In 1877 a small group of Swiss immigrants from the Graubunden canton formed a cooperative with another Swiss group in Stillwater, Minnesota, to begin a colony in eastern South Dakota. These settlers founded the Badus Swiss colony on the open prairie in Lake County, Dakota Territory (later South Dakota), based on cooperative rules written in…

Swiss emigres and Mennonite missionaries Marie and Rodolphe Petter were welcomed into Cheyenne Chief Red Moon's band in Oklahoma. Away from the interference of other whites, they decided to live like their new neighbors and pitched a tipi before building a more substantial structure. There they continued their studies of the Cheyenne language and…

In one of the most frequently noted incidents in Willa Cather's "My Antonia", Russian immigrant Pavel reveals on his deathbed that, when driving his friend's wedding party sledge, he saved his own life and companion Peter's by throwing the bride and groom to the attacking wolves. Antonia and Jim are fascinated by this story, and readers…

The Jewish experience in Wichita, Kansas, highlights the ongoing challenge of being Jewish in the Midwest. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish life in the middle part of the country was quite different from that in cities like New York, which contained the largest concentration of Jewish Americans, and which has attracted most of the…

Cather's move to Nebraska as a child, the people she met there, and the seemingly endless prairie around her captured her imagination and became the inspiration for her novel "O Pioneers!" In this work, Cather introduces her readers to the diversity of immigrants who settled in the area around her home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather's…

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rolvaag's "Giants in the Earth" narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning…

Wichita's [Kansas] war on the Chinese began in 1886. Although a small war in comparison to other anti-Chinese outbursts in the American West, the persecution and violence against the city's small Asian population was nonetheless terrifying and significant to those who were the focus of the racist demonstrations. In an attempt to follow the…

A longing for an idyllic folk culture past has had a notable impact on the American landscape as communities reinvent themselves to cater to these desires. Lindsborg, Kansas, is one such struggling rural community that has projected its ethnic past to the outside world in hopes of drawing tourist dollars.