The Nebraska Sandhills: A new Heritage Room Display

A new Heritage Room display surveys the literary presence of the Nebraska Sandhills. Some of the most memorable work by Nebraska authors has emerged from this fragile and challenging landscape. Our new display includes memoirs and works of history, biography, natural history, fiction, and photography.

The visual star of this display are the very striking black and white photographs from Charles Guildner’s portfolio “Lives of Tradition.” Guildner’s work was purchased in 2007 by Lincoln City Libraries with funds privately donated for that express purpose. The silver prints depict life on the Haythorn Ranch, a storied Sandhills ranch where the owners have continued to find a profit in using horses to do jobs that were mechanized almost everywhere else.

Paul Johnsgard’s This Fragile Land: A Natural History of the Nebraska Sandhills (1995) provides a superb introduction to the ecology of the region, its geological history, its creatures and its conservation issues. Charles McIntosh, The Nebraska Sand Hills: The Human Landscape (1996) draws from a lifetime of study in presenting a complete scholarly historical geography of the region, its occupants and their conflicts, beginning with Native Americans. Superb sketch maps illustrate McIntosh’s discussions of different waves of occupation, settlement, conflict and economic development. Nellie Snyder Yost’s The Call of the Range (1966), her history of the Nebraska cattle industry, is still an excellent guide to the origins and history of the great Sandhills ranches and the cattlemen who built them.

But above all, the history of the Sandhills is the story of great characters. The history of the Sandhills lives in the memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies of those who settled the area. Their histories are one of the grand themes of Nebraska literature.

Mari Sandoz’s great biography of her father, the irascible, violent, but indomitable “Old Jules” Sandoz would be the best known of the biographies. And Sandoz, settler, land-promoter, friend of the older generation of mountain men, wanderers and Indians, feuded incessantly with his neighbors, among them Bartlett Richards, the founder of The Old Spade Ranch, in its time, the largest and most famous of the great Sandhills ranches. The biography of Richards by his son, Bartlett Richards, jr. and Ruth Van Ackern reminds us that Richards, too, was an interesting and complex character.

The Sandhills are cattle country, the region was poorly suited to the small homesteads that settlers moving in from the East imagined they might establish there. The resulting conflicts over fencing, leasing of public lands, water rights, and land use by settlers and cattlemen could turn violent. And with every policy change, ranchers seemed to come out on top over the long haul, besting the homesteaders, and acquiring their land. The ranchers were portrayed as real villains in the Eastern press, because in the East, no one really understood the futility of the broken dreams that died in the dry lands beyond the 100^th meridian. Whether or not the story that Theodore Roosevelt told Bartlett Richards to his face that he would put Richards in a Federal Penitentiary is apocryphal, Richards died in the custody of the Adams County Jail, where he was being held on a Federal conviction for fraudulent land filings. But local lore remembers that in the Kinkaid era, settlers would often gather up in such numbers at the Old Spade Ranch for the noon meal that an additional table had to be put up for the cowhands. Richards felt obliged to feed such guests, and sometimes to loan them equipment, to keep them from starving on their homesteads. The landscape itself swallowed the dreams of the farmers, only the ranchers survived.

To the biographies of Sandoz and Richards, and Lawrence Bixby, the “Preserver of the Old Spade Ranch,” in the crisis of the 1920s, one might add the memoirs of James H. Cook (1857-1942), Fifty Years on the Old Frontier (published in 1923), friend of Red Cloud and of the Northern Cheyenne and founder of the old 04 Ranch, and of his son Harold Cook, Tales of the 04 Ranch, which recounts the (fossil rich) Nebraska boyhood of the famous paleontologist. Perhaps we should remember the outlaw Doc Middleton as well. There are many more genuinely fascinating memoirs and biographies from the Sandhills than can be mentioned here.

