When the Mari Sandoz High Plains Center opens in Chadron, Nebraska in 2001, it will be one of three centers at which Nebraska honors its outstanding writers. Through the compilation of over 200 images in this new book, taken from historical collections and her own work, author and photographer LaVerne Harrell Clark contributes to that same purpose. In it, she recreates the frontier life of settlers and the neighboring Sioux and Cheyenne Indians of the sandhills region of northwestern Nebraska. Accompanied by in-depth captions detailing Mari Sandoz's life and works, these images illustrate how she came to hold an outstanding place as an American writer until her death in 1966. Born in 1896, in the "free-land" region of the Nebraska Panhandle, Sandoz was greatly influenced in her writing by the people who called at her homestead. Her acquaintances included Bad Arm, a Sioux Indian who fought at the Little Bighorn and was present at Wounded Knee, "Old Cheyenne Woman," a survivor of both the Oklahoma and Fort Robinson conflicts, and William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the legend of the Old West.

"The Sioux Indians came into my life before I had any preconceived notions about them," writes Mari Sandoz about the visitors to her family homestead in the Sandhills of Nebraska when she was a child. These Were the Sioux, written in her last decade, takes the reader far inside a world of rituals surrounding puberty, courtship, and marriage, as well as the hunt and the battle.

In the autumn of 1878 a band of Cheyenne Indians set out from Indian Territory, where they had been sent by the U.S. government, to return to their homeland in Yellowstone country. Mari Sandoz tells the saga of their heartbreaking fifteen-hundred-mile flight. Alan Boye provides an introduction to this Bison Books edition.

A history of the beaver trade in the Great Plains region ranges from its beginnings along the Saint Lawrence River to the last great rendezvous of traders and trappers in 1834

Unable to kill, a young Cheyenne is scorned by his tribe when he chooses to become a horse catcher rather than a warrior.

Love Song to the Plains is a lyric salute to the earth and sky and people who made the history of the Great Plains by the region's incomparable historian, Mari Sandoz. It is a story of men and women of many hues—courageous, violent, indomitable, foolish—their legends, failures, and achievements: of explorers and fur trappers and missionaries; of soldiers and army posts and Indian fighting; of California-bound emigrants who stopped off to become settlers; of cattlemen and bad men, boomers and land speculators, and their feuds and rivalries. Above all, this is a portrait of the true Plainsman, the man or woman who can stand to have the horizon far off and every day, every year, a gamble.

In 1867 the total number of buffaloes in the trans-Missouri region was conservatively estimated at fifteen million. By the end of the 1880s that figure had dwindled to a few hundred. The destruction of the great herds is the theme of this book. Mari Sandoz's canvas is vast, but it is charged with color and excitement—accounts of Indian ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, gambling and gunfights, military expeditions, famous frontier characters (Wild Bill Hickok, Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, Sheridan, Custer, and Indian Chiefs Whistler, Yellow Wolf, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull).