Love Song to the Plains

"Love Song to the Plains" was one the last books Mari Sandoz published in her lifetime. In it, she retells many of the stories she's told before, stories the reader has heard from her and others, the stories that created the Great Plains, "the West", in the mind of the nation. Most of these stories play on myths that have only an irregular basis in historical fact; some stories were outright lies, to advertise a sideshow, to sell stolen realestate, to justify murder, committed or proposed. Even when writing nonfiction, Sandoz finds good use for stories as stories; they are one reality, enlightening precisely by telling everything but the truth. This book is really a history of Nebraska, though ramifiying all over the upper Plains and in to the Rocky Mountains, these ramifications occurring along the pathways of the Indian Wars, ever an important topic for Sandoz, and for Nebraska, a state perhaps more conscious of its history than many. Mari Sandoz probably compares more readily to Wallace Stegner than to her fellow Nebraskan Willa Cather; though she's much more positive about the future than Stegner (I find her remarks on recent Nebraskan history far less insightful than her reading of Plains history up through the New Deal), she shares his skepticism about the culture of "the West" but also his attachment to it. Readers who are bothered by anger may find Sandoz unpleasant at times; of course, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, if you're not angered by history, you didn't pay attention.

This is an extremely beautiful account of the history of Nebraska and the Great Plains. Mari Sandoz is a shamefully obscure writer whose writing is so efficiently pure that it seems timeless. A must for anyone interested in the West, and in the nature of humanity, always looking to expand.