The Sandhills are featured in many mavellous photography books. A complete collection of these would overfill the display case: Margaret MacKichan and Bob Ross, In the Kingdom of Grass (1992), Michael Forsberg’s Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild (2009), David A. Owen, Like No Other Place: The Sandhills of Nebraska, Photographs and Stories (2010), Roger Bruhn (Foreword by Ted Kooser), Dreams in Dry Places (1990), Georg Joutras, Along the Edge of Daylight: Photographic Travels from Nebraska and the Great Plains(2005) would be among them. Michael Forsberg was a recent Ames Reader, and Lisa Norman’s Haythorn Land & Cattle Co.: A Horseman’s Heritage: A Pictorial Essay was also mentioned in an earlier post. I have used some of their covers to illustrate this posting.

The Heritage Room maintains a Nebraska Sandhills Book List on its home page.

Some New Titles in the Heritage Room, January, 2011

What follows is a sampling of some of the new and notable titles acquired by the Heritage Room in the last six months.

Mari Sandoz "I Do Not Apologize for the Length of This Letter" The Mari Sandoz Letters on Native American Rights, 1940-1965, Introduced and edited by Kimberli A. Lee, with a foreword by John R. Wunder. (Plains Histories) Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009.

Kimberli Lee, who compiled this collection and wrote chapters introducing the volume and the four carefully chosen groupings of letters within it, became acquainted with the letters when she was a doctoral student as the University of Nebraska. Lee created the online finding aid for the National Endowment for the Humanities supported project that preserved some 20,000 pages of Sandoz letters, and some 32,000 of Sandoz's research cards on microfilm.

The selection that Lee has made focuses on four themes: Sandoz's concern with historical accuracy in the portrayal of Native Americans; her indictments of federal Indian policy; her criticism of the negative and simplistic stereotyping of American Indians in advertising, film, and fiction; and her support for Native writers and artists.

Sandoz was driven, to the point of obsession, by her concern for historical accuracy, with getting the details right. She hated it when she found the history that mattered to her most obscured by confusion, inaccuracy, and carelessness. Thus her raging contempt for the films that borrowed freely (plagiarized, she thought) from her books on Crazy Horse and on the Cheyenne, only to present, yet again, new and sensational versions of that stereotyped, cliché-ridden false history she worked so hard to correct. She was equally clear-headed about the economic and political forces that were driving contemporary Indian Policy. She was also remarkably prescient in understanding what historical materials and themes were going to grow in significance as the years passed. At times she came close, long before it became popular, to writing a sort of environmental history. On the subject matter in question here, Lee quotes Vine DeLoria, Jr. on her insights into Native history: "Sandoz had an amazing ability to develop themes and issues that plagued Indians during her time and that continue to disrupt us today."

While these attributes are perhaps not in themselves exactly the source of Sandoz's literary greatness, they are still very much part of what made her a great writer. This is an important book because it introduces a vast collection of material that reflects Sandoz's way of thinking about these matters. Perhaps it's worth noting, too, that well considered collections of this sort have been an important part of the intellectual landscape, but that may not be true any longer. As Lee notes in closing, such a collection of Sandoz's letters "may never again be produced on paper, given technological advances in digital and electronic communication." Will anyone take the trouble to do this kind of work, if the product is to be as ephemeral as a blog posting?

Several related works have come in over the last several months, including:

Wynne L. Summers, Women Elder's Life Stories of the Omaha Tribe. Macy, Nebraska 2004-2005, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009

Hugh J. Reilly, The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars (Native America: Yesterday and Today), Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

Linda M. Waggoner, Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. A fascinating biography of one of the first Indian artists to make it in the mainstream of American art.

We are now a bit behind in noticing new materials and hope to catch up in later postings.

A Book Artist’s Vision: Rosekrans Hoffman--A New Display in the Heritage Room

Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman recalled for friends how her father, Jim, had

“shunned the finality of a paved road, as though Lewis and Clark had hired [him] to scout the uncharted territory of Denton. Instead, he preferred a steep mud hill in his Model A, for it put up a fight and they wrestled until he was on top. And in the 1930s the top was close to the sky.”

Her father also avoided “roads that were numbered like prisoners,” preferring to drive anonymous roads “met by farmer’s driveways, staked by mailboxes and crossed by animals.”


