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Founding Fathers History

Washington’s Resounding Prayer at Valley Forge

George Washington praying at Valley Forge. Engraving by John C. McRae, 1866, based on a painting by Henry Brueckner. (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

It was December 1777, one of the bleakest times during the Revolutionary War. The Continental Army had won a few battles; however, morale suffered as they had also lost a few crucial battles, such as the Battle of Long Island, the Battle for New York, the Battle of White Plains, and the Battle of Bennington. As it was common for armies to take up quarters during the winter, General George Washington chose his army’s quarters to be constructed 25 miles north of Philadelphia, near Valley Forge. The location was strategic—the British Army had captured Philadelphia that fall and the land area had small creeks that would impede attacks due to its uphill location.

The prospects looked dire for the 12,000 men encamped at Valley Forge. The roads were impassable due to snow. The Continental Army was undersupplied and underfed. The men were neglected, with tattered clothing, worn-out shoes, and disheveled hair. Their constructed shelters were dark, cold log huts with dirt floors, a pit, and a sheet for the door, and there were 12 men per hut, leading to rampant disease.

Historians estimate somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 men died in that bitter cold winter. In Philadelphia, the Red Coats were well taken care of, quartering themselves in American homes and availing themselves of their supplies while guarding the city to prevent supplies from being directed to the Valley Forge camp.

As the story is told by Reverend Snowden in his “Diary and Remembrances,” Isaac Potts, a Quaker, a Tory, and a pacifist, was strolling through the woods in Valley Forge during the winter.

“I heard a plaintive sound as, of a man at prayer,” Potts said. “I tied my horse to a sapling and went quietly into the woods and to my astonishment I saw the great George Washington on his knees alone, with his sword on one side and his cocked hat on the other. He was at Prayer to the God of the Armies, beseeching to interpose with his Divine aid, as it was His crisis, and the cause of the country, of humanity, and of the world. Such a prayer I never heard from the lips of man. I left him alone praying. I went home and told my wife, ‘I saw a sight and heard today what I never saw or heard before,’ and just related to her what I had seen and heard and observed. We never thought a man could be a soldier and a Christian, but if there is one in the world, it is Washington. She also was astonished. We thought it was the cause of God, and America could prevail.”

A Pivotal Moment

Not only was this a pivotal moment for Isaac Potts—he switched to the Whig party and was now a supporter of the war—it also appeared to be a pivotal moment for the Continental Army. Baron von Steuben took command; utilizing his manual “Regulation for the Order of Discipline of the Troops of the United States.” He created a schedule, conducted drills, and instructed on the use of bayonets and battlefield formations and maneuvers. The spring of 1778 brought the French to the side of the Americans. France and America replenished food and supplies and built new roads and bridges. In June 1778, the British abandoned Philadelphia and retreated to New York. At the end of that same month, the British withdrew at the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey. As more dominoes fell, eventually the British surrendered in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.

The prayer of Washington is seen by many as the pivotal moment that changed the trajectory of the Revolutionary War. This one pivotal moment is depicted in various works of art, including Arnold Friberg’s painting, “The Prayer at Valley Forge.” George Washington was a deeply religious man. He held a deep and abiding faith that God had put him in his position and that victory would come for the Americans. He encouraged days of prayer and fasting to seek God’s divine assistance in times of peril. Washington’s belief in freedom of religion and conscience was exemplified in his support of the Bill of Rights, his respect for the conscientious scruples of the Quakers, and his assurance to the Hebrew Congregations of Newport, Rhode Island, that they would be able to enjoy “the exercise of their inherent natural rights” and that the government would protect their religious freedoms.

This country has had other archetypal leaders who answered their calling and displayed their devotion to God and the higher law principles that it was founded upon. And their prayers seem to have been answered, as time and again the trajectory of this nation has changed. Think of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. These leaders emerged with spoken and written words humbly acknowledging that our rights come from God, not the state, and that there are self-evident, objective truths. Their leadership changed the trajectory of this country, adversity was overcome, and this nation eventually healed.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan, another iconic leader, stated: “I said before that the most sublime picture in American history is of George Washington on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge. That image personifies a people who know that it’s not enough to depend on our own courage and goodness. We must also seek help from God our father and preserver.” Reagan had Arnold Friberg’s painting on display in the White House all eight years of his presidency.

