“El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” by Willa Cather

 

People who have been so unfortunate as to have travelled in western Kansas will remember the Solomon valley for its unique and peculiar desolation. The river is a turbid, muddy little stream, that crawls along between naked bluffs, choked and split by sand bars, and with nothing whatever of that fabled haste to reach the sea. Though there can be little doubt that the Solomon is heartily disgusted with the country through which it flows, it makes no haste to quit it. Indeed, it is one of the most futile little streams under the sun, and never gets anywhere. Its sluggish current splits among the sand bars and buries itself in the mud until it literally dries up from weariness and ennui, without ever reaching anything. The hot winds and the river have been contending for the empire of the valley for years, and the river has had decidedly the worst of it. Never having been a notably ambitious stream, in time it grew tired of giving its strength to moisten barren fields and corn that never matured. Beyond the river with its belt of amber woodland rose the bluffs, ragged, broken, covered with shaggy red grass and bare of trees, save for the few stunted oaks that grew upon their steep sides. They were pathetic little trees, that sent their roots down through thirty feet of hard clay bluff to the river level. They were as old as the first settler could remember, and yet no one could assert that they had ever grown an inch. They seldom, if ever, bore acorns; it took all the nourishment that soil could give just to exist. There was a sort of mysterious kinship between those trees and the men who lived, or tried to live, there. They were alike in more ways than one.

This story from the inestimable Ms. Cather appeared in New England Magazine, the June 1901issue. Jon Lewis selected it as one of his 100 Best Western Short Stories.

Mr. Lewis had also selected Cather’s “Along the Divide” [also reviewed in this blog] and that is also a story I hold dear.

As for this one---Masterpiece!

In brief, it is a tale of how towns could appear and disappear seemingly overnight on the Frontier. We view this municipal life cycle from the view of the land itself and then personalize the lifecycle with the sole remaining citizen of the Boom-and-Bust town.

So much incident, so much character, so much heart in these few pages. Many novels pad page counts and do not come close to matching the humanity and craft displayed here.

From one man’s 100 Best List to be placed even higher on another’s.

May it serve you as well.