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The Nation's Pulse
Plains Plutarch
Mari Sandoz authored 18 books on America’s least inviting region.
Mari Sandoz’s struggles as a writer were a metaphor for the landscape of her origin, the Great Plains. A wind-whistled place, home to drought, blizzards, tornados, and plagues of grasshoppers, its very hardness has branded it America’s most provincial and uninteresting region. From this unforgiving milieu she fashioned eighteen books with the tenacity of a homesteader harnessed to a plow. Maybe her career would have been easier if — like her celebrated contemporary Willa Cather — she had not waited until later in her life to leave.
Born in Hays Spring, Nebraska in the Sandhills in 1896 to Swiss immigrants Jules and Mary Fehr Sandoz, Mari Susette Sandoz was the eldest of six children. Her father Jules Sandoz was a rancher who believed that children should not only work, but know hard labor. Mari as a child performed ranch work under harsh conditions. She once went snowblind after digging a number of floundering cattle out of a huge snowdrift. Jules also discouraged his daughter’s precocious reading and writing. He was the first obstacle that she would surmount. Another was a failed marriage when at 18 she wed a neighboring rancher named Wray Macumber, a man identical to her father in temperament.
Sandoz’s success with her later historically oriented books can ironically be partially credited to her father. “Old Jules” knew many hard-bitten men who had connections to the old pre-agricultural life on the plains: grizzled trappers and buffalo hunters, and veterans of the Indian wars. Many an evening in Mari’s youth saw the family host at their table one or more of these characters with their interesting stories to tell, and she seems to have absorbed every detail — historical and otherwise — in these “silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed.”
Abandoning her marriage, and despite lacking a high school diploma, Sandoz managed to enter the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1922, thanks to the help of a kindly administrator. But her struggles as a writer were just beginning. Later in life she claimed to have collected a thousand rejection slips for submitted short stories. This is likely an exaggeration, and may include work in a variety of forms: essays, journalism, etc. In 1934 she took a job as the associate editor of Nebraska History magazine, the publication of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
Sandoz was nearly 40 when she published Old Jules (1935), the story of her immigrant father’s struggle to build his Nebraska ranch. Her big breakthrough came in 1942 with Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas, a biography of the legendary Sioux chief based on an unconventional research modus operandi where, as she wrote, “I have used the simplest words possible hoping… to say some of the things of the Indian for which there are no white-man words, [and to] suggest something of his innate nature.” During her career she also published six forgettable novels such as Slogum House (1937) and Capital City (1939), books that disappeared without much notice, though the latter was an excoriation of life in Lincoln that earned her so much local opprobrium that she moved to Denver to escape it. Sandoz could write competent but bland fiction, while excelling at nonfiction. It seems this apprenticeship in imaginative mediocrity forged a style suited to serve her true calling, the writing of history and memoir related to the Great Plains. For instance, the Crazy Horse biography demonstrated that Sandoz could vividly describe events from the native point of view. Another book in this vein was The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966), her take on one of America’s noteworthy military disasters, and controversial with Custer scholars at the time because she refused to contribute to then-fashionable George Armstrong Custer hagiography.
She is especially admired for an historical trilogy: The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964) — books covering a century of Plains history and promoting the idea that until the arrival of dryland wheat farmers late in the 19th century, the region’s economic worth was produced almost exclusively by the flesh and fur of animals. There were few trees to cut on the sea of grass, and though gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, oil and gas development wouldn’t proceed until the 20th century. The Great Plains only reluctantly bestows its riches.
The author’s most successful book was Cheyenne Autumn (1953), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and story of an 1878 breakout of 300 Northern Cheyennes from an “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma) reservation as they strove to return to their ancestral homeland on the Yellowstone River in present Montana. The book reads like a novel with its brisk action and treatment of the historical dramatis personae such as Chief Dull Knife and Generals George Crook and Nelson Miles. The Indians (with women and children in tow) run and fight their way north for fifteen hundred miles in a futile quest that cost many lives and ultimately sent the fugitives back to the reservation. In the book’s preface she wrote that this was a period “that turned a free hunting people into sullen agency sitters.” It inspired the 1964 film starring Richard Widmark and James Stewart, and directed by John Ford, the latter’s last western. Sandoz hated the movie because — typical of Hollywood meddling with historical realism — Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were added to the plot, two historical characters who had nothing to do with the Cheyenne odyssey. It was her last disappointment.
Sandoz died (1966) of cancer not long after the film’s release. A life of stamina and determination with a sharp, metaphorical prairie wind in her face was over. But the Plutarch of the Plains left behind a great American legacy.
About the Author
Bill Croke, formerly of Cody, Wyoming, is a writer in Salmon, Idaho.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (27) | Leave a comment
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Kitty | 2.7.12 @ 6:22AM
Just what TAS has needed: a nice refreshing chance from politics.
Bob K.| 2.7.12 @ 10:14AM
Amen to that!
Bob K.| 2.7.12 @ 8:09PM
Well done, Mr. Croke!
Robert Nowall | 2.7.12 @ 6:48AM
Some prints of "Cheyenne Autumn" omit the Wyatt Earp part...
D G Myers | 2.7.12 @ 7:23AM
A lovely piece on a largely forgotten writer. Croke is justifiably hard on Sandoz’s fiction, although perhaps her novel The Tom-Walker (1947), about war veterans returning to civilian life, should be exempt from his judgment of “blandness.” As I said elsewhere, the novel’s purpose is to “criticize a society that has forgotten the virtues implicit in military service—a surprising point of view for a writer from the Left.”
Kitty is right: Croke’s piece is a “refreshing chance.”
