Mari Sandoz Books in Order

Gulla Slogum rules a family determined to dominate its Nebraska surroundings through theft, intimidation, and manipulation. Using her children as instruments of revenge, she pursues land and influence, turning accumulated grievances into a campaign for power.

This history traces the destruction of the great buffalo herds as commercial hide hunters moved across the American West. Frontier personalities, military campaigns, violence, and perilous encounters form part of the story of a rapidly transformed landscape.

A school bus overturns in a fierce blizzard, stranding a young teacher, seven pupils, and their teenage driver far from help. With little food and inadequate clothing, the group must face the cold while searching for a way to survive.

Selections from Sandoz's major histories join essays and sketches to portray the High Plains and its inhabitants. The collection moves among Indigenous peoples, settlers, wildlife, and regional memory, bringing together different aspects of her long engagement with the West.

Young Elk is expected to become a warrior, but killing repels him and he longs to catch and tame wild horses. Earning the right to follow that path requires courage and a new understanding of his obligations to his community.

Reminiscences, historical pieces, a novella, and short stories bring together Sandoz's writing about the Sandhills and its people. Autobiographical material and commentary connect her regional portraits with the experiences through which she developed as a writer.

Sandoz traces the growth of the cattle industry across the American West, following the people and conflicts behind its expansion. Drawing on extensive research, she portrays a frontier economy shaped by ambition, hardship, competition, and powerful personalities.

Drawing on memories and knowledge of Sioux life, Sandoz explores the practices surrounding childhood, courtship, marriage, hunting, and warfare. The account presents a cultural world she first encountered through visitors to her family's Nebraska homestead.

Young Lance observes the hunts, warfare, and daily life of his Sioux community and records them in pictures. Experience and hardship gradually teach him how to turn youthful artistic vision into the responsibility of preserving his people's story.

This history of the Great Plains follows explorers, Indigenous communities, settlers, soldiers, cattlemen, and speculators across a changing region. Landscapes, legends, violence, and everyday endurance connect the successes and failures of people who made their lives there.

Sandoz examines the Battle of the Little Bighorn through the knowledge accumulated during her research into the American West. The account places Custer's final confrontation within a broader historical understanding of the people and conflict involved.

Autobiographical recollections revisit Sandoz's Nebraska childhood, her parents, neighbors, and the pleasures and dangers of frontier life. Stories of storms, animals, cooking, and community gatherings preserve a world shaped by both isolation and close human bonds.

A frontier promoter's family provides the setting for the youth of the future artist Robert Henri. Growing up amid violence and the hardships of settlement, a sensitive boy develops within a community driven by ambition and threatened by the land.

Escaping a painful past, young doctor Morissa Kirk establishes a practice on the Nebraska frontier. Treating settlers and Indigenous patients earns growing acceptance, but the conflict between cattlemen and homesteaders draws her into struggles that threaten the region.

Working people caught in the Great Depression struggle against competing interests in a Great Plains capital. Political maneuvering, inequality, and the pursuit of wealth expose the pressures shaping public life as the country approaches another world war.

A Civil War veteran takes his family west and becomes a fierce defender of ordinary working people. Across three generations, recurring war injuries and economic hardship reveal how survival remains a struggle even after the soldiers return home.

A band of Cheyenne people leaves forced confinement in Indian Territory to return to its northern homeland. Their long journey becomes a struggle for survival as they face pursuit and the consequences of resisting the government's displacement policies.

Letters spanning nearly four decades reveal Sandoz's development as a writer and researcher. Correspondence with publishers, fellow writers, and others illuminates her working methods, personal hardships, social concerns, and sustained commitment to portraying the American West.

Sandoz recounts the life of Oglala leader Crazy Horse, whose independence distinguished him within his own community. His military resistance to American expansion and eventual surrender form the center of a portrait ending in violent tragedy.

Sandoz portrays her pioneer father through the stories and struggles of life in western Nebraska. Conflict with neighboring cattlemen, isolation, difficult marriages, and the demands of the land reveal both a formidable individual and the frontier society around him.

Following more than two centuries of the beaver trade, this history traces trappers and traders from the St. Lawrence toward the western frontier. The account ends with the great rendezvous era, showing how commerce advanced across the continent.