Excerpt from My Antonia by Willa Cather
Excerpt from My Antonia
Published in 1918
A novel accurately relates the difficulties experienced by European immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth century
"They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers."
My Antonia is a novel about life in Nebraska in the 1880s and 1890s, where author Willa Cather (1872–1947) lived from age nine. The Antonia in the title is fourteen-year-old Antonia Shimerda, whose family moved to Nebraska from Bohemia, in Europe, the land now known as the Czech Republic. Although My Antonia is fiction, it accurately represents how hard life was for European immigrants attracted to the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Arriving with little money and unable to speak English, European immigrants were often attracted by the promise of free or inexpensive farmland made available through the Homestead Act of 1862 (see entry). But the Great Plains of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas offered a difficult, hostile environment. Pioneers dug holes into the earth and heaped bricks made of sod (dirt held together by grass roots) to make low houses that were a combination of a hole in the ground and a mud hut.
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