Historically as a nation, during disunity, Americans have grasped the gravity of the moment and, like their preceding iconic leaders and contemporary Americans, have returned to God and the founding principles that were embedded in the founding documents. Over the past year, it appears as though the earth has once again shifted. Not unexpectedly, Bible sales are soaring and there is an increased interest in understanding our country’s heritage. The American spirit is yet again awakening and renewing its religious and cultural allegiances.

Deborah Hommer is a history and philosophy enthusiast who gravitates toward natural law and natural rights. She founded the nonprofit ConstitutionalReflections (website under construction) with the purpose of educating others in the rich history of Western Civilization.

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History

William Becknell and the Santa Fe Trail

A wagon train forms a defensive circle at Camp Comanche, a traders' camp on the Santa Fe Trail, between the North Fork River and the Canadian River. A line of soldiers guards the encampment from attack. (An 1839 engraving by Lossing from Josiah Gregg's "Commerce of the Prairies: or the Journal of a Santa Fe Trader"/Getty Images)

When a young U.S. Army lieutenant named Zebulon Pike set out to explore the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains in 1806, he was unceremoniously arrested by Spanish troops in modern-day Colorado. The Spaniards marched him at gunpoint through northern Mexico (including today’s New Mexico and Texas) before deporting him to Louisiana. Isolationist Spanish authorities thus jealously guarded their frontiers against perceived American incursions.

Only a few years after Pike’s journey, however, Mexico erupted into revolution. What this development might mean for American traders, no one could say. Regardless, a vast, largely uncharted buffer territory yet separated Mexico proper from the United States. From the Missouri border, hundreds of miles of plains—inhabited by bands of highly mobile and often hostile American Indians—ran up against hundreds of miles of desert and mountains. All of this must be traversed before one could ever catch a glimpse of Santa Fe.

Enter William Becknell. Becknell had lived in Missouri for around a decade, making his way further and further west until finally setting himself up on the Missouri River—the state’s western border. A veteran of the War of 1812, Becknell worked a farm, traded horses, and operated a ferry across the Missouri at Arrow Rock. Later, he tried his hand at salt mining, and he speculated in land, too. To carry out his various enterprises, Becknell borrowed a sizable amount of money.

Spurred by Debts

Then came the Panic of 1819. Monetary inflation, much of it in the form of unredeemable paper money, drove gold and silver coin into the hoarder’s cache. Businesses shuttered. Banks collapsed. Loans were called in and credit contracted—and Becknell’s creditors demanded payment in gold or silver. How would he come up with the money?

The standard hard-money unit circulating in the United States at the time was the Spanish dollar. Due to the Panic, these were now in very short supply. Becknell determined, then, to head west, deep into Spanish-controlled territory, to see if he could trade for silver coin. In August 1821, he placed an advertisement in the local newspaper. “W. BECKNELL” was captaining “[a] Company of 17 men … destined to the westward,” the notice read. The party hoped to increase its ranks to 30. “On the first day of September the company will cross the Missouri at the Arrow Rock,” the notice informed its readers. Any who wished to join were instructed on where and when to meet.

But when the prearranged day arrived, only a handful of men—perhaps five—showed up prepared for the journey. Including Becknell himself, then, the company may have numbered a mere six.

The Santa Fe Trail with its branches and present-day state boundaries. (National Park Service)

Moving in a southwesterly direction, Becknell’s company crossed the plains of Kansas—meeting virtually no natives along the way—to the Arkansas River. Continuing west along the Arkansas, Becknell turned southwest again at the much smaller Purgatoire River (thereby missing Pike’s Peak by about 160 miles). The stream led them to an offshoot of the Rockies. The journey through these mountains was difficult, but on the other side, Becknell and his company were greeted by a fantastical landscape of desert mesas, buttes, and canyons.

Reception by the Mexicans

Continuing southwest about 100 miles, the men suddenly encountered a contingent of 400 Mexican soldiers traveling in formation. They were led by a captain named Pedro Ignacio Gallego.

This was the moment of truth. Would this agent of the state, with a veritable army at his back, confiscate the Americans’ goods, deport them, or imprison them—as had been done to explorers and would-be American traders in the past?

As it turns out, Gallego had been sent on patrol not to seek out trespassing Americans, but rather to counter a recent wave of violent raids by the Navajo and the Comanche against Mexican settlements in the area. Indeed, Gallego at that very moment had been tracking a marauding band of Comanches when he’d spotted Becknell and his company. In his diary (translated here from the original Spanish), Gallego later described the meeting with Becknell:

“About 3:30 p.m. encountered six Americans at the Puertocito de la Piedra Lumbre. They parleyed with me and at about 4 p.m. we halted at the stream at Piedra Lumbre. Not understanding their words nor any of the signs they made, I decided to return to El Vado.”

