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Episode 19: Mari Sandoz
Howdy folks, it’s the second week of March 2025 and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.
The harsh Nebraska winters had never been kind to Mari Sandoz (Maur-ee San-Doze).
When she was younger, she had spent an entire day digging her family’s cattle out of a snowdrift, permanently losing vision in one of her eyes due to snow blindness.
And it was the winter of 1928 when Mari was called back home to her parents. Her father was dying, and he had one thing he needed to tell her. He wanted her to tell his life story.
Mari would do just that, becoming a celebrated novelist and biographer of the life and struggles of settlers, Native Americans and others who made the American West. We remember her during the week of her death, March 10, 1966.
Mari’s father was Jules Sandoz, a Swiss immigrant who tried to scrape out a living for his family against an unforgiving northwest Nebraska prairie.
His last request for his daughter had shocked her. She had spent much of her youth at odds with the domineering man. Before that day, he had always discouraged her from even thinking of becoming a writer.
“You know I consider artists and writers the maggots of society,” he had told her.
But she would say yes to the dying man, transforming his plea into a literary career.
After years of painstaking research, the book about her father, entitled “Old Jules,” would be published in 1935, establishing her reputation.
Mari was born in 1896, near Hay Springs, Nebraska, the oldest of six children. She only spoke German until age nine, and as a child, her family’s focus was always more on backbreaking labor and discipline than education.
While she loved to read and write, it took her until age 17 to graduate from the eighth grade, the farthest she would get in school. But Mari was determined to become a teacher. She secretly took the rural teachers’ exam and passed, allowing her to begin teaching in local country schools without attending high school.
At 18, she married a neighboring rancher, Wray Macumber, but the marriage was short-lived. In 1919, citing “extreme mental cruelty,” she divorced him and moved to Lincoln, seeking a fresh start.
Now, on her own, Mari took on low-paying jobs while trying to establish herself as a writer, but her efforts were met with overwhelming rejection. She submitted short stories under her married name, Marie Macumber, piling up more than a thousand rejection slips.
Despite no high school diploma, she managed to enroll at the University of Nebraska, where a sympathetic dean recognized her talent.
Then came 1928 and her father’s deathbed request. Getting “Old Jules” published was an uphill battle. Every major publisher in the country rejected it.
Mari was living on the edge, trying to make this dream happen. Malnourished and in poor health, she moved back to Nebraska’s Sand Hills to live with her mother. Frustrated by failure, she burned more than seventy of her unpublished manuscripts.
In 1935, after fourteen rejections, “Old Jules” won a nonfiction contest held by Atlantic Press. They wanted to publish her, but she had to fight to keep her characters speaking in their own Western tone and vernacular.
Once the book reached the public, it became an instant best-seller. “Old Jules” shocked some readers with its unflinching portrayal of frontier life, but it also cemented Mari’s reputation as an authentic voice of her region.
Mari’s 1937 novel Slogum House depicted a ruthless Nebraska family and served as a warning against the rise of fascism. The novel was deemed vulgar and was banned from the libraries in Omaha, Nebraska.
Mari wrote to her editor after Slogum House was published: “I realize you are looking out for your Eastern readers and the critics …. I don’t give a good goddam (DARN?) about the whole raft of readers and critics …. I’m in the writing business for the writing, and the rest is certainly very incidental.”
Her next novel, Capital City, targeted political corruption in Lincoln, Nebraska, prompting a wave of hate mail and threats.
Weary of the backlash, Mari moved to Denver and then New York City in 1940. In 1942, she wrote what many consider her greatest work: Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas.
In this biography of the legendary Lakota leader, Mari did something groundbreaking at the time: she wrote from within the Lakota worldview, using their concepts, metaphors and speech patterns. This approach was ahead of its time. She described her intent in the book’s preface, stating that she aimed to express “something of his relationship to the earth and the sky and all that is between.”
She continued her interest in Plains Indian culture with subsequent works, Cheyenne Autumn, in 1953. She also expanded her focus to the broader history of the Great Plains, with a series of exploring the connection between the region and its animals in the books The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen and The Beaver Men.
Even as she battled bone cancer in the final months of her life, Mari Sandoz continued to write. She died on March 10, 1966, at age 69.
In 1998, she was inducted posthumously into our Hall of Great Westerners here at The Cowboy.
And with that, we’ll put another episode of “This Week in The West” on the shelf.
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler
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We leave you today with the words of Mari Sandoz from her novel “Crazy Horse”: “Man living alone can do as it pleases him; if he lives among others he must bow the head to the good of all. Without strong leaders to see this done, the people will fail (and) the nation will break up into small, defenseless bands.”
Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
