Charmingly, Mari Sandoz tells of a long-ago Christmas in western Nebraska when her father's house was filled with good music. Old Jules had ordered an Edison phonograph and boxes of cylinder records from the East, paying for them with an inheritance and ignoring debts, to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife. But the entire family soon entered into the holiday spirit as neighbors arrived to feast and dance and enjoy musical selections ranging from Lucia di Lammermoor to Casey at the Telephone. Even old enmities dissolved under the spell, for, as Old Jules said, "The music is for everybody."

A classic in the tradition of Dylan Thomas's "Child's Christmas in Wales" and Truman Capote's "Christmas Memory," this story by the famous author of "Old Jules" was first published posthumously in December 1966.

Mari Sandoz's beautifully written account of the battle in which General George Armstrong Custer staked his life--and lost it--reveals on every page the author's intimate knowledge of her subject. The character of the Sioux, the personality of Custer, the mixed emotions of Custer's men, the plains landscape--all emerge with such clarity that the reader is transported to that spring in 1876 when the Army of the Plains began its fateful march toward Yellowstone. The background of the tragedy is here: the history of bad blood and broken treaties between the Indigenous nations and the United States, the underlying reason for Custer's expedition and for the convocation of Indians on the Little Bighorn that particular year. Sandoz's final book was the first analysis of Custer's motives and political ambitions to shed light on an old mystery that was hotly disputed by the general's admirers. Historian Elaine Marie Nelson introduces this iconic work to a new generation and details the long, challenging road this book took to publication. Sandoz raced against time to complete the volume while undergoing cancer treatments, and the book was published just three months after her death. The Battle of the Little Bighorn is widely considered the apex of her writing.

Crazy Horse, the legendary military leader of the Oglala Sioux whose personal power and social nonconformity contributed to his reputation as being "strange," fought in many famous battles, including the Little Bighorn, and held out tirelessly against the U.S. government's efforts to confine the Lakotas to reservations. Finally, in the spring of 1877 he surrendered, only to meet a violent death. More than a century later Crazy Horse continues to hold a special place in the hearts and minds of his people. Mari Sandoz offers a powerful evocation of the long-ago world and enduring spirit of "Crazy Horse." Chosen as a 2007 One Book, One Nebraska selection, this edition of "Crazy Horse" includes discussion questions and a comprehensive glossary to enhance the reader's experience with this classic Sandoz text.

"The Cattlemen" is the story of the cattle industry in America and of the men whose ranches reached from the Rio Grande into Montana, from the early Spanish days to Mari Sandoz's contemporary times. It is the second in Sandoz's trilogy of books narrating the history of the American West in relation to animal species.

Originally published in 1967, this remarkable pictographic history consists of more than four hundred drawings and script notations by Amos Bad Heart Bull, an Oglala Lakota man from the Pine Ridge Reservation, made between 1890 and the time of his death in 1913. The text, resulting from nearly a decade of research by Helen H. Blish and originally presented as a three-volume report to the Carnegie Institution, provides ethnological and historical background and interpretation of the content. This 50th anniversary edition provides a fresh perspective on Bad Heart Bull's drawings through digital scans of the original photographic plates created when Blish was doing her research. Lost for nearly half a century-and unavailable when the 1967 edition was being assembled-the recently discovered plates are now housed at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. Readers of the volume will encounter new introductions by Emily Levine and Candace S. Greene, crisp images and notations, and additional material that previously appeared only in a limited number of copies of the original edition.

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

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.

First published in 1935, "Old Jules" is unquestionably Mari Sandoz's masterpiece. This portrait of her pioneer father grew out of "the silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed. So it was that I heard the accounts of the hunts," Sandoz recalls. "Of the fights with the cattlemen and the sheepmen, of the tragic scarcity of women, when a man had to 'marry anything that got off the train, ' of the droughts, the storms, the wind and isolation. But the most impressive stories were those told me by Old Jules himself." This Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by Linda M. Hasselstrom.

Covering more than two centuries, "The Beaver Men" recounts the beginning of the beaver trade along the St. Lawrence to the last great rendezvous of traders and trappers on Ham's Fork, in what is now Wyoming, in 1834. "The Beaver Men" is the third in Mari Sandoz's trilogy of books narrating the history of the American West in relation to an animal species.

