer than that; indeed, if the fields were too muddy, cornhusking might halt until the ground froze. Husking or shucking was done by hand from the standing stalk, the ears thrown into a wagon pulled down the rows by bored horses. |
| 154 | "I won't have none of your weevily wheat" | This folksong and play-party song, "Weevily Wheat," is included (two versions) by John and Alan Lomax in American Ballads and Folk Songs. |
| 159 | "we saw her [Lena] out with her cattle" | Before farmers arrived in any locality of the plains, open range prevailed; crops had to be fenced, and livestock ran free. As soon as farmers became numerous enough, however, they would get the county to enact a herd law imposing animal liability on stockmen. This meant that beasts had to be restrained, and crops no longer had to be fenced. So, if the Lingards wished to make use of the unenclosed range in their locality, they had to send Lena out to herd the cattle and keep them from destroying their neighbors' crops. |
| 164 | "the best hotel . . . all the commercial travelers" | All the towns of the plains were railroad towns, and so salesmen, or drummers, and commercial representatives traveled town to town by train. They stayed in hotels convenient to the railway stations. If they had to go into the countryside, they rented rigs at the livery. Commonly the hotels provided display rooms where commercial travelers could spread out their wares. The drummers were a distinct sub-culture of the region, working their territories, making hotels their homes and headquarters. |
| 172 | "go to the Bohemians for beer; the Norwegians didn't have none when they threshed" | Most of the Norwegian immigrants to the American plains were participants in or affected by the evangelical revival that swept the old country in the mid-19th century. Here they formed congregations of Evangelical Lutherans, and they were usually prohibitionist--hence no beer for the harvesters! Bohemians, on the other hand, were mainly Roman Catholic, and many were Free Thinkers--so they had no qualms about beer, and thought it was good for the harvesters to have it. |
| 172 | "I can cut bands" | The early binders used in wheat harvest on the plains were wire binders, not twine. The wire could not be allowed to go into the threshing machine. So one worker stood on a platform before the maw of the thresher and cut the bands of each bundle before it was fed in. |
| 173 | "the men run to stop the horses" | The outfit was threshing with a horsepower, that is, a power unit around which horses walked in a circle, pushing beams that turned the vertical shaft in the center. The shaft transmitted power to the thresher by means of a tumbling rod, over which the horses had to step on each pass. To stop the threshing machine, you had to stop the horses. |
| 173 | "The Old Oaken Bucket" | "How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood" begins this famous poem by Samuel Woodworth. |
| 175 | "I went to the river with the Harlings on clear nights, and we skated" | In these days before the creation of artificial reservoirs all over the plains, rivers were important points for recreation--fishing, swimming, picnicking, skating, courting. The river bottoms had timber and shade and were among the few areas not planted to crops, and thus were available for common use, often irrespective of private ownership. |
| 190 | "Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer before" | Plains country towns delighted in all sorts of itinerant entertainments, not just the dancing pavilion described in Antonia. Other traveling entrepreneurs transported and assembled hardwood roller rinks and rented skates to enthusiastic novices. With the advent of motion pictures, itinerants hauled trailer-mounted projection systems around and showed movies on the external walls of business buildings, the crowd seated on planks. |
| 205 | "Mrs. Cutter painted china" | You may think that the domestic art of china painting was one of those Gilded-Age fancies that passed with the 19th century, but not so. In fact central Nebraska remains through the 20th century a hotbed of china painters. The China Belles of Hastings, I know, kept the art going strong. |
| 222 | "Mrs. Harling came to the Opera House" | Most 19th century railroad towns of the plains built opera houses, or at least aspired to such. Rarely was opera performed in them, of course. With few exceptions, the opera house indeed was devoted to performance only on the second story; the lower level was occupied by businesses, as in Red Cloud. Performances ran the gamut from popular entertainment to high art to community functions, such as young Willa Cather's high school commencement. Was there ever opera in an opera house in a plains country town? In fact yes, as touring companies traveling by rail often filled dates between major engagements by scheduling small towns--and drew great crowds for single nights or brief stands. |
| 225 | "The pink bee-bush stood tall along the sandy roadsides" | The bee-plant is one of the showiest wildflowers of the plains. It stands waist-high and exhibits clusters of fetching pink blossoms. It's not a good flower to pick, however, because it stinks terribly. The leguminous plant grows best in disturbed ground and sandy soils--near windmills in pastures, for instance, or on sandy roadsides. Once again Cather has the environmental details just right. |
| 225 | "and the cone-flowers and rose mallow grew everywhere" | The cone-flower reference might be to purple coneflower, which has caused such a stir of rapacious collectors digging up the prairie for its medicinal roots, but I suspect the reference is to the more abundant yellow coneflower. Rose mallow--this is a delightlful little prairie flower, low-growing, persistent in pastures and roadsides, purple blossoms cone-shaped and the diameter of a quarter. |
