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.

One Book-One Lincoln Display at Bennett Martin Library

A new display on the second floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln celebrates the announcement that Joe Starita’s book, I am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice will be this year’s One Book/One Lincoln selection. Other finalists were worthy, but Starita’s book offers a riveting story with deep roots in local and regional history.

Joe Starita was born in Lincoln and studied English and Journalism at the University of Nebraska. He went on to become an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald and that newspaper’s New York City Bureau Chief. He is a former City Editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for reporting at the Miami Herald, and his book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995) won him critical acclaim, local and regional awards, and a second Pulitzer Prize nomination. Starita teaches in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Starita’s books are a distinguished contribution to a strong Nebraska literary tradition. Some of the earliest serious attempts to record and understand Native American experiences and to put the Plains Indians back into American history as real people were made by Nebraska writers. Our display represents a little more than a century of Nebraskans writing about the Plains Indians.

In the best of these works, writers struggled to present the true voices of Native Americans and record their side of history in stories that seemed about to be lost to old age and death, or overlooked in a strong tendency to convert American history into a dull monument to virtue and Manifest Destiny. Real history, interesting history, is meaningful conflict, complex people who deserve to be understood on their own terms, mixed motives and light and shadow. While recognizing that the simple moralization of history is a trap that leaves us ignorant, from time to time, Nebraska writers have gently suggested that much is to be learned from the struggles of native people that sheds light on some of America’s more persistent problems at home and abroad.

The display includes work by Starita, Eli S. Ricker, Mari Sandoz, John Neihardt, Melvin Gilmore, Amos Bad Heart Bull (introduction by Mari Sandoz), George Hyde, Donald Danker, Thomas Henry Tibbles, Hartley Burr Alexander, Alan Boye, John Wunder, and Stew Magnuson, among others.

Joe Starita will present the Ames Reading on Sunday April 19, 2009

Joe Starita was born in Lincoln and studied English and Journalism at the University of Nebraska. He went on to become an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald and the Herald's New York City Bureau Chief. He is also a former City Editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting at the Miami Herald, and his earlier book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge (1995) won him critical acclaim, local and regional awards, and another Pulitzer Prize nomination. His new book, I am a Man: Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice published just this year, is gathering the same kind of attention and critical interest as his earlier work. We look forward to hearing from him at 2 P.M. Sunday, April 19 in the Heritage Room on the third floor of Bennett Martin library.

A Strange Fascination: Stories of Violent Men on the Prairie

Picture and background information for our current display.

Nebraska opened to legal settlement with the signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May of 1854. The settlement of the territory was shaped by the growing conflict over slavery embodied in that legislation, by waves of immigration, first across the Oregon Trail and then to the state itself, by Indian wars and raids, and then again by new waves of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. There was much in these origins that could be expected to leave a legacy of violence: Veterans of the Civil War would carry its horrors with them forever. Every wave of immigration included far more young males than women, and gatherings of unmarried young men are a prime source of wildness that may explode into violence. There were conflicts between farmers and ranchers, and there was a new gold rush to the Black Hills just to the north of the state.

In reality, however, the crime rate per capita on the Nebraska frontier was no greater than it was in those same years in the more settled cities of the Eastern United States. The homicide rate was slightly higher, the prevalence of other crimes, especially robbery, rather lower, than in the East. Perhaps those differences reflect the fact that so many men (and some women, too) carried guns.

Sometimes, in Nebraska, violent incidents and violent men are remembered with peculiar intensity. We may speculate about the reasons why this should be so, and perhaps see, in different kinds of fascination, evidence of a changing society. Mari Sandoz thought that after the Civil War, the country was unwilling to give up the emotionalism of the bloodletting, and so, in escapist fashion, the public took special interest in and made heroes of the most irresponsible of men, gunslingers and outlaws.

The killing of David McCanles by James Butler Hickok, at Rock Creek Station near Fairbury in July of 1861 earned Hickock (Fairbury legend says) his famous sobriquet as "Wild Bill." Some say the killing was over a debt that McCanles tried to collect from Hickok, though local legend mentions differences over a wild woman who "was commonly known" as Kate Schell. McCanles was a family man who died in the arms of his nine year old son. He ran a profitable station for the Overland Stage Company, and gained a local reputation as a great practical jokester, albeit one whose high spirited jokes ran into bullying those with whom he had differences. Yet he was also a southerner believed to be keeping his sympathies hidden because his business would suffer. That he was known as a bully and thought a southern sympathizer may help account for Hickok having been acquitted of the killing.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show celebrated in some of its most famous scenes a certain version of the settlement of the West and the Indian Wars, part of a struggle that the Poet John Neihardt sometimes compared to the Trojan War in its epic force. The show usually ended with a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand. Cody’s Native American employees seemed to enjoy the show as much as anyone, and certainly profited by participating. If his show offered a romantic vision of the Indian Wars and the conquest of the West, Buffalo Bill proved, surprisingly perhaps, to be a defender of Native American rights. He once said "every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government."

Doc Middleton—the "travelling name" of outlaw James Riley—was a Sandhills horsethief and sometime killer who made a reputation as a local Robin Hood, while selling horses stolen from Kansas to the Sioux and horses stolen from the Sioux in Kansas. Eventually he made peace with the law, settled down to have a family, and was supposed to win the great 1000 mile Chadron to Chicago horse race in 1893, but his horses gave out, and the anticipated cowboy operetta ending failed.

Finally, not to be overlooked, because present day fascination for him runs so deep (books about him are among the most frequently requested in this library), is mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. His appeal feeds on the sickness of the vacant soul. It manifests the suspicion that the only genuinely gratifying escape from the social and personal dilemmas of modern society is inward, in allowing our anger to make us sick. Interest in Starkweather only deepens the fog in the mind of his spellbound enthusiasts; poor empty headed Charlie had nothing inside worth the time already spent on him. --dsc