A Sod House

SINCE Frederick Jackson Turner propounded his frontier thesis, an army of historians have diligently gathered facts and written countless analyses of the frontier. The many Wests, such as the cattle, the sod house, and gold mining frontiers, with their differing terrain and natural resources, fostered varying activities and attracted diverse populations. Although these particular Wests have been extensively studied, students of the westward movement have conspicuously overlooked the timber frontier.' Manistee County, Michigan, a typical timber county, lends itself to analysis as a frontier because of available census data.2

HE geographies of our grandparents included the area now occupied by South Dakota as part of the region described as the Great American Desert. And it was not so. When the writer was a boy living in South Dakota even some of the relatives in the east thought we lived in sod houses, burned hay to keep warm, were constantly menaced by savage Indians, and had three blizzards a week. And it was not so.

O Pioneers!begins with the wind, which is threatening to blow away Hanover, Nebraska, a little town serving homestead settlements. On their return to the Bergson homestead, Alexandra, her brother Emil, and their neighbor Carl Linstrum pass homesteads, whose sod houses, lowslung shelters made of the land itself, crouch in hollows to survive the elements, their very materials denoting their subjection to nature. “The great fact was the land itself,” “a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why,” only that “the land wanted … to preserve its own fierce strength.” Nature's unpredictable impulses to self-preservation “overwhelm[ed] the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.” In this novel, then, Willa Cather introduces the relation between nature and culture within the sublime tradition, in which the experience of nature discloses the limits of human faculties and threatens their health and continuance.

Dowse Sod House

In my thesis, I wish to present the story of my maternal grandmother as it is revealed in the lives of her thirteen children. I have been interested in the story since I can remember. My earliest memories are of sitting on Grandma’s lap and listening to tales of Indians on the warpath, of Kansas prairie sod houses and rattlesnakes, and of what my aunts, uncles, and my mother used to do when they were small. To avoid any possible embarrassment to living persons, I have fictionized the names of my characters. I have, however, retained all actual dates and have faithfully recorded the true childhood mishaps and anecdotes.

A geochemical analysis of 18th-century Inuit communal house floors in northern Labrador