Willa Cather Memorial Prairie

Cather's family never owned this ground and never lived on it. The prairie took her name in 1975 because it is the country her novels are made of, and because so little of it is left: prairie once covered about 40 percent of the United States and now covers less than one percent. "As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea," she wrote in My Ántonia.

Before it was anyone's memorial it was Pawnee land. The Kitkehahki, the Republican band, lived along this valley, and one of their large villages stood a few miles downriver near Guide Rock. The Pawnee ceded the country to the United States and were removed from Nebraska in 1875. Red Cloud was founded in 1871, and settlers soon turned much of the prairie around it into cropland and pasture. These 612 acres were never plowed. The Woods Charitable Trust bought them in 1974, The Nature Conservancy managed them until 2006, and since then they have belonged to the Willa Cather Foundation, which aims to return the land to its nineteenth-century condition.

It is mixed-grass prairie, with big and little bluestem, Indian grass and switchgrass alongside blue grama and buffalo grass. Wildflowers bloom from April into October. Meadowlarks, bobolinks, upland plovers and greater prairie-chickens are among the birds. Nearly two miles of trail cross it, open year-round on foot, with no restrooms, water or shelter.