Historical Event, 5.11.1896

[Tricia]

Mari Sandoz was born ...

[George Armstrong Custer]

Mari Sandoz 1896 - 1966

[crzhrs]

Sandoz has been knocked for her CRAZY HORSE bio being more of a novel than a historic bio. Her father was well-known among the Indians and he and his daughter often camped with many of the elderly warriors who told stories about their past. Many of them talked about Crazy Horse and his importance to their people.

She also used a number of the Hinman and Ricker interviews with the Indians as a basis for her books.

CRAZY HORSE is considered one of the best bios done and while some of it may be embellished it does provide much info on Crazy Horse and his people and times.

I recommend the book

[George Armstrong Custer]

Yes, Sandoz has as many critics as admirers. I must confess a long-standing prejudice against her work based upon references to it by academic historians, who disparaged her method and style. I didn't begin to modify this view - and hadn't read her work - until the University of Nebraska published the 50th anniversary edition of her Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas in 1992. Out of curiosity I bought a copy, and prepared to rue the waste of $14.95.

However, the anniversary edition carries an excellent introductory essay by Lincoln biographer Stephen B. Oates. In this Oates deftly sets out what an academically trained historical biographer is trying to achieve, and the sources and reference techniques traditionally used in doing so. He contrasts this with the tribal traditions and memories of Crazy Horse and his millieu which Eleanor Hinman (accompanied by Sandoz) collected in 1930. Oates then goes on to describe how Hinman began work on a Crazy Horse biography only to find it beyond her, and how she then generously turned the project over to her friend Sandoz. Oates relates how, having taken on this challenging task, Sandoz began work in the traditional manner - she moved to Denver, giving herself access to the Denver Public ibrary and the State Historical Society of Colorado. She spent two winters trawling the archives in Washington - the records of the ACO and Indian Bureau for the trans-Missouri country 1840-1880.

In the fall of 1941 Sandoz was revising her work when her dissatisfaction with the failure of her writings, based largely upon white archival records, to bring what Crazy Horse's story meant to his own people alive on the page led to a road to Damascus moment. As Oates puts it, Sandoz 'decided to rewrite it entirely so that she could tell it from the Indian perspective.' And the result was the much criticised, much admired biography of Crazy Horse which was first published in 1942. As Sandoz herself says of what she was trying to achieve: 'I have tried to tell not only the story of the man but something of the life of the people through that crucial time. To that end I have used the simplest words possible, hoping by idiom and figures and the underlying rythm pattern to say some of the things of the Indian for which there are no white-man words, suggest something of his innate nature, something of his relationship to the earth and the sky and all that is between.' As Oates notes, these aspects of Crazy Horse 'could not be found in the white man's written documents.'

Instead, Sandoz, although continuing to underpin her biography with her first two seasons' archival research, broadened its horizons in order to attempt to capture the essence of a personality who had given no interviews, had committed none of his thoughts to the written word and, indeed, was not even photographed. Sandoz endeavored to achieve this by resorting to her own understanding of the Lakota life and traditions gleaned from the stories she had heard directly from them in her Nebraska girlhood (she was born just 20 years after LBH), and from the interviews she conducted with Hinman of the last survivors of Crazy Horse's generation in 1930.

Did she succeed? Well, I admit I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma here. Ordinarily I'd emphasise over and over the building blocks of writing academic history. But I've come to realise this was not what Sandoz was trying to achieve after what Oates calls her 'creative breakthrough' in the fall of 1941. The result, when I finally read it for the first time, is a literary masterpiece whether or not you regarded it as primarily fictionalised or historical biography. As Crzhrs notes, it does 'provide much info on Crazy Horse and his people and times', and it does so from the point of view of someone who has grown up with a feel for these themes through direct contact from a young age. Like Crzhrs, I recommend it to be read without preconceptions in the readers mind of what it ought to comprise.

Does all of the above make me a converted 'Sandozonista'? Not quite. Her technique worked well for the subject matter of Crazy Horse - and her autobiographical studies of her often appallingly hard childhood also work. But she fails, in my view, with such works as The Battle of the Little Big Horn, for which her technique falls short of what is required. Her metier was the empathetic rendering of Indian sensibilities to a white readership, and she reached her apogee by stretching the established canons of biography and getting as close to Crazy Horse and his world as it is possible to do when that world is internally undocumented.

Ciao,
GAC

[crzhrs]

GAC:

Very nicely put . . . I read CH back in the late 70s. There is much truth in the book and of course Sandoz does put a little "extra" into it . . . but she does list her sources and people which were interviewed, especially He Dog.

I agree about her LBH book . . . which can cause some to discredit the CH book, but for anyone wanting to find out much about CH and his life and the events surrounding that period I recommend the book.