Prairie Fire

Marc Dion
Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:00:00 -0700
Opinion

There are about 420 people in Arthur County, Nebraska, out in the western part of the state, spread out over 715,152 square miles. The county seat, and the county's only incorporated town, is a town called Arthur, and about 130 people call that village home.

Those little rural towns in the West, Midwest and South have been emptying out for decades. Drained by the Dust Bowl, mechanized farming, corporate farming and ranching, and hog factory operations, these little places lost their schools, their grocery stores and nearly every other variety of commercial endeavor.

And people want to live in places where there's "something to do," although all most of us ever do is go to work and come home. Still, in a suburb, which is where most Americans live, there's the feeling you might do something. At the very least, you can drive into the nearby city, carefully avoid the ghetto areas, and eventually arrive at a good restaurant. After the meal, you can take the interstate back to the wide, empty streets of your suburb and tell your wife that you "had a great time" and you should do it more often.
Updated: Fri Mar 20, 2026

There are about 420 people in Arthur County, Nebraska, out in the western part of the state, spread out over 715,152 square miles. The county seat, and the county's only incorporated town, is a town called Arthur, and about 130 people call that village home.

Those little rural towns in the West, Midwest and South have been emptying out for decades. Drained by the Dust Bowl, mechanized farming, corporate farming and ranching, and hog factory operations, these little places lost their schools, their grocery stores and nearly every other variety of commercial endeavor.

And people want to live in places where there's "something to do," although all most of us ever do is go to work and come home. Still, in a suburb, which is where most Americans live, there's the feeling you might do something. At the very least, you can drive into the nearby city, carefully avoid the ghetto areas, and eventually arrive at a good restaurant. After the meal, you can take the interstate back to the wide, empty streets of your suburb and tell your wife that you "had a great time" and you should do it more often.

You can't do that in Arthur, or anywhere near Arthur. There isn't even an Applebee's in Arthur.

But in some ways, Arthur, and places like Arthur, are the last tattered, dusty remnants of who Americans were meant to be, back there when they wrote the Constitution.

Americans were supposed to be small town businesspeople, or farmers. We were not supposed to be peasants like in Europe, but people who owned the land on which they stood, and that ownership would give them a personal stake in government. None of that counted of you were Black, of course. If you were Black, slavery chained even your dreams.

"Land and freedom!" rebels against the government have cried down through the centuries. No rebel ever cried, "An apartment with a roommate and the gig economy!"

And I'm not one of those fools who wants to go live off the grid and be a homesteader. When I was a young man in Missouri, I worked with and for men who'd lived off the grid, plowed with mules, picked cotton by hand and lived by lantern light. They were not nostalgic, and they would tell you how picking cotton makes your fingers bleed.

Somewhere inside every American male is the idea that we could be a cowboy, or a gunfighter, or an honest homesteader in his sod house, battling locusts and drought and blizzards.

And out in Arthur County, where the homesteaders starved out and blew away, or moved closer to an Applebee's or a Target, no one remembers. That dream of self-sufficiency rooted in muscle-cracking labor is gone. In Massachusetts, men in cowboy boots eat Nebraska beef at Texas Roadhouse and watch the waitstaff line dance.

About 800,000 acres of Nebraska caught fire last week, and it was reported, but not with the zeal reporters bring to a fire in Los Angeles, a fire that burns out actors and influencers.

In the town of Arthur, Nebraska, a week ago back in unnoticed time, Rose Mary White, 86, died in the fire, a death covered by some newspapers and radio and television stations in Nebraska. She was born in Arthur. She was a great-grandmother and she waited tables, and her late husband Lloyd worked in a dairy for a while, and they moved around on the Plains, finally returning to Arthur amid the silence left behind by retreating American dreams.

Arthur is making its last stand out in the Sandhill Country, a place where no one wants to live anymore, although plenty of people say they'd like to live "out in the country."

Rose Mary White lived out in the country her whole life, and she made her last stand in Arthur, Nebraska, while the good pastures burned.

My wife Deborah and I live in a suburb. We are maybe 20 minutes from an Applebee's. We say our neighborhood is "quiet," but I could hit the neighbor's house if I threw a cigar butt hard enough.

We live on a quarter acre, and that's our "spread." You remember the old Western movies and how some drifting cowboy would turn his collar to the hard prairie wind up and say he was "gonna get a nice little spread someday."

The house we live in is a style of construction called a "ranch house," and sometimes just a "ranch."

In America, the longing never leaves us.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.