Becknell’s own account of the meeting adds more detail:

“On Tuesday morning the 13th, we had the satisfaction of meeting with a party of Spanish troops. Although the difference of our language would not admit of conversation, yet the circumstances attending their reception of us, fully convinced us of their hospitable disposition and friendly feelings.”

The meeting was thus an amicable one, despite the language barrier, and Becknell came away convinced of the Mexicans’ “manifestations of kindness.” The two groups camped together that night, and the next day traveled together, too. Entering a town, a “grateful” Becknell noted that its inhabitants exhibited “civility and welcome.” It is likely that Becknell then learned of Mexican victory over the Spanish in their revolution. Mexico was independent. From here, the Americans were allowed to continue their journey on their own.

Trading in Santa Fe

In the middle of November, some 77 days after departing Missouri, Becknell and his men finally entered the town of Santa Fe. The new governor of New Mexico, Facundo Melgares, who had also been the old governor of Spanish New Mexico, was the same man who had arrested Pike 15 years earlier! Melgares personally welcomed Becknell and his men, informing them that Mexico was open for business.

Becknell spent several weeks trading with the highly receptive inhabitants of Santa Fe, offering calico cloth and other items from the States for Spanish dollars. On the way home to the United States, he traveled in a direct northeasterly direction (rather than following east-west or north-south river trails), which avoided mountains altogether in favor of a mostly flat, level path: the imposingly dry Cimarron Desert. Fortunately, the Cimarron River provided something of a watery path through this otherwise sand-sage country, though the river sometimes dried up completely.

Five months after his initial departure from “the Arrow Rock,” Becknell crossed back into Missouri, his saddlebags filled with Spanish silver. A few hundred dollars’ worth of trade goods had been swapped for around 6,000 dollars in hard coin. His debts could now surely be paid—indeed, several times over!—with money to spare.

But Becknell wasn’t finished. The next year, he returned to Santa Fe—this time, of course, opting for the Cimarron route. Crucially, he brought with him several covered wagons, the first ever to cross this territory. The trip took just 48 days, and apart from an ordeal involving the Osage Indians—who kidnapped three of Becknell’s party and tortured them before the Missourian managed to get them back—it appears to have been uneventful. Later accounts that Becknell and his men at one point almost died of thirst, only surviving by sucking the liquid contents out of crudely removed animal stomachs, are of questionable authenticity. In any case, Becknell and company returned home from this second trip having earned 3,000 percent profits.

Becknell had blazed the Santa Fe Trail. Later, he would help map it as a surveyor and guide. And for the next 60 years, it was some variation of Becknell’s wagon trail upon which countless travelers and traders moved goods between New Mexico and the East.

Dr. Jackson, who teaches Western, Islamic, American, Asian, and world histories at the university level, is also known on YouTube as “The Nomadic Professor.” You can follow his work, including entire online history courses featuring his signature on-location videos filmed the world over, at NomadicProfessor.com.

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Features

The Iconic, Pint-Sized No. 22,186

(Linda Zhao)

What is one of the most iconic American product designs of all time, that is simple in design, affordable, practical, indestructible, and pint-sized? Here are some clues: It’s a kitchen item celebrated by florists for its versatility, beloved by brides for its nod to Southern charm, and used by both beachgoers on the Alabama Riviera and foodies in Brooklyn bars. It would be easy to overlook Patent No. 22,186, but we should respect and remember the profound impact the Ball Mason jar has had on our culture.

The history of the Ball Mason jar is a fascinating story of five brothers who saw a need in their country for a safe way to preserve foods and, by using their abilities, changed the family meal and lives forever. A pint-sized history lesson reveals that John Landis Mason first patented the glass jar in 1857, but the Ball Brothers Manufacturing Glass Company licensed the Mason jar and in the process made the Ball Mason Jar one of the most iconic product designs of all time. For three centuries—through challenges and opportunities, economic prosperity and financial trials, disappointments and successes—the company has endured.  And, furthermore, there has been only one trademark etched on the bottom of each jar, “Made in the U.S.A.”

