Mari Sandoz

Novelist

• Born: May 11, 1896
• Place of birth: Sheridan County, Nebraska
• Died: March 10, 1966
• Place of death: New York, New York

Biography

Mari Susette Sandoz, a historian and novelist of the American West, was the daughter of Jules Ami Sandoz and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Fehr. Her father, a Swiss immigrant who came to the United States in 1881 and homesteaded in western Nebraska in 1884, was a community builder and a champion of small farmers in their struggle against ranchers. He was also a domestic tyrant, his stature diminished by a lifetime of legal quarrels and by savage acts of violence against his wife and children. As a child, Sandoz was required to perform tasks that would have been dangerous for an adult. Once she was sent to bring in the cattle during a blizzard and suffered an attack of snow blindness that permanently blinded one eye; on another occasion her father, in a rage, broke a bone in her hand, leaving the hand partially crippled for the rest of her life.

Sandoz received less than five years of sporadic education in country schools, but her determination to become a writer originated in childhood, and the environment of the Nebraska frontier, violent and dangerous as it was, provided a wealth of material that she was able to draw on throughout her life. Her father was a friend to the Sioux people who visited his ranch, some of them warriors who had only recently been at war with the United States Army, and Sandoz’s early determination to do literary justice to them originated in these encounters.

Despite her limited education, Sandoz passed the rural teachers’ examination in 1913 and conducted her first school in her father’s barn. A year later she married a young local rancher, Wray Macumber; she divorced him in 1919. That year she went to Lincoln, Nebraska, to attend a business college, and for the next sixteen years she struggled to earn a living at a variety of jobs while getting an education and beginning to write. She attended the University of Nebraska when she could afford it but never completed a degree, and she began to write short stories based on her memories of western Nebraska. Before her father died in 1928, he asked her to write his biography, and though she had often thought of doing so his hold on her was so great that she hesitated to begin.

Old Jules (1935), Sandoz's first and perhaps her most important book, was first written as a novel and then revised several times as history. She thoroughly researched her topic, and the work is indispensable for an understanding of the development of the northern Great Plains. The editors to whom she first showed it rejected it, however, considering it to be too dramatic to be entirely true; they also objected to her prose style.

Old Jules was Sandoz's first achievement in the creation of the Trans-Missouri series, which she conceived early in her writing career. The books in this series—Crazy Horse (1942), Cheyenne Autumn (1953), The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen from the Rio Grande across the Far Marias (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964), in addition to Old Jules—recount the history of the region from the earliest historical time to the twentieth century; if she had lived long enough she would have concluded with an account of the development of the petroleum industry on the plains.

Although she was primarily devoted to the writing of history, Sandoz also produced novels throughout her career. Her early efforts, Slogum House (1937) and Capital City (1939), were in part the products of her fear of the rise of fascism in the United States during the 1930s, and the moral passion that motivated her is revealed in the allegorical methods she employs. Her later novels carry the weight of their social messages more easily. The most successful of them are Miss Morissa (1955), the story of a frontier woman doctor whose character resembles Sandoz’s own; and Son of the Gamblin’ Man (1960), the fictionalized story of the father of the painter Robert Henri, whose passion to found a community in the West must have struck Sandoz as resembling that of her own father (although the latter sold poorly, due to a lack of publicity by the publisher, and was not well reviewed at the time). She also wrote two short, highly regarded novels on Indian themes, The Horsecatcher (1957) and The Story Catcher (1963).

Sandoz moved to New York in 1943 to be near research libraries and publishing houses. Except for research trips to the West and teaching at the University of Wisconsin in the summers from 1947 to 1955, she lived there for the rest of her life. In her last days she fought a heroic—and lonely—battle with cancer while she worked to complete her last book, The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966).

Sandoz wrote three books that will be read as long as the frontier experience remains a vivid possession of the American imagination: Old Jules, Crazy Horse, and Cheyenne Autumn. In her description Jules Sandoz comes alive as a remarkably complex man—a romantic always dreaming of a freer life to the west and an idealized Europe to which he cannot return, yet a realist who struggles to create a community while brutalizing himself and those around him. His daughter’s success in rendering the complexity of a man whom she simultaneously feared and admired makes this book both a masterpiece of Western history and one of a handful of the most important works of American biography. Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn reveal a remarkable success in achieving empathy with the Plains Indian peoples, and the language Sandoz uses has been acclaimed as precisely suited to what the Indians would have used if they had been telling the stories.

Author Works

Nonfiction:

Old Jules, 1935

Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas: A Biography, 1942

Cheyenne Autumn, 1953

The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, 1954

The Cattlemen from the Rio Grande across the Far Marias, 1958

Love Song to the Plains, 1961

These Were the Sioux, 1961

The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire, 1964

Old Jules Country: A Selection from Old Jules and Thirty Years of Writing Since the Book Was Published, 1965

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1966

The Christmas of the Phonograph Records: A Recollection, 1966

Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections, 1970

Gordon Journal Letters of Mari Sandoz, 1991–92 (2 volumes; Caroline Sandoz Pifer, editor)

Letters of Mari Sandoz, 1992 (Helen Winter Stauffer, editor)

“I Do Not Apologize for the Length of This Letter”: The Mari Sandoz Letters on Native American Rights, 1940–1965, 2009 (Kimberli A. Lee, editor)

Long Fiction:

Slogum House, 1937

Capital City, 1939

The Tom-Walker, 1947

Winter Thunder, 1954

Miss Morissa, Doctor of the Gold Trail, 1955

The Horsecatcher, 1957

Son of the Gamblin’ Man: The Youth of an Artist, 1960

The Story Catcher, 1963

Foal of Heaven, 1993

Short Fiction:

Victorie, and Other Stories, 1986 (Caroline Sandoz Pifer, editor)

Miscellaneous:

Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings, 1959 (includes essays, short stories, and a novella)

Bibliography

Bristow, David L. “The Enduring Mari Sandoz.” Nebraska Life, Jan.–Feb. 2001. David L. Bristow, davidbristow.com/sandoz.pdf. Accessed 16 May 2017. A personal portrait of Sandoz, from her difficult youth to her struggles as a writer.

Lindell, Lisa R. “Recasting Epic Tradition: The Dispossessed as Hero in Sandoz’s Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1, 1996, pp. 43–53. Lindell examines Sandoz’s depiction of the treatment of the Cheyenne Indians and her portrayal of Crazy Horse.

Rippey, Barbara W. “Toward a New Paradigm: Mari Sandoz’s Study of Red and White Myth in Cheyenne Autumn.” Women and Western American Literature, edited by Helen W. Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowki, Whitston, 1982, pp. 247–66. An analysis of Sandoz’s exploration of myth in this novel.

Stauffer, Helen W. Mari Sandoz, Story Catcher of the Plains. U of Nebraska P, 1982. A literary biography of Sandoz detailing her meticulous research and dedication to accuracy and her quarrels with editors and publishers. Also provides an analysis of Sandoz’s writings.

Villiger, Laura R. Mari Sandoz: A Study in Post-Colonial Discourse. P. Lang, 1994. A full-length study that examines Sandoz’s work as a series of contrasts, including regional versus universal dimensions, the indigenous world and the newcomer’s world, and text and context. Includes bibliographies of writings by and about Sandoz.