Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter
Keywords
Switzerland, nonfiction, immigration
Abstract
On my first trip West, from the corn plains of Illinois to California and back, Nebraska was the first state with a physiognomy really distinct from the green fields I had come to know. Although there were many spectacular landscapes to be admired during the trip, the grassy hills of Western Nebraska, round and treeless, stayed in my memory. So did the sunflowers, lining the roads and swaying gently in the grass. Little did I know then that, years later, this rather bare, monotonous country would hold my imagination through literary works of women, Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz. With their books, they enrich and deepen the external image of the land with the complex human drama of the early settlers who were faced with a nature bountiful and ferocious, who had to contend not only with each others' unlimited dreams and despairs, but also with the Indians' alien culture, their wrath and frustrations. Even less would I have ever guessed that this world would be conveyed by a Swiss-American woman, Mari Sandoz, who grew up on this remote frontier and whose Swiss parents played an essential role in opening up new space to homesteaders seeking a livelihood in the wild. The daughter of pioneers, Mari Sandoz became a pioneer in her own right: venturing into the field of historical and fictional writing, she followed the settlers exploring the historical details of their arduous lives and tracing in them the intricate, often contradictory .forces of their frontier experience.
Recommended Citation
Burkhard, Marianne
(1983)
"III. Strangers Settling a Wild Land: Mari Sandoz' Writings About Swiss Settlers in Nebraska,"
Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter: Vol. 19:
Iss.
3, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_newsletter/vol19/iss3/4