In 1867 conservative estimates put the number of buffaloes in the trans-Missouri region 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 "The Buffalo Hunters." Mari Sandoz's vast canvas is charged with color and excitement--accounts of Indian ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, gambling and gunfights, military expeditions, and famous frontier characters such as Wild Bill Hickok, Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, Sheridan, Custer, and Indian chiefs Whistler, Yellow Wolf, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull.

By zealous research, keen observation, and wide-ranging and deeply probing commentary, Mari Sandoz has become one of the most famous and well-respected interpreters of the American West. "Old Jules Country" is made up of the region that Sandoz has written about most frequently--the High Plains of the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming--the Black Hills, the Bad Lands, the sandhills, and the great rivers: the Missouri, the Platte, and the Yellowstone.

Here are selections from the six volumes of her acclaimed Great Plains Series "The Beaver Men," "Crazy Horse," "Cheyenne Autumn," "The Buffalo Hunters," "The Cattlemen," and "Old Jules" and from her study of a great people, "These Were the Sioux." Also included are two essays, "The Lost Sitting Bull" and "The Homestead in Perspective." A Cheyenne prayer and two sketches unavailable elsewhere--"Snakes" and "Coyotes and Eagles"--complete the collection.

This anthology provides a stimulating sampling for readers not yet acquainted with Sandoz's work. For her extensive following, it offers the opportunity for a satisfying reappraisal of her overall achievement.

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

Mari Sandoz came out of the Sandhills of Nebraska to write at least three enduring books: "Old Jules," "Cheyenne Autumn," and "Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas." She was a tireless researcher, a true storyteller, an artist passionately dedicated to a place little known and a people largely misunderstood. Blasted by some critics, revered by others for her vivid detail and depth of feeling, Sandoz has achieved a secure place in American literature. Her letters, edited by Helen Winter Stauffer, reveal extraordinary courage and zest for life.

Included here are letters written by Sandoz over nearly forty years--from 1928, the year of her father's death and a critical one for her creative development, to 1966, the year of her own death. They allow memorable flimpses of the professional and private person: her struggles to learn her craft in spite of an unsupportive family and hard-won formal education, her experiences in gathering material, her relationships with editors and publishers, her work with fledgling writers, and her commitment to art and to various social concerns.

A young Sioux warrior earns the right to be called historian for his tribe after numerous adventures and trials which test his ability to tell the story of his people with truth and courage.

A hold, biting novel by the author of Old Jules and Crazy Horse, The Tom-Walker spans three generations in a Midwestern family. The patriarch, Milt Stone, who lost a leg fighting in Grant's army, is the Tom-Walker, circus slang for man on stilts. After the Civil War he takes his family west to the Missouri country. There he gains a reputation as a raconteur and as a passionate defender of the little man who works hard, fights the wars, and gets squeezed out by powerful interests. He lives to see his son and grandson fight in World War I and World War II, respectively, and return home from those wars, maimed like him, only to have to resume a fight just to stay alive. Crowded with living characters, The Tom-Walker never loses the larger view of American history. From the Gilded Age to the Atomic Age, everybody is trying to be either a Jay Gould or a Jesse James, out for easy money, everybody is] wanting to be king of something: mines, railroads, cattle, outlaws, anything. How people like the Stones fare is the story within this story. Rich and warm and extravagant and deeply rooted in what her America has been and is. -New York Times There is a good deal of America in the book, and the narrative teems with violent energy.-New Yorker

"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.

"No one in our time wrote better than the late Mari Sandoz did, or with more authority and grace, about as many aspects of the Old West," said John K. Hutchens. The proof of that is in her powerful re-creation of pioneer days in the Sandhills of northwestern Nebraska in these autobiographical pieces written between 1929 and 1965. Those who have not read her classic "Old Jules" (1935) will find "Sandhill Sundays" and "Other Recollections" a colorful introduction to Sandoz Country, and those who have will look for the same landmarks and unforgettable people. They include the Sandoz patriarch, the fiery libertarian Old Jules; Marlizzie, the archetypal pioneer woman who was Mari's mother; siblings, chums, neighbors, homesteaders, and Indians, all individualized and defined by a harsh and lonely frontier. Dangers in every form--blizzards, fires, rattlesnakes, murderous men--are described, and, just as vividly, so are the pleasures afforded by country cooking, storytelling, pet animals, and the first phonograph for miles around.

