In a blinding blizzard a schoolbus overturns and a young teacher, her seven pupils, and the driver-a mere boy-are stranded in the open country, miles and miles from the nearest ranchhouse. Thus Mari Sandoz introduces a situation that will stretch the limits of human endurance. The exposed little group is armed with no more than the lunches they started out with and only the clothing required for a normal winter's day. As a killer storm takes hold and the mercury plunges below zero they become desperate. How each character facesthe terrifying prospect of freezing to death is a story that has...

Young Lance is his father's son when it comes to the daring needed for gaining honors in the war councils of the plains Sioux. Even greater is his seeing medicine. With eyes growing sharper, he watches the warring between tribes, the buffalo hunting, the daily routine-and shows it all in pictures drawn in the dust or on skins with charcoal and color sticks. But catching the story of Sioux society in the 1840s is not for an impetuous and unseasoned youth. Many adventures, sorrows, and hardships must pass before the village sings Lance's new name: Story Catcher, recorder of the history of his...

Here in one volume are Mari Sandoz's reminiscences of life in the Sandhills country; a study of the two Sitting Bulls (the Hunkpapa and the Oglala) and other Indian pieces; a novelette, Bone Joe and the Smokin' Woman; and nine short stories, mostly with a rural setting, including The Vine," her first to be published. Introducedby an autogiographical sketch of the author's early years and linked by a commentary derived from her letters, articles, and interviews, the separate pieces coalesce into an illuminating picture both of the Niobrara River country and of Mari Sandoz's...

Charmingly, Mari Sandoz tells of a long-ago Christmas in western Nebraska when her father s house was filled with good music. Old Jules had ordered an Edison phonograph and boxes of cylinder records from the East, paying for them with an inheritance and ignoring debts, to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife. But the entire family soon entered into the holiday spirit as neighbors arrived to feast and dance and enjoy musical selections ranging from Lucia di Lammermoor to Casey at the Telephone. Even old enmities dissolved under the spell, for, as Old Jules said, The music is for everybody....

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.-...

In the autumn of 1878 a band of Cheyenne Indians set out from Indian Territory, where they had been sent by the U.S. government, to return to their homeland in Yellowstone country. Mari Sandoz tells the saga of their heartbreaking fifteen-hundred-mile flight. Alan Boye provides an introduction to this Bison Books edition.

Crazy Horse, the legendary military leader of the Oglala Sioux whose personal power and social nonconformity contributed to his reputation as being strange, fought in many famous battles, including the Little Bighorn, and held out tirelessly against the U.S. government s efforts to confine the Lakotas to reservations. Finally, in the spring of 1877 he surrendered, only to meet a violent death. More than a century later Crazy Horse continues to hold a special place in the hearts and minds of his people. Mari Sandoz offers a powerful evocation of the long-ago world and enduring spirit of...

In 1867 conservative estimates put the number of buffaloes in the trans-Missouri region 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 The Buffalo Hunters. Mari Sandoz s vast canvas is charged with color and excitement accounts of Indian ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, gambling and gunfights, military expeditions, and famous frontier characters such as Wild Bill Hickok, Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, Sheridan, Custer, and Indian chiefs Whistler, Yellow Wolf, Spotted Tail, and Sitting...

Covering more than two centuries, The Beaver Men recounts the beginning of the beaver trade along the St. Lawrence to the last great rendezvous of traders and trappers on Ham s Fork, in what is now Wyoming, in 1834. The Beaver Men is the third in Mari Sandoz s trilogy of books narrating the history of the American West in relation to an animal species."

The Cattlemen is the story of the cattle industry in America and of the men whose ranches reached from the Rio Grande into Montana, from the early Spanish days to Mari Sandoz s contemporary times. It is the second in Sandoz s trilogy of books narrating the history of the American West in relation to animal species."