| 225 | "pasture that was always cropped short in summer, where the gallardia came up year after year" | I'm not entirely certain which of the gaillardia Cather refers to here, but I suspect it is aristata, or blanket flower. It's a low-growing prairie wildflower, a perennial, flowers purple-reddish-brown in the center, trimmed with yellow. It survives heavy grazing nicely, perhaps thrives on it. |
| 225 | "a pleasant dressing-room I knew among the dogwood bushes, all overgrown with wild grapevines" | This is not the flowering dogwood of the southeastern U.S.; I suspect it is Cornus stolonifera, or red osier; it's also known as kinnikinnick, the inner bark used by Indians for smoking. It's common in riverine environments throughout the Great Plains, as are wild grapes (although getting less common because of sensitivity to herbicides), which twine and hang heavy on low trees such as the dogwood--thus making a reasonable "dressing room." |
| 227 | "The elder bushes did not grow back in the sandy ravines between the cliffs, but in the hot, sandy bottoms along the stream" | Elderberry bushes are common on the central plains, but they are confined to riverine environments. Both the white blossoms and the purple fruit clusters have culinary use. |
| 231 | "twenty acres of rye . . . makes nice bread" | The predilection of northern European peoples for dark breads has made the culture and use of rye by immigrants on the plains into a symbol of cultural persistence and cultural rebound (as described by geographer Terry Jordan). |
| 234-35 | "He married a Lapp" | The Sami--the original natives of the northern parts of the Scandinavian nations--were known in the past as the Lapps or the reindeer people. Cather's images of the Sami as perceived by Norwegian immigrants are accurate in their ambivalent biase. Sami in the late 20th century have become culturally conscious and politically active, claiming their rights as indigenous peoples. |
| 235 | "game of 'Pussy Wants a Corner'" | This is a game similar to musical chairs. Everyone gets into a corner except one player, who is the pussy, and shouts, "Pussy wants a corner!" Whereupon all leave their corners and scramble for new corners. Whoever is left without a corner is the new pussy. Pretty simple. |
| 235-36 | "Coronado and his search for the Seven Golden Cities" | Jim's recounting of the story of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado's journey to the central plains in 1541 is one of those delightful set pieces in Antonia--a narrative within the narrative. Note the references to the folk discovery of antiquities--a Spanish stirrup and sword. Collectors across the region found pieces of Spanish iron and steel and invariably ascribed them to Coronado! Cather's narrative elements here draw on the story of the so-called Juan Gallego sword found in Finney County, Kansas, in 1886, and now in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society. |
| 237 | "a ringdove mourned plaintively" | The reference is to the mourning dove, more commonly known as the turtle dove, the only dove native to the central plains. It's a mystery why Cather calls it a ringdove. This may be one of the very few miscues among Cather's environmental details. |
| 326-28 | "Why don't we show Mr. Burden our new fruit cave?" | A cave, that is, a cellar distinct from the house, served two purposes on the farm: shelter from storms, and storage for food. The cave was a cool place for storage of root crops. Canned goods would be shelved along the walls. The cave in this passage of Antonia is a well of abundance. |
| 328 | "spiced plums . . . Mother uses them to make kolaches" | Kolaches are the signature pastry of Bohemian immigrants on the plains. A kolache is a bun of yeast dough with an impression in the middle, which is filled with variety of things--poppy-seed paste, or some sort of fruit--quite commonly, as in the case of Antonia, prune paste. |
| 328-29 | "tall hollyhocks . . . Bohemians . . . always planted hollyhocks" | Hollyhocks are a favorite flower not only of Bohemians but also other European immigrants on the plains, because they were traditionally beloved from the old country, but also exhibited excellent drought hardiness on the plains. Generally they are used as a facing planting, along walls or fences, where they reseed themselves readily. |
| 329-31 | "a cherry orchard . . . and an apple orchard . . . sheltered by a high hedge . . . thorny locusts, then the mulberry hedge" | On the Great Plains orchards required shelter from the wind, hence the hedges around the Dusak orchard. Black locust was a common native shelterbelt species, but why the mulberry? Mulberry (the black Eurasian, introduced type) was planted in the vicinity of cherry trees because the mulberries ripened just before and throughout the time when the cherries ripened. Birds love mulberries, and could be diverted by them from the cherries. Mulberries also make great pies if mixed with something tart, such as cherries, rhubarb, or gooseberries. |
| 331 | "Are there any quail left now?" | Bobwhite quail are native to the central plains, although there are various folk narratives that describe how they were brought into the region. With the arrival of agricultural settlement, frontier cultivation created ideal edge conditions for quail--undisturbed grassland where the plow had not yet touched, and abundant feed in cultivated fields. Closer settlement, however, brought not only greater hunting pressure but also the loss of vital grassland habitat. |