Willa Cather’s Nebraska: The Divide, Geologic Deep Time, and Indigenous Erasure in O, Pioneers!

by Jack Love Introduction Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is a unique novel that employs environmental language prevalent in American Literature of the 19th and early 20th century. Though O Pioneers! is set on the Divide in Nebraskan farm country, there are moments in the text where Cather references past geological epochs when the entire lands of Nebraska were submerged beneath primordial oceans. In other instances, she compares the western landscape to prehistory when stones and soils were stil...