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

by Mari Sandoz

Book Overview

By zealous research, keen observation, and wide-ranging and deeply probing commentary, Mari Sandoz has become one of the most famous and well-respected interpreters of the American West. Old Jules Country is made up of the region that Sandoz has written about most frequently--the High Plains of the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming--the Black Hills, the Bad Lands, the sandhills, and the great rivers: the Missouri, the Platte, and the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803291361
• ISBN13: 9780803291362
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Selections from the Nebraska author's historical nonfiction

Nebraska's best known writers pulled up stakes and headed elsewhere -- Willa Cather to Greenwich Village and Wright Morris to California. A prolific writer who stayed close to home was Mari Sandoz, born of a Swiss-German homesteader in the northwest Nebraska Panhandle in 1896. Her biography of her father, "Old Jules," made her suddenly famous in 1935 when she was nearly 40 years old.Sandoz knew the frontier from firsthand experience, and although her tyrranical father prevented her from earning more than an 8th grade education, she became a tireless researcher of the turbulent period of confrontation between whites and Indians. Inheriting a deep respect for Native Americans from her father, she represents them sympathetically in her best known histories, "Crazy Horse" (1942) and "Cheyenne Autumn" (1953). She also wrote novels and many short stories, some works published after her death in 1966."Old Jules Country" is a selection of nonfiction writings from several of her books, plus a few shorter essays. Readers today may have trouble with her historical work, as Sandoz writes from the point of view of the people she's writing about. So to a modern reader, the frame of reference is not always clear. Although her work is based on extensive research, the style reads more like historical fiction. For some, this will make the material more accessible; for those looking for historical accuracy it will add an element of ambiguity. Still, with patience, a reader can begin to glean a great deal about Indians during the years of the frontier and quickly discover the limitations of stereotypes and cliches that dominate our meager understanding of "how the West was won." The essay "The Lost Sitting Bull," for instance, explores some of the political differences among the tribes in their dealings with the government and the military, and for the general reader it opens a wide window into a largely forgotten history. More accessible are her personal memories of her father, as told in "Old Jules," and of growing up in the Nebraska sandhills along the Niobrara River. "The Homestead in Perspective" presents a personalized picture of staking a claim in the prairie sod and the odds against making a go of it. The essays "Snakes" and "Coyotes and Eagles" reveal more of the day-to-day realities of frontier life. For readers of modern memoirs, these essays will seem more familiar in their structuring of incident, choice of detail, and personal disclosure. I recommend this book to anyone with some knowledge of the high plains frontier, its settlement, and its history. It is a good introduction to the nonfiction of Mari Sandoz, and a reader will be drawn to read more from the individual books excerpted here. For more about homesteading in Nebraska, an excellent social history is Everett Dick's "Sod-House Frontier."

A glimpse into a fading past

Maria Sandoz is one of the most underrated American writers of her time. Her account of Old Jules is a vivid portait into the obscure history of the plains, and the people who lived and died there.