Western frontier life in America marks one of the most exciting chapters in American history. The settlement of the West fulfilled the dreams of gold-hungry prospectors and of homesteaders whose backbreaking labor transformed barren plains into fields of grain. To men and women everywhere, the West symbolizes the American achievement of taming a wild and beautiful land. Both Willa Cather's My Antonia and the film Heartland celebrate the struggle of ordinary human beings on the path to the American Dream, and the impossible tasks they strive to accomplish. In the end, the audience realizes that it is only through the struggle that true success and happiness is achieved.

The American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century promised to satisfy the needs and dreams of immigrants fresh from Europe, as well as thousands of Americans unhappy with their life in the East, but the people who...