Some Notes on Mari Sandoz

Mari Sandoz knew from her earliest recollections that she wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write fiction, record stories, and chronicle history. Perhaps more than any other Nebraska writer, she embodied her home region, the Great Plains and more precisely Nebraska's Sandhills.¹ A perceptive commentator on culture change and the impact of the environment on human actions, her fierce rhetoric and compulsion to write made her a survivor in her life as well as a forerunner of today's New Western History, ethnohistory, and ecoliterature movements.

Sandoz wrote both fiction and history or in what some critics call that blurry canon in between the two literatures. Mari's first publication, aside from a school story her teacher sent to the Omaha Daily News, was a short story that opened the first issue of Prairie Schooner in 1927. "The Vine," about two homesteaders and their relationship to the land, won Sandoz, then using her pen name Marie Macumber, immediate national recognition with Edward J. O'Brien's three-star rating and inclusion among such writers as Owen Wister, Ernest Hemingway, and Oliver LaFarge.

Sandoz herself was proudest of her historical contributions. She was blunt and confident in person and in her prose and once summed up her historical contributions: "It's true that I'm not afraid of the evaluation posterity will put upon my nonfiction," she wrote in a letter. "[G]ood or bad it is unique in its field and those who come after me will have to depend upon it to a very large extent. These books have always had critical acclaim even if not always understanding. . . . "²

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Born to Jules Ami Sandoz and Mary Fehr Sandoz in May of 1896 at their homestead near the Niobrara River, Mari Susette Sandoz actually was first named Mary after her mother. As a baby and young child, her parents called her Marie. Mary or Marie as a young adult opted for yet a third spelling and pronunciation, Mari (the "ari" phonetically pronounced as "are" and "E"). Mari's mother married the Swiss expatriot in 1895. Her parents had a mixed linguistic marriage as Mary spoke German and Jules came from the French cantons of the Switzerland confederation. What Mary didn't know when she married this gruff homesteader of the Plains was that she had been preceded by three other wives, one of whom was still legally his wife. That humiliation had to be lived with as by the time Mary discovered her dilemma she was dependent upon Jules financially and pregnant.

By all accounts, Mari Sandoz entered her world as a survivor. Her birth was not easy for Mary who had difficult labors with five pregnancies. Moreover, Mary was not a nurturing mother. She did not have time to soothe and cuddle her babies. Anything physical in the Sandoz household was violent rather than loving. Later that first year Mari developed an allergy to her mother's milk, and because of her crying her father nearly beat her to death. Mari's mother saved her life by taking her from the house.

Mary Sandoz had more children, and with each new child came responsibilities for the eldest. Seventeen months after Mari was born came Jules, who was called Jule by his parents. Less than two years later came James in 1899. Because Mary's mother had come to help with the babies, Mari had a brief kind of childhood until she turned six. Then her grandmother began to suffer from cancer. Mary's mother died in 1903, the same year a third brother Fritz was born. At age seven, Mari found she had total responsibility over the care of Fritz, and when Mari turned ten she was also expected to cook, bake, clean the house, and care for the children while her mother helped with the farming. All the while Mari lived in terror of her father. On one occasion he beat her and broke a bone in her hand that never healed properly.

Shortly before Mari's ninth birthday in 1905, someone in Sheridan County reported to authorities that...