Photograph with, left to right, Rudolfo Gonzales, Marian Anderson, Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman, and Bob Hoffman. Ruth met Bob at a jazz concert. Photo by famed jazz photographer Jack Bradley, used here by kind permission of Jack Bradley. Bradley recalls that "both Ruth and Bob were dear friends." All rights reserved, reproduction by written permission only, Jack Bradley, 24 Skipper's Drive, Harwich, MA 02645.


Rosekrans Hoffman took her father’s independence and his love of byways to heart. Cosmopolitan as she became, after leaving Nebraska to pursue her artistic career in New York, when she found her artistic path pointing back along the roads of her childhood, she followed it. At first, she had painted, very successfully, in the style of the day. Her abstract impressionist paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum and in other famed collections. She changed direction in the 1970s as she began to illustrate children's books. Soon an agent suggested she write such a book herself. Anna Banana (New York: Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) settled Rosekrans Hoffman in a unique and successful career as an artist who wrote children’s books and provided artwork for children’s books by many other writers. She was always careful to say that she was an artist and not an illustrator. To her, this meant that the integrity of her artistic vision came first.

When she spoke to friends and interviewers, it was always apparent that Rosekrans Hoffman had unusually intense memories of her own childhood. She remembered the fine red dust that blew up from Oklahoma in the early 1930s, coming in through unsealed windows so thickly that was hard to breath indoors, so that her mother would put wet towels over Ruth and her brother’s heads to filter the air. The fortitude, ingenuity, and teamwork required for a family to survive the Great Depression years seemed to draw families and neighbors together. For a child, all unaware of her parents’ worries, those years could make for wonderful, and unusually intense (by contrast with the experience of later, more materialistic generations) childhood memories.

But all was not wonder. In the later summer of 1933, age of seven, Ruth developed a bone infection, osteomyelitis, treatable in those days before antibiotics only with painful bone drains. Most people with the disease died, Ruth spent 18 months in a full-body cast, armpits to toes, to immobilize her for the drains. She would spend many more months in partial casts, a wheelchair, and homemade braces that her father invented to enable her to become more mobile. The experience, she told Lincoln Star reporter Patty Beutler,

“gave me a new perspective on life… in bed in the body cast, horizontal I saw things I wouldn’t ordinarily see. I wasn’t a child looking up, but more like a part of the land. From my prone position, I used to eye my food like an explorer surveying the horizon. Piles of mashed potatoes took on the proportions of mountains against the skyline. Undersides of chins, nostrils, palms jumped out at me. I studied expressions, the details of wallpaper, and tiny hairs peeking out of people’s ears.”

She had been drawing since she was three or four years old, but in her long confinement in bed, she began to draw all the time. She began by copying the comic strip, “Tillie the Toiler,’ and others from the newspaper. “Good things can happen from really bad things, although you may not know it at the time,” she told a Connecticut interviewer. Her illness put her on the path to becoming an artist. She would go on to get a fine arts degree from the University of Nebraska.

As Ted Kooser recalled at her memorial, Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman “was in pain from the time she was a young girl to the day she died.” “How is it possible,” Kooser asked, “for a person enduring such suffering to create drawings and paintings so luminous with delight, to write stories with such joy and hope?” She seemed to draw on “an immense store of character” running counter to the self-centeredness that seems so widespread in our world. Kooser again:
“You all know how marvelously witty Ruth was, and how much she loved to laugh. At the end of her years, having lost her delightful and beloved husband, Bob, having lost the ability to care for herself, she could even find life in a nursing home amusing. I would go up there to visit her in part to hear what she had to say about the other people there. I would rather hear Ruth describe somebody down the hall or in the dining room than to see them myself…. She could snatch funny lines right out the air, like butterflies.”

