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Alexandra Bergson

The eldest child of John Bergson, a tall, strong young woman who wears a man's ulster and takes charge of the family homestead after her father's death, per his dying wish that she keep the land together and guide her brothers. Slow, truthful, and unshakably deliberate, she orchestrates a bold plan to mortgage the homestead and buy up neighboring land along the river, eventually building the family into wealthy, independent landowners. Decades later she runs a large, prosperous farm, keeps the old man Ivar as a permanent dependent despite her brothers' objections, and dotes on her much younger brother Emil, for whom she built her fine house.

Emil Bergson

Alexandra's youngest brother, much younger than Lou and Oscar, whom Alexandra raised almost as a son and sent through the State University. As a small boy he is remembered crying over a kitten stuck up a telegraph pole in Hanover; as a young man he is dashing, moody, and 'more Swedish than any of them' underneath his American polish, torn between studying law, taking up more land, and his secret, consuming love for his married neighbor Marie Shabata. He travels to Mexico for a time, smoking cigarettes and speaking Spanish, before returning home to the tragedy that ends his story.

John Bergson

The Swedish immigrant patriarch who spent his first five years on the Divide going into debt and the next six struggling out of it, losing cattle, horses, hogs, crops, and two infant sons along the way. He dies at forty-six having finally paid off his mortgages, leaving instructions that Alexandra manage the land and that his sons never sell it. He is buried beneath a white shaft in the Norwegian graveyard, which sixteen years later overlooks transformed, thriving farmland.

Carl Linstrum

A sensitive, narrow-chested neighbor boy and Alexandra's closest childhood friend, who as a teenager climbs a telegraph pole with strapped-on spikes to rescue Emil's kitten. His family gives up their failing claim and moves to St. Louis so his father can return to work in a cigar factory; Carl becomes an engraver and lives a rootless, itinerant artistic life in cities, feeling himself a 'failure' by the Divide's standard of land and wealth. Years later he returns to visit the now-prosperous Alexandra, and their old bond deepens into something more, complicated by her brothers' suspicion of his motives regarding her property.

Lou Bergson

Alexandra's second-eldest brother, quick, intelligent, and apt to act rashly, with a bristly yellow mustache he is proud of. He resists Alexandra's plan to take on new mortgages to buy more land, later marries Annie and moves toward town life and local politics, and eventually joins Oscar in arguing that the family land really belongs to 'the men of the family' despite Alexandra having managed and built it.

Oscar Bergson

Alexandra's elder brother, square-headed, powerfully built, and rigidly wedded to routine and hard physical labor regardless of whether it makes sense; he once threshed a failed wheat crop at a loss just to prove how poor it was. Slower and more stubborn than Lou, he backs his brother in confronting Alexandra over ownership of the family land later in life.

Marie Shabata (née Tovesky)

A vivacious, warm-hearted Bohemian woman, originally from a well-off family, who fell for the handsome Frank Shabata as a teenager, was sent to a convent to separate them, and ran away to marry him at eighteen. She and Frank buy and run an orchard farm near Alexandra's land; unhappy in her marriage, she forms a deepening, ultimately tragic secret love with the much younger Emil Bergson, and is drawn to old folk beliefs about trees and luck inherited from her Bohemian family.

Frank Shabata

Marie's handsome, hot-tempered husband, a Bohemian immigrant farmer who once wooed Marie with a dozen photographs of himself in romantic poses. He works his land with fierce, almost violent energy, takes an annual drinking spree to Hastings or Omaha, and is consumed by an unfocused jealousy about his wife that he can never quite prove or release, driving the couple further apart over the years.

Ivar

An eccentric, deeply religious old Norwegian who lives alone by a pond frequented by wild birds, doctors sick animals (curing a horse's swelling and sawing off a cow's torn horn) through prayer and folk remedies, and forbids anyone to bring guns near his land. After losing his own farm to mismanagement, he is taken in by Alexandra, given a room in her barn near the horses, and made her trusted advisor and Bible-reader, despite her brothers' repeated attempts to have him declared unfit and removed.

