“On the Divide” is set in the Continental Divide in a place called Rattlesnake Creek. There are two references to a Rattlesnake Creek, Rattlesnake, Ohio and the Rattlesnake Tributary that eventually feeds in the Mississippi River. Yet, Cather insists that “North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain…” (35). However, I am less concerned about where this story is set than I am with the feeling the atmospheric setting imposes upon the reader, and with Cather’s skill in developing character.
One of the things that Nebraskans and the people of the Midwest pride themselves on is their ability and willingness to endure the hardships of nature. Canute maintains this pride. “Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of the polar twilight” (37), explains Cather’s narrator. But it is not just the winters that men fear. “Insanity and suicide are very common things on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season. Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the corn leaves” (38).Cather goes on about just how nature impacts the psyche of the Divide’s inhabitants, but her real skill lies in the way she uses the physical backdrop of the Divide to characterize Canute and build sympathy for a seemingly uncaring brute of a man.
Caunte was a large man of Norwegian decent. “The Norwegians used to say that Caunte had taken the log across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished” (35), referring to the unnatural way the log bent to form the support for his shack’s sodden roof. But Cather’s story is about how man cannot hope to survive on the Divide by force of will alone. “He [Canute] drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness and level of the Divide” (39). This line leads into my favorite lines in the entire story: “Milton made a sad blunder when he put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All mountain peoples are religious. It is the cities and the plains that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice, were cursed of God” (39).Cursed of God, I can confirm growing up in Nebraska, is how many of its people feel. Yet Nebraskans take pride in this as if they were Job, being tested in a game between God and the devil.
Not knowing what else to do, when a family stakes claim not far from his, Caunte makes friendly with them. He then gets the idea that one of the daughters would make a good wife. He then demands she marry him, one night, in the middle of a cold rain storm. When her father refuses, Caunte steals her away, against her will, back to his shanty. He then fetches the local priest, who at first is unwilling to marry a girl against her will. The priest then caves under Caunte’s anger and marries them.
The humbling, sad fact is that the girl had planed on one day marrying Caunte, but not like this. She is angry and lonely as she waits for Caunte to return from his trip, taking the priest back to the church. As she “[…] looked though the cupboard, the general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity the man who lived there” (48). And by the end of the story she calls to Caunte, who she knows is just outside the door of the shanty in the cold and snow. “[…], Caunte—I’d rather have you” (49). Her wanting his companionship is the kindness that brings the monster low, “[…] Caunte stretched in the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the door step” (49).
What I take away from this story as a writer is that sometimes what you say about the landscape says more about the character of the people reside in it, and vice a versa, then pages of meaningless psychical character or landscape description. Somehow, as a writer, I need to be able to use description to both layer place and character at once. These descriptions carry more power when they are reciprocal.
Read “On the Divide” online:
HereCather, Willa. “On the Divide.”
24 Stories. New York: Meridian Classic, 1988. p. 35 - 49
Photo by Jessica Fox-Wilson
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