Even when she strays, as in the final piece, "Outpost in New York," Mari Sandoz never leaves the Sandhills in spirit. Included are a chronology of her career, a checklist of her writings, and a brief introduction by Virginia Faulkner.

"Slogum House" "lay on the winter flat of Oxbow like the remains of some great, hulking animal that had foraged the region long ago, leaving its old gray carcass to dry and bleach at the foot of the hogback." Ruled by Gulla Slogum, the house was headquarters for a clan that terrorized what it couldn't seduce or steal. Using her daughter as poisoned bait and her sons as predators, Gulla plotted to put a whole county under her control. She had been insulted too often and worked too hard; now she sought power, land, and revenge.

"Miss Morissa" is a dramatic, moving novel of a young pioneering woman doctor on the brawling Nebraska frontier of the 1870s. Fleeing the East and a heartbreaking past, Morissa Kirk finds the North Platte River Valley rife with rumors of gold strikes. Fortune hunters, desperadoes, horse thieves, murderers make up the frontier society, while Indians roam the plains refusing to surrender their land to the gold-hungry white men. Near lawless Clarke Bridge she sets up her practice, treating white and Indian alike, receiving horses (if anything) in return for her services. Then, even as fame spreads of her skill, and acceptance slowly grows, Morissa becomes embroiled in the life-and-death struggle between the cattlemen and the homesteaders, a struggle as destructive as it was inevitable. In the telling of Morissa's story, Mari Sandoz has caught the whole turmoil of the changing frontier in the days of Custer, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill Cody.

The story tells of the gambler and townsite promoter who founded Cozad, Nebraska, and of his family, particularly his younger son, [who] became a world-famous artist and teacher known as 'Robert Henri.' This tale is essentially Robert's story, the story of a sensitive talented boy growing up in the midst of frontier violence. But it is also the story of the ambitious promoter and of frontier people fighting hunger, cold, blizzards, drouths, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and ruthless cattlemen. . . .

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.

Here in one volume are Mari Sandoz's reminiscences of life in the Sandhills country; a study of the two Sitting Bulls (the Hunkpapa and the Oglala) and other Indian pieces; a novelette, "Bone Joe and the Smokin' Woman"; and nine short stories, mostly with a rural setting, including "The Vine,"" her first to be published. Introduced by an autogiographical sketch of the author's early years and linked by a commentary derived from her letters, articles, and interviews, the separate pieces coalesce into an illuminating picture both of the Niobrara River country and of Mari Sandoz's emergence as a major American writer.

First published in the dark days immediately before World War II, Capital City is Mari Sandoz's angriest and most political novel. Like many important American novels of the 1930s-John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Jack Conroy's The Disinherited, Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty-Capital City depicts the troubles of working people trapped in the Great Depression. A unique portrayal of how the Depression affected the Great Plains, it examines the forces that bitterly contended for wealth and power. Sandoz researched the daily life and behind-the-scenes operations of several state capitals in the thirties before synthesizing them in this novel, which is part allegory, part indictment, part warning. Famous for her passionate writing, Sandoz imbued Capital City with the full measure of her outrage Mari Sandoz (1896-1966) is one of Nebraska's foremost authors. She wrote twenty-three books about the High Plains region, including Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, and Old Jules, available in Bison Books editions. Terese Svoboda is the author of four novels, most recently Tin God (Nebraska 2006), and grew up on the edge of the Sandhills

Mari Sandoz's account of the battle in which General George Armstrong Custer staked his life--and lost--reveals on every page the author's intimate knowledge of her subject. The character of the Sioux, the personality of Custer, the mixed emotions of Custer's men, the Plains landscape--all emerge with such clarity that the reader is transported in time to that spring of 1876, when the Army of the Plains began its fateful march toward the Yellowstone. The background of the tragedy is here: the history of bad blood and broken treaties between the Sioux Nation and the United States, the underlying reason for Custer's expedition and for the convocation of Indians on the Little Bighorn that particular year. The author's analysis of Custer's motives and political ambitions sheds new light on an old mystery and will be hotly disputed by the general's admirers.