Ruth never spent much time looking at other artists' and authors' childrens books. When she illustrated books for other writers, she favored the publishers’ usual practice of keeping the author and the artist separate until the book launch party. Her art drew on her own vision of reality, “if there is one thing I concentrate on,” she told an interviewer, “it’s expression—it never seems to lie… there is a facial expression and then there is the whole body as expression…“ Children, she noticed, “learn expression before words.” She never had children of her own, but seemed to draw from a deep well of her own childhood, on the muted colors of small town Nebraska in the 1930s, and on the quirky and independent spirit that sustained rural people in those years of trial.

The new display in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin Public Library includes selections from the original artwork (all in the Heritage Room) for Go To Bed: A Book of Bedtime Poems, Selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, Illustrated by Rosekrans Hoffman. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), following through the various stages of book art production through to the color proofs. The display also includes other books, sketches and cards sent to friends, and, as part of our permanent display, two of her dolls. The display draws on the Heritage Room's files of Rosekrans Hoffman's correspondence and on artwork she donated to the Heritage Room. From the 1970s on, Rosekrans Hoffman donated posters and drawings to the Heritage Room for our fund-raising purposes.

--Stephen Cloyd

* * * *

Sources:

Rosekrans Hoffman on her father, remarks made July 28, 1983 at a celebration of the artist's work in the State Capitol Rotunda, Rosekrans Hoffman Manuscript in Heritage Room (corrected and signed by the author), "Hoffman, Rosekrans, Capitol Celebration 7-23-83."

Patty Beutler, “Rosekrans Hoffman, Native Nebraskan Draws on ‘Peculiar’ Perspective,” in Nebraska Library Association Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 pp. 15-19. Beutler interviewed the author and artist about her unusual perspective and observed the connections between her childhood and her artwork noted here, especially regarding her choice of palette.

The most extensive published sketch of Rosekrans Hoffman (the name she used professionally) is Sue Williams, “Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman, A Renowned Lancaster County Artist,” in Tales and Trails Newsletter from Denton, NE and surrounding areas, Vol. 3, No. 3, June 2001, pp. 1-5.

Quotations from Ted Kooser are from “Remarks for Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman’s memorial service, December 2, 2007.” (Kooser MS in Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman vertical file, Heritage Room).

“I concentrate… on expression,” in Nora Fitzgerald, “Child’s World,” Connecticut Magazine, Vol. 52, No. 12, December, 1989, p. 115.

Recently acquired collection of materials relating to Loren Eiseley is now open to public

The Robert Franke Eiseley Research Collection is now available to researchers and the public at the Heritage Room. Of special interest are a seven page typescript by author Ray Bradbury, Franke's correspondence with nature writer Annie Dillard and with poet Howard Nemerov concerning Eiseley, and extensive correspondence with Caroline Werkley, Eiseley's long time assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. Werkley's snapshot here shows Eiseley playing with a cat.

Franke was deeply interested in the religious themes in Eiseley's writing about man and the natural world. Franke's published and unpublished explorations of this theme, including drafts, reprints, sermons, several book proposals and conference notes are included in the collection.

The Loren Eiseley Society donates Robert G. Franke's Eiseley Research Collection to the Heritage Room

Robert Franke had a strong interest in religious themes found in the essays and books of anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley. Franke was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Friends of Loren Eiseley, reorganized recently as The Loren Eiseley Society. The collection includes Franke’s publications, and his notes, proposals, and unpublished manuscripts for sermons, papers and books about Eiseley. Franke's research included numerous interviews and correspondence with Eiseley’s friends and colleagues. Of special interest are a seven page typescript by author Ray Bradbury, giving answers to Franke’s questions, correspondence with writer Annie Dillard and poet Howard Nemerov, and an extensive correspondence with Caroline Werkley, Eiseley’s secretary at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most of the documents in the research files were collected in 1981-1983, but there are later additions and documents overall date from 1959 to 1987. The collection is now in processing, and will be available soon.

The Franke Collection joins the Heritage Room's substantial collection of Eiseley materials, which, anchored by the Gale E. Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials, also includes books owned by Eiseley as a boy, the Nebraska Academy of Science Eiseley Donation, a Library Collection, and the Lazlo Kubinyi Collection of Eiseley Book Illustration.