Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
In this splendidly edited collection, Helen Winter Stauffer presents more than four hundred of the nearly thirty thousand letters that Mari Sandoz wrote between 1926 and 1966, focusing on Sandoz' "writing, researching, and publishing" (p. xv). Sandoz' sense of herself as a western historian dominates the Letters. Her western view embodied a traditional emphasis on the importance of the West, on the masculine and, often, on the heroic; it was overlaid with a Populist's undying distrust of eastern oppression. But Sandoz also foreshadowed the "new" western history, emphasizing the land itself, its original inhabitants, the influence of the newcomers, and the tragedies and brutalities of the West. The Letters reveal her preoccupation with the history of the Plains Indians and her concern both with details and with broader issues of interpretation, particularly of the Sioux Wars. Sandoz viewed the Plains Indians as dignified and heroic and blamed white settlers for debasing them, partly to justify broken treaties and broken promises. She devoted a significant part of her professional life, and her correspondence, to learning and telling their story properly.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.