Mrs. Lee

Annie's elderly Swedish mother, bent nearly double but spry, who visits Alexandra every winter to escape her daughter's more genteel household and enjoy speaking her native language, wearing her nightcap, and drinking a nightly brandy toddy. She loves recounting stories from a Swedish family paper and tales of her girlhood on a Gottland dairy farm, sometimes forgetting which stories were real and which were printed.

Amédée Chevalier

Emil's close French friend since boyhood, a cheerful, hardworking young farmer who marries Angélique in a large community wedding with 'barrels of beer' and twenty cousins in attendance. Driven and proud of his new machinery, he pushes himself dangerously hard managing his wheat harvest despite sudden severe pain, foreshadowing his own untimely death.

Angélique

Amédée's playful young bride, teased by Emil at her own wedding celebration when he sweeps her up and jokingly threatens to run off with her before returning her, laughing, to her husband.

Signa

A servant in Alexandra's household who marries Nelse; Alexandra gives the couple two milk cows as a wedding present, and in a scene of old-world custom, the bride insists on walking home leading a cow beside her new husband rather than riding, out of wifely deference.

Hanover

A small, wind-battered railroad town on the Nebraska tableland with a rutted main street running from the grain elevator and depot at one end to the lumberyard and horse pond at the other. It has general stores, two banks, a drug store, a feed store, a saloon, and a post office, and serves as the trading center for the surrounding farm country called the Divide.

The Divide

The vast, sparsely settled prairie tableland surrounding Hanover where the Bergson family and their immigrant neighbors homestead. In its early years it is described as a fierce, overwhelming 'wild land' of sod houses and gaunt windmills that resists cultivation; sixteen years later it has become a checkerboard of wheat and corn fields, painted farmhouses, telephone wires, and steel windmills, one of the richest farming districts in the country.

The Norwegian Graveyard

The burial ground where John Bergson and later his wife are laid to rest beneath a white marble shaft visible across the wheatfields. From its gate, sixteen years after Bergson's death, one can look out over a transformed landscape of neat squared fields, painted farmhouses, and windmills that would be unrecognizable to the man buried below.

Swedish Homesteaders of the Divide

An immigrant farming community, including the Bergsons, Ivar, and the Lee family, who settled the harsh prairie table-land, bringing Lutheran faith, the Swedish language, folk remedies, and songs like the 'Frithjof Saga' and Longfellow's ballads. Over a generation their hard-fought claims become some of the richest wheat and corn farmland in the country.

Bohemian and French Settlers

Neighboring immigrant communities on the Divide, including the Catholic Tovesky/Shabata family and the large French Chevalier clan (Amédée and his twenty cousins), known for elaborate community weddings, dances, fine baking, and old-world folk beliefs such as tree-worship traditions brought from the Bohemian mountains.

The White Mulberry Orchard

An old, sheltered corner of the Shabata orchard bordered by a mulberry hedge and a wheatfield, kept alive for years by Carl Linstrum's boyhood labor of hauling water to the young trees. It becomes Marie's favorite retreat, furnished with an old wagon-seat, a book, and a workbasket, and lends its name to the novel's third part as the setting for her secret meetings with Emil.

The Bergson Land Scheme

After a scouting trip to the more developed river country, Alexandra convinces her reluctant brothers Lou and Oscar to mortgage their existing homesteads and borrow heavily in order to buy the Linstrum, Crow, and Struble farms, betting that undervalued Divide land will multiply in worth within a decade. The gamble succeeds spectacularly: land that was once considered poor becomes immensely valuable, transforming the family from struggling farmers into wealthy, independent landowners.

Emil and Marie's Doomed Love

Over several years, Emil Bergson and his married neighbor Marie Shabata develop a passionate, forbidden attachment, torn between duty and desire; Marie repeatedly urges Emil to go away and start a new life so the affair cannot destroy them both, while Emil resists leaving. Their story, entwined with Frank Shabata's simmering jealousy, builds toward the book's central tragedy, foreshadowed by images like two kernels of seed-corn from the same ear, one thriving and one left to rot.