Ironically, the Ball Mason jar, which was once viewed only as a primary kitchen product, is now more at home at weddings, bars, and chic events than on a pantry shelf. Pretty flower bouquets, perfumed candles, organic salads, and iced tea are placed inside the jars much more often than the expected canned fruits and vegetables.

An increased emphasis on environmental and economic issues related to healthy food production has created a resurgence of interest in canning, which promotes the original intent of the jars. Google “Popularity of home canning” to find numerous statistical facts supporting this claim. Only in recent years have I started canning, so I’m part of the data verifying the Ball Mason jar’s current “in vogue” status.

Canning may be making a huge comeback, but homemade jellies, jams, pickles, string beans, and tomatoes have always been part of the DNA of generations of women in my family who were like the industrious Little Red Hen of storybook fame: They grew their food, canned their food, and shared their food with others. Grandmother Jaye, who had nine children, probably canned out of necessity. My mom had four girls who loved nothing more than her hot biscuits filled with homemade preserves and jellies—fig, pear, plum, dewberry, scuppernong (a “big white grape”), strawberry, and peach. Many troubles—big and small—found their relief in a piping hot biscuit filled with these goodies.

(Linda Zhao)

After every last spoonful was scraped from the jar, it was washed and stored in a box to be reused the next season. In fact, often jars were passed from one family member to another. A Ball Mason jar is practically indestructible. Think about it: Do they ever chip or break?

The process of canning involved everyone in my family. Whether it was shaking a pear tree to bring down the ripened fruit or picking figs, my sisters and I were in charge of gathering the fruit. During the days of late spring, my sisters and I scoured fence rows or ditches beside roads for dewberry patches. We heeded Mother’s words concerning snakes that found the brambles of the bushes to be their cooling place, for Daddy’s leg bore the long scar of a rattlesnake’s fangs when he was a young boy. We had heard the story many times of how he lay near death’s door for weeks fighting off the poison from this lowly serpent.

As we picked the berries, I repeated the Uncle Remus stories my teacher had read aloud to my class. I tried to retell the tale with the same excitement and cunningness in my voice that Miss Farish used as she read Br’er Rabbit’s plea with Br’er Fox: “Please, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch.”

My sisters and I returned home victorious from our searches, but with fingers pricked by thorns and stained purple from eating more berries than we had placed in the syrup buckets and dishpans we carried. Mother placed the berries in a big pan and smothered them with Domino sugar. A dishtowel was placed on top of the pan for the berries to sit overnight on the table to macerate.

While cooking, Mother stirred and mashed the berries until the juice had thickened enough to coat a spoon. Then Daddy helped Mother strain the seeds and pulp through a large flour sack catching the berry juice in a pan before the Ball Mason jars were submerged for a water bath.

Years later, even my father had learned to can from start to finish. After Mother’s death, Daddy tried to fill her void by being a mother to us. He immersed himself in doing the things she had always done. Daddy, who had never opened a can, was suddenly canning pear and fig preserves.

There are few sights as pretty as sunlight streaming through Ball Mason jars filled with fruits and vegetables floating in their juices. The radiating, translucent shades and hues of colors can never be captured in the many paint samples hanging on a Home Depot wall.

The Ball Brothers story should be included in children’s history books, for their story is one of American greatness. Surprisingly, few students—or even adults—know about their dedication to a dream that became a reality. The spectrum of colors in the filled Ball Mason jars sitting on my kitchen island is as pleasing to the eye as the memories of great Americans, school days, and family times are to the heart. The rainbow of colors in the jars also reminds me of the Bible story of God’s faithfulness to Noah and to future generations of people. That’s something pretty remarkable for a pint-sized jar!

Gwenyth McCorquodale has been teaching since the age of 7, when she taught her three younger sisters the letters of the alphabet. Gwenyth retired from Judson College in Marion, Alabama, where she served as professor of education and head of the department of education. She has written books, articles for national and international journals, and for her hometown newspaper, The Monroe Journal.

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Entrepreneurs Features

Bridging the Divide With BBQ

(Courtesy of Ben Ferguson)

At 31, Ben Ferguson took the perfect job for anyone seeking national influence. A conservative radio host, Ferguson joined CNN’s stable of political contributors in 2013. But seven years of expressing conservative views to a hostile audience, and even to hostile colleagues, became debilitating. “I got exhausted,” Ferguson said. “I just saw the hate and anger every time I’d go on TV that would come from people hoping that you die, and from liberal groups trying to attack you and silence you forever. They really try to ruin your life.”