D G Myers | 2.7.12 @ 7:27AM
What a maroon! Here is the correct link to a little discussion that places Mari Sandoz’s The Tom-Walker in the context of other “veterans’ novels.”
Again, wonderful writing, Mr Croke!
SandhillsBrit | 11.9.12 @ 7:59AM
I rate her higher than Carther. Cather is an exquisite prose stylist, but in the end she writes about the frontier period from a town-person's perspective. Sandoz knew it in a way that few other writers do - with the exception of say, Hamlin Garland. She knew it physcially, in her gut, primally. I've recently written a book The Red House On The Niobrara, describing my own 6-month sojourn in the Sandhills during which I discuss her work and legacy. (I'm a Brit, by the way). You may care to check it out: http://amzn.to/Jck324
Interested Conservative| 2.7.12 @ 9:05AM
I have always wondered if some PhD candidate did the follow-up to Old Jules. To say, as Wikipedia's entry does, that she is a child of Swiss immigrants only begins to capture the story. How he left home, and his early studies, are briefly covered in her memoir, but IIRC there's also a distant tie to the drug company back in Switzerland.
In addition to Cather, there's an interesting overlap to some of Hamlin Garland's starker recollections of upper midwest/great plains life.
Bill| 2.7.12 @ 9:33AM
In Old Jules, the metaphor that recurs throughout the book is the waves of would-be pioneers arriving like waves on the seashore, failing, then washing away like the waves falling on a beach. Great.
Kitty | 2.7.12 @ 1:32PM
I'm the maroon; I meant to type change instead of chance. :)
D G Myers | 2.7.12 @ 5:26PM
Nonsense, Kitty. To be introduced to a new writer—a new discovery—is just exactly a “refreshing chance.” Let’s call your typo an Aristotelian slip.
Bill| 2.7.12 @ 9:31AM
In Cheyenne Autumn, Mari Sandoz' encyclopediac knowledge of the western watershed of the Missouri River leads her to create a wonderful metaphor, of the rivers and their intervening heights of land making a kind of ladder up which the Northern Cheyenne under Dull Knife and Little Wolf climbed in order to get from Indian Territory to the Powder River country. The book is great, but it's worth the reading for that metaphor alone.
Bill| 2.7.12 @ 9:38AM
If you to get a feeling of what being Mari Sandoz, Old Jules, and the pioneers who were her neighbors experienced, go visit northwest Nebraska, Cherry County and environs, and see what the Sand Hill country is like. Farming there must have been a terrible experience. It's still pretty unpopulated.
Cris| 2.7.12 @ 1:51PM
Yes, a vast expanse of open country. Driving through on the local roads, it seems to never end. I believe this is the area Nebraskans referred to in Capote's 'In Cold Blood' as 'out there'. The traveler, if he takes the time to contemplate his surroundings, will find the solitude majestic.
Bill| 2.8.12 @ 10:08AM
Cattle country, not made for fences. It IS majestic. You can picture the Sioux and Cheyenne riding their horses through the hills.
SandhillsBrit | 11.9.12 @ 8:01AM
See my comment (Sandhills Brit) above. I fell in love with that country in 1993, after a friend in Hastings sent me to talk to Caroline Sandoz.
Occam's Tool| 2.7.12 @ 11:57AM
I love the Northern Plains.
joergen Olsen | 2.7.12 @ 12:18PM
Mari Sandoz has never been translated to Danish. What at shame. I now really have to read some of her books, - after your 'appetizer.' Thank you for reminding us of this author, and on Charles Dickens Day!
SandhillsBrit | 11.9.12 @ 8:03AM
Thanks to a British scholarship fund, last year I had the privilege of staying 6 months in an old house built by Danish immigrants on the banks of the Niobrara. You may care to look up The Red House On The Niobrara and at least read the free 30-page download ( http://amzn.to/Jck324)
marshcope| 2.7.12 @ 12:24PM
I discovered Sandoz when in '57 The Horse Catcher(about a Cheyenne boy who loved horses more than fighting) appeared in readers digest condensed books--the same issue that included a condensed The 20th Maine.
cicero| 2.7.12 @ 2:38PM
Great stuff! History tells us what happened; Fiction tells us why.
Bob K.| 2.7.12 @ 7:57PM
Better that fiction be history than the reverse.
Bob K.| 2.7.12 @ 8:05PM
Macaulay wrote that "History begins in novel and ends in essay." and "A great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated."
http://www.jstor.org/pss/259946
Bob K.| 2.7.12 @ 8:16PM
For those interested reference is made here to Professor John Lukacs most recent historical essay, published in 2011. "The Future of History."
See Chapter V. "History and the Novel."
ISBN 978-0-300-16956-0
Mazzuchelli| 2.8.12 @ 2:28PM
The state is beautiful. Believe it was Highway 2 through the Sand Hills that Charles Kuralt featured as one of the most beautiful in the country. Driving between the North and Middle loup rivers is also spectacular. Much of the beauty is because it hasn't been trampled by humanity for a long, long time. A lot of people believe the state is flat since I-80 was built on a flood plain. Good. When you hit 80 in Nebraska, just keep on going.
SandhillsBrit | 11.9.12 @ 7:55AM
Nice to see your article. Although I am Brit, and live in Britain, I have spent twenty years trying to get Sandoz' name out there as perhaps the greatest western writer (I place her above Cather, for example). Last year I spent six months alone in a hunting lodge on the Niobrara, thinkng about her work - and other matters. If you have time, perhaps you would care to look at my book The Red House On The Niobrara (http://amzn.to/Jck324). The first 30pp are available as a free download.
Anyway, power to your elbow, my friend.