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.

When a school bus overturns in a blinding blizzard, a young teacher and her pupils are stranded miles from anywhere for eight days.

Recreates the life of a Swiss-born Nebraska homesteader, while reflecting on the character of the people who shaped the American nation

An evocative fictional portrait of the impact of the Depression on the Great Plains captures working-class people of the period as they struggle to overcome the hardships, challenges, and pain of everyday life in the face of poverty, political and economic upheaval, and corruption. Reprint.

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).

Mari Sandoz immortalized her irascible father in Old Jules. Now her brother, Jules Sandoz, Jr. fills out the story of their family life, dominated by Papa, in western Nebraska in the early l900s. A frail boy who clung to the skirts of his German grandmother, Jules Jr. had to learn lessons of survival early. He was beaten up by his schoolmates and did not speak English well, but with his brother James he helped feed the family by hunting and trapping. Eventually he found the strength to stand up to his father. Son of Old Jules offers fresh glimpses of other family members, most memorably of Mary, his hardworking and stoical mother and of Mari, who de-clared her independence by becoming a schoolteacher and marrying and then divorcing a local swain. Some of the Sandhillers who figured in Mari's books appear here too, including a succession of immigrants whom Papa Jules recruited as settlers. By the early twenties, when these memoirs end, Jules Jr., newly married, had gone into farming for himself Corroborating and fleshing out the story of the family told by Mari Sandoz, Son of Old Jules was written "to give a more balanced view of the settler period." Jules Sandoz, Jr. recorded his memories in the last years of his life, and after his death in 1980 they were edited and organized into book form by his youngest sister, Caroline Sandoz Pifer.