Catherland

The panel's two strongest images come straight from the novels. The plow against the sun is from near the end of Book II of My Ántonia (1918): Jim Burden and the hired girls, picnicking above the river at sundown, watch a plough left standing on an upland farm fill the red disk, "a picture writing on the sun." The closing quotation is from Part I of O Pioneers! (1913), as Alexandra Bergson drives home onto the Divide from the river farms, resolved to mortgage the homestead and buy more of the high land.

What the plaque says

Catherland Here on the Divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some of the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves live again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpreter of man's growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond. On this beautiful, ever-changing land, man fought to establish a home. In her vision of the plow against the sun, symbol of the beauty and importance of work, Willa Cather caught the eternal blending of earth and sky. Willa Cather wrote from her heart the wonderful tales she heard and the vital drama she saw in her growing years. In her books those she knew and admired live forever. My Ántonia, earth mother of the plains, grew to maturity, loved, worked, and died within a few miles of this spot, yet she is known and cherished all over the world. "The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." The history of this land began in the heart of Willa Cather. Willa Cather Educational Foundation Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Willa Cather Center — 14 mi
  The restored Moon Block on Red Cloud's Webster Street, home of the Willa Cather Foundation, with the town she grew up in and wrote about laid out around it.
• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — 20 mi
  Six hundred and twelve acres of never-plowed mixed-grass prairie south of Red Cloud, once Kitkehahki Pawnee country, named for the writer who said the grass was the country.

More markers nearby

• Cowles Consolidated School — 9.0 mi
• Emmanuel Lutheran Church, 1904-1952 — 9.7 mi
• Crystal Lake — 12 mi
• Kingston Cemetery — 13 mi