After Jim Burden's parents die, his Virginia relatives send the ten-year-old boy to live with his grandparents on their Nebraska farm. He travels by train in the care of teenage Jake Marpole, who was a "hand," a man hired to do chores, on his father's farm. The passenger conductor tells Jim and Jake about an immigrant family on the train whose destination is the same as theirs, and he teases Jim about the attractive girl, near his own age, who is the only one in her family who can speak any English. Otto Fuchs, a farmhand for Jim's grandfather, meets Jim and Jake at the station and drives them out to Grandfather Burden's farm in a wagon.
When Jim awakens, it is afternoon. After a bath in the tin washtub behind the kitchen cookstove, he explores the long cellar next to the kitchen. At supper he meets his bald, blue-eyed, white-bearded grandfather, and that evening he listens to Otto's tales about his adventures in the Far West. Otto answers all of Jim's questions and, in secret, tells the boy about the pony that has been purchased for him. The next day Jim explores the farmyard and goes to the garden to dig with his grandmother, who always takes her rattlesnake cane with her. After she goes back to the house, Jim stays in the garden alone and dreams away the morning, feeling at peace — part of the fabric of the earth, the sun, and the wine-red sea of tall, unending prairie grass.
On Sunday morning, Grandmother, Otto, and Jim take some provisions to their new neighbors, the Shimerdas, who have been living in a lean-to that fronts a cave, eating only corncakes and molasses. While Peter Krajiek translates for Otto and Grandmother, Jim, Ántonia, and Yulka run across the prairie and snuggle down in the tall grass to talk. Ántonia wants to learn English words, and Jim teaches her a few. Later, back at the dugout, Mr. Shimerda gives Grandmother Burden a book containing both an English and a Bohemian alphabet and asks her to teach English to Ántonia.
Jim takes his first long pony ride and is deeply impressed with the rich autumn colors in Nebraska. Over the next several weeks, he takes many rides, exploring the countryside and listening to Otto's stories about the West. Almost every day, Ántonia comes for her reading lesson with Jim; Mrs. Shimerda isn't too happy about this arrangement, but grudgingly she realizes that at least one member of the family should learn English. During those first weeks, the Shimerdas never go to town because Krajiek has made them suspicious of the townspeople.
