Originally published at the beginning of the twentieth century, the
short stories of John G. Neihardt deserve to be better known. Their
flesh-and-blood Indians were practically unprecedented in an era
when the fiends of dime novels and idealizations of Cooper were
still the literary norm. Owing much to young Neihardt's intimate
association with the Omahas at their reservation in eastern
Nebraska, the stories were of an Indian cast that perplexed the
critics. They were often overlooked as the years brought laurels to
the author of "A Cycle of the West" and "Black Elk Speaks," A
closer look at them reveals that Neihardt was a disciplined artist
from the very beginning.
The nine stories in this volume appeared from 1901 to 1905 in the
"Overland Monthly"; five were collected in "The Lonesome Trail" in
1907. All of them are informed by Neihardt's experience among Omaha
Indians and shaped by the power of his imagination. Except for "A
Prairie Borgia," which clearly touches on the notorious Chief
Blackbird's relations with traders, all are set in the time before
contact with white men. Love and hate, kindness and cruelty, hope
and despair, generosity and envy, honesty and guile, spiritual
impulse and sexual desire operate in this wholly Indian world. "The
End of the Dream," 'The Triumph of Seha," and "The Smile of God"
are patterned on vision quests issuing in profound irony. The
social outcast who figured in "Neihardt's Indian Tales and Others"
(1927, a Bison Book), appears again in adventures with a cosmic,
and sometimes fantastic, dimension. These stories, as well as "When
the Snows Drift," "The Beating of the War Drums," "The Fading of
Shadow Flower," "The Singing of the Frogs," and"The Spirit of Crow
Butte," have an inwardness reflected by vivid imagery. Their
quality led Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte, the daughter of Joseph
LaFlesche (Iron Eyes), last chief of the Omahas, to exclaim that
Neihardt was the only writer in a long line extending from Cooper
to Frederic Remington who possessed "a true understanding of Indian
character."
The stories were compiled by Neihardt's daughter, Hilda Neihardt
Petri. In his introduction Jay Fultz discusses their cultural
context and artistic integrity.
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