So Ferguson chose to defuse the anger by building community. He left CNN last year and started a barbecue restaurant in his hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, while continuing his nationally syndicated radio show from Dallas. “I wanted an outlet that was just totally non-confrontational or controversial,” he said. “Food was my outlet to bring people to the table and bring them together.”

But Ferguson’s BBQ has a unique feature. It shares the building with a gun range the host also owns.  “People love it,” he said. “It’s not what you expect when you’re walking into a gun range to have a world-class barbecue restaurant. People are going, ‘Are you kidding me? This is here?’ They keep coming back.”

(Courtesy of Ben Ferguson)

Savory Memories

Ferguson’s desire to open the restaurant reflects the memories of his younger days. “You know, when I lived there, I’ve never once cooked barbecue,” Ferguson said about Memphis. “The best barbecue places in the world are in Memphis, right? Why would you want to barbecue when you can literally just go down the street and eat some of the best barbecue in the world?

“But I missed the traditional Southern pork barbecue: pulled pork, shoulders, ribs and sausage. I got into barbecue because I missed it. I wanted that quality that I got in Memphis, when I could drive to an amazing restaurant and just get it.” His customers seem to agree. “Father’s Day was jam packed,” Ferguson said. “There was a wait list to get into the restaurant. We had our biggest Sunday ever on Father’s Day, which was exactly my goal: to bring families together.”

(Courtesy of Ben Ferguson)

Serving Safety

The gun range, meanwhile, allows residents to receive defensive firearms training in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities. “I wanted to teach as many people as possible how to protect themselves,” Ferguson said. “There are a lot of single mothers in Memphis, and we’ve done a lot of outreach in trying to bring in single mothers so they can protect and defend themselves and their kids in their home. That’s part of our mission statement, our purpose, and it’s worked.”

(Courtesy of Ben Ferguson)

The unique pairing attracts a wide variety of customers. Some conduct Bible studies. Others hold weddings, wedding rehearsals, or funerals. “Every Friday morning, we have a group of men that just hang out with one another, and they have a great time,” Ferguson said “It’s pretty amazing.”

Backseat Beginnings

Ferguson’s journey to radio host and barbeque entrepreneur began “in the backseat of my mom’s car, listening to this new guy on the radio by the name of Rush Limbaugh,” he said. “That was in 1993.” At the time, Ferguson was 11 years old. Later, he heard another host, a liberal member of Memphis’s City Council, talk about a bill being debated in Congress. “I asked my mom if I could call in because I thought what she [the female host] said was wrong and inaccurate,” Ferguson said. “I called and challenged her on it after I got the bill from Congress. She started yelling at me but I was able to beat her with facts. I fell in love with talk radio right then and there.”

Two years later, at 13, Ferguson became the nation’s youngest talk-show host. At 20, he became the youngest to sign a syndication contract. At 23, he wrote his first book, “It’s My America, Too,” and spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention. In 2012, Ferguson moved to Dallas, where he conducts his local and national shows.

A Way to the Heart

But the 39-year-old radio host might be making his biggest impact outside of the studio. “I’ve had liberals who say, ‘Ben, I don’t believe in what you said on the radio. But let me tell you, I went out to your restaurant,’ ” Ferguson said. ” ‘I couldn’t not try it after you’ve been talking about it for the past year, and I ended up taking a permit class. So I just want to say thank you because now, I can protect my family. I really enjoyed your staff and your facility.’ Bridging that gap has been amazing.”

For Ferguson, the way to a potential antagonist’s heart winds through the aroma of sauce and spices. “Anytime you smell barbecue or cook barbecue, it brings people together from different walks of life,” he said. “It doesn’t matter your politics.”

Joseph D’Hippolito is a freelance writer whose commentaries have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, The Stream, Front Page Magazine, and American Thinker.

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Arts & Letters Book Recommender

An American Greatness—Willa Cather’s ‘O, Pioneers!’

Portrait of Willa Cather, circa 1900s. (Fotosearch/Getty Images).

Every once in a while, slow and steady wins the race.

One of America’s greatest literary regionalists, Nebraskan Willa Cather (1873–1947), has only slowly and gradually been gaining recognition over the past century as one of our country’s greatest novelists. Indeed, her first novel, “Alexander’s Bridge,” came out 109 years ago in serialized format in McClure’s Magazine. The following year, 1913, she published her first novel in full novel form, the stunning “O, Pioneers!”, which takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem.

