Tag: Nebraska

Categories
The Great Outdoors History

Raising a Forest by Hand

Charles Bessey was a pioneering botanist. (Courtesy of the Charles E. Bessey, Botany Papers, Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries)

“The hills bear all manner of fantastic shapes,” Charles Bessey observed, noting that they sometimes featured open pockets of bare sand in blowouts and were “provokingly steep and high.” Bessey was describing the Sandhills, the area of post-glacial dunes wrought by mighty winds in north-central and northwestern Nebraska. Aided by his botany students from the University of Nebraska (today’s University of Nebraska–Lincoln), he cataloged a treasure of plant species in 1892. Yet besides spurges and gooseberries, herbaceous plants such as smooth beardtongue, and grasses such as Eatonia obtusata, he found the potential for forestation.

“He was convinced that the moist soil of the Sandhills would support forest growth,” the historian Thomas R. Walsh wrote. Nebraska had gained statehood in 1867 but still had enough untouched areas to be “a virgin natural laboratory,” as Walsh described it. And there were so few trees for wood, shelter, or shade. Bessey had been pushing the state legislature to reserve Sandhills tracts for tree planting. In 1891, urged by the top forestry official in Washington, D.C., he started a test plot at the eastern edge of the Sandhills, which encompassed an area about the size of New Jersey. Ponderosa pines were a big component of the experiment’s 13,500 conifers. With the initial indication that they would do fine, he started a campaign to convince people that forestation was practical. After all, as Walsh noted, “the area was once covered by a pine forest that was destroyed by prairie fires.”

The pre-dawn fog rises above the Niobara River, located in Valentine, Nebraska. (Pocket Macro/Shutterstock)

Bessey had come to the University of Nebraska in 1884, lured from Iowa Agricultural College (today, Iowa State University) by an offer of $2,500 per year. He was already the author of “Botany for High Schools and Colleges,” the nation’s first textbook on the subject. His motto of “Science with Practice” indicated a teaching philosophy that mixed laboratory and field work with classroom instruction. He was one of a small group of professors at the prairie university, attended by just 373 students in the year he arrived, but he had an outsized and enduring influence through his popular botany seminar. A top student in the 1892 cataloging project was Roscoe Pound, who claimed the university’s first Ph.D. in botany, then distinguished himself as a legal scholar and served two decades as dean of Harvard University’s law school.

Throughout the latter years of the Gilded Age, Bessey kept hammering away at the idea of national forests. To Gifford Pinchot, head of the national Division of Forestry, he wrote, “In the Sandhills, we have a region which has been shown to be adapted to the growth of coniferous forest trees, and here we can now secure large tracts which are not yet owned by private parties.” Pinchot had the ear of President Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1902 set aside 206,028 acres in two reserves in the Sandhills. “This was the first and only instance in which the federal government removed non-forested public domain from settlement to create a man-made forest reserve,” Walsh explained.

The two reserves are 75 miles apart. The northern Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest is on the Niobrara River near the city of Valentine. The southern one, first called Dismal River Forest Reserve, is now the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey and is managed by the Bessey Ranger District. (Nebraskans refer to it as “Halsey Forest.”) Within it are the Bessey Recreation Area and the crucially important Charles E. Bessey Tree Nursery, which yearly produces 1.5 million bare-root seedlings and up to 850,000 container seedlings for distribution in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. Additionally, the nursery acts as the seed bank for Rocky Mountain Region 2, storing about 14,000 pounds of conifer seeds in case of wildfire or insect infestation.

Carson Vaughan, author of “Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream,” grew up in Broken Bow, about 50 miles from Halsey Forest. It was only after he started writing articles about Bessey and the forest that he comprehended the magnitude of the original undertaking: creating the largest man-made forest in the United States. “Nothing like this has ever happened anywhere else on the planet,” he said. “And it all started because this pioneering botanist, Charles Bessey, had this wild idea and the patience, the dogged persistence, to stick with it over a couple decades and see it come to fruition.”

Vaughan remembered climbing Scott Lookout Tower, near Halsey, and feeling the impact upon viewing a forest amid treeless grasslands. “You get the rolling, billowing Sandhills right next to this very clear, dark, dense forest,” he said. The experience reinforced the concept that “it took human beings planting all of these trees to make this national forest grow out of this sandy, arid region.”

The sun rises over the Dismal River, which runs through the Nebraska Sandhills. (marekuliasz/Shutterstock)

After succeeding in the Sandhills, Bessey turned to other important challenges. In 1903, he was contacted about the effort to save the giant sequoias in certain groves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. He tried to interest President Roosevelt in the cause, then introduced the matter into proceedings of scientific societies, sending their resolutions on the matter to congressional representatives. Although he helped to set the conservation process in motion, Bessey would pass away in 1915 without seeing his efforts bear fruit. 16 years later, the state of California acquired the Mammoth Tree Grove, which is a principal element of the eventual Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

On the other side of the country, Bessey became involved in the effort to create a national forest reserve in the southern Appalachians. “The cutting away and total destruction of the forests is a crime against the community as a whole,” he wrote. In 1908, a bill to authorize the reserves came before the House of Representatives, but soon died. It particularly galled Bessey that one of his former students, Representative Ernest M. Pollard, was on the agricultural committee, which had deferred action. “It does seem as though we had the most stupid and blinded lot of men in charge of our affairs that has ever cursed any country,” Bessey wrote to House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon. Bessey and others kept working, and ultimately, the Weeks Act of 1911 was passed, providing for acquisition and preservation of forested lands nationwide.

Today, visitors to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln can see an image of Bessey in bas-relief on a bronze tablet at—where else?—Bessey Hall. There’s also a Bessey Hall at Iowa State. And at Michigan State University, Ernst Bessey Hall is named for Charles’s son, who became a professor of botany and dean at MSU’s graduate school from 1930 to 1944. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Categories
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.