Mari Sandoz

Crazy Horse, the military leader of the Oglala Sioux whose personal power and social nonconformity set him off as "strange," fought in many famous battles, including the one at the Little Bighorn. He held out boldly against the government's efforts to confine the Sioux on reservations. Finally, in the spring of 1877 he surrendered, one of the last important chiefs to do so, only to meet a violent death. Mari Sandoz, the noted author of Cheyenne Autumn and Old Jules, both available as Bison Books, has captured the spirit of Crazy Horse with a strength and nobility befitting his heroism.

The Strange Man of the Oglalas : a Biography

Crazy Horse

First published in the dark days immediately before World War II, Capital City is Mari Sandoz's angriest and most political novel. Like many important American novels of the 1930s—John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, John Conroy's The Disinherited, Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty—Capital City depicts the troubles and responses of working people trapped in the Great Depression. It is a unique portrayal of the depression in the Great Plains, and a study of the forces that bitterly contended for wealth and power. Sandoz researched the daily life and behind-the-scenes operations of several state capitals in the thirties before drawing them together in this novel, part allegory, part indictment, part warning. Famous for her passionate writing, Sandoz gave Capital City the fuwll measure of ferocity and rage.

Capital City

Vivid picture of the great expanse of earth and sky that was the Great Plains, with a history of the pioneers and Indians who lived there.

Love Song to the Plains

"In 1867 the plains were black with thunderous millions of buffaloes. By 1883 only a few hundred were left. Mis Sandoz has painted a brilliant cyclorama of this great change. She pictures the grandeur of the great herds, the excitement and the consequences of the buffalo hunt. She shows how the far-sweeping slaughter caused the Indian wars and forced the Indians back onto the reservations. Out of the great hunts developed the buffalo hide trade and buffalo boom towns. The newly built railroads were snatched from bankruptcy by buffalo freight. Thousands of post-Civil War unemployed turned buffalo hunters, clearing huge acreages for cattle and settlement."--Dust jacket.

The Story of the Hide Men

The Buffalo Hunters

Slogum House

Old Jules

In 1867 the total number of buffaloes in the trans-Missouri region was conservatively estimated at fifteen million. By the end of the 1880s that figure had dwindled to a few hundred. The destruction of the great herds is the theme of this book. Mari Sandoz's canvas is vast, but it is charged with color and excitement—accounts of Indian ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, gambling and gunfights, military expeditions, famous frontier characters (Wild Bill Hickok, Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, Sheridan, Custer, and Indian Chiefs Whistler, Yellow Wolf, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull).

"No one in our time wrote better than the late Mari Sandoz did, or with more authority and grace, about as many aspects of the Old West," said John K. Hutchens. The proof of that is in her powerful re-creation of pioneer days in the Sandhills of northwestern Nebraska in these autobiographical pieces written between 1929 and 1965. Those who have not read her classic Old Jules (1935) will find Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections a colorful introduction to Sandoz Country, and those who have will look for the same landmarks and unforgettable people. They include the Sandoz patriarch, the fiery libertarian Old Jules; Marlizzie, the archetypal pioneer woman who was Mari's mother; siblings, chums, neighbors, homesteaders, and Indians, all individualized and defined by a harsh and lonely frontier. Dangers in every form?blizzards, fires, rattlesnakes, murderous men?are described, and, just as vividly, so are the pleasures afforded by country cooking, storytelling, pet animals, and the first phonograph for miles around. Even when she strays, as in the final piece, "Outpost in New York," Mari Sandoz never leaves the Sandhills in spirit. Included are a chronology of her career, a checklist of her writings, and a brief introduction by Virginia Faulkner.

Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections

Based on the lives of John J. Cozad and Robert Henri.

The Youth of an Artist : a Novel

Son of the Gamblin' Man

A Biography

Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas

Unable to kill, a young Cheyenne is scorned by his tribe when he chooses to become a horse catcher rather than a warrior.

The Horsecatcher

First published in 1935, Old Jules is unquestionably Mari Sandoz?s masterpiece. This portrait of her pioneer father grew out of ?the silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed. So it was that I heard the accounts of the hunts,? Sandoz recalls. "Of the fights with the cattlemen and the sheepmen, of the tragic scarcity of women, when a man had to ?marry anything that got off the train,? of the droughts, the storms, the wind and isolation. But the most impressive stories were those told me by Old Jules himself.? This Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by Linda M. Hasselstrom.

"First published in 1935, Old Jules is Mari Sandoz's masterpiece. This portrait of her pioneer father grew out of "the silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed. So it was that I heard the accounts of the hunts," Sandoz recalls, "of the fights with the cattlemen and the sheepmen, of the tragic scarcity of women, when a man had to 'marry anything that got off the train,' or the droughts, the storms, the wind and isolation. But the most impressive stories were those told me by Old Jules himself." This Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by Linda M. Hasselstrom."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Sioux Indians came into my life before I had any preconceived notions about them," writes Mari Sandoz about the visitors to her family homestead in the Sandhills of Nebraska when she was a child. These Were the Sioux, written in her last decade, takes the reader far inside a world of rituals surrounding puberty, courtship, and marriage, as well as the hunt and the battle.

These Were the Sioux

The story of the military leader of the Oglala Sioux.

Cheyenne Autumn

When a school bus overturns in a blinding blizzard, a young teacher and her pupils are stranded miles from anywhere for eight days.

Winter Thunder

Recreates the life of a Swiss-born Nebraska homesteader, while reflecting on the character of the people who shaped the American nation

Mari Sandoz

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