For nearly a century, though, writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald have overshadowed this brilliant writer from the central Great Plains, and it didn’t help her that she was literarily a romantic, politically anti-Progressive and anti-war, and, by the 1930s, skeptical of the New Deal. As strong as her reputation had been in the ’10s and ’20s—with unadulterated praise from such formidable critics as H.L. Mencken—it began to crumble at the hands of the “literary realists” in the 1930s. To them, she insipidly took the worst of life and praised the heroic. Though a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1923, she never recovered her reputation in her lifetime, and her best friend burned her final, uncompleted manuscript, “Hard Punishments.” Since then, her reputation has risen and fallen over the years, but, today, thankfully, it is mostly rising. The state of Nebraska (culturally and politically) has wisely promoted Cather’s reputation as well.

Cather wrote “Alexander’s Bridge” as the kind of novel she thought New York critics would like. She wrote “O, Pioneers!” not only for family, friends, and neighbors, but also, most critically, for herself. “I began to write a book entirely for myself; a story about some Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska, when I was eight or nine years old.” She found the new novel “absorbing”—far more so than when writing “Alexander’s Bridge”—and she, to her own amazement, realized that with “O, Pioneers!”, “there was no arranging or ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong.” As the book was written for her own benefit, Cather ignored all the things that she assumed the critics would demand. As such, she feared that no one would think much of the novel, with its “slow-moving story, without ‘action,’ without ‘humor,’ without a ‘hero’; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards—set in Nebraska, of all places!”

Yet, what Cather did, was create an American myth, the difficult—slow but steady—story of a pioneer, a Swedish woman named Alexandra (no relation to Alexander in her first novel, but absolutely connected to that half-god conqueror of the ancient world, known as “The Great”) who yearns to love the land and succeeds in doing so. After all, when the story opens, Cather introduces us to Hanover (Red Cloud), Nebraska, which is doing everything in its power not to be blown across the prairie in a gust of winter fury. The town, it seems, felt the ferocity of the plain’s wind below as well as around it. But when Alexandra looks upon the local area known as the Great Divide, it succumbs to her will. It is worth quoting Cather, here, at length, in all of her myth-making glory:

“When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

It would be difficult, if not downright impossible, to find a passage in American literature that better captures the spirit of American individualism and the frontier, the spirit of romantic longing and of temperate embracing. Cather, to be sure, captures all of the essence of Americanness in this passage. Contrary to critics who see nothing but the erasure of Native Americans, Cather’s point is about human love for the particular harsh Plains landscape, a love that is perhaps unique to farmers who understand every inch of a region’s rises and drops.

“O, Pioneers!”, not surprisingly, follows the story of Alexandra Bergson and her neighbors, Bohemian, French, Norwegian, and Swedish. Though not Roman Catholic herself, Cather writes so lovingly of the Catholic Church and the Catholic immigrants to Nebraska that she—as Notre Dame philosopher Ralph McInerny once said—might as well have been a Catholic in all that she did. It is, after all, in the Catholic Church that Cather finds the will to defy death and sin, nihilism and shame.

In her own understanding of art, which she often made explicit, Cather claimed that the true poet is immune to the drives of the marketplace. “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin,” she wrote, but “economics and art are strangers.” Almost certainly, thinking about the Progressives and the New Dealers, Cather meant that economists are the materialists and utilitarians who view the world as nothing more than a set of choices based on costs and benefits. Regardless, the Nebraskan continued, the poetry of a poet is “his individuality [and] the themes of true poetry, of great poetry, will be the same until all the values of human life have changed and all the strongest emotional responses have become different—which can hardly occur until the physical body itself has fundamentally changed.”

“O, Pioneers!” turned out to be the first of Cather’s several books on the frontier, and her next novels—especially “My Antonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop”—are not only superior, but, arguably, the greatest novels written in the American experience. Yes, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, step aside! Contrary to their wallowing nihilisms, Cather’s work is always humane and gracious.

In her 1913 novel, Cather wrote: “A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Amen, Willa, amen. The same is as true of a writer as it is of a magazine as it is of a critic. And it’s just as true in 2021 as it was in 1913.

Slow and steady …

Brad Birzer is the Russell Amos Kirk chair in American studies at Hillsdale College. He would like to thank Liberty Fund for sponsoring a conference on Cather and Rose Wilder Lane, March 10–11, 2021, and for Anne Fortier’s comment on Alexandra as a conqueror.