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Green Hills of Grayest
Sand
Old Jules is more than the title of a book by
Mari Sandoz, it is the name of one of the monsters of American
letters: the Simon Legree of the pioneer household who, married four
times, drove one wife to the insane asylum and struck the fourth in
the face with a handful of four-foot wire stays so that she tried to
poison herself with strychnine. ("'I learn the goddamn balky woman to
obey me when I say, 'hold [the bull calf].'") A former medical student
and scion of a proud upper-middle class family in Zürich, this
immigrant from Switzerland arrived in the Nebraska Panhandle in 1884
at the age of twenty-five to settle on a dugout claim above the
Niobrara River at the verge of Mirage Flats thirty miles south of
Rushville, equipped with little more than a Vetterli single-shot
rifle, the stamp collection he had begun as a boy, a team of horses
and a wagon, and a spade. Jules Sandoz had scant use for the
"American" pioneers coming into the country but affection for the
Sioux Indians, who admired his marksmanship and took him with them on
extended hunting trips in the Sand Hills. He became a surveyor and a
locator, settling fellow Swiss (including several of his brothers) on
claims of their own; ran the local post office from his house;
resisted the wealthy "English" cattlemen who fenced the land and tried
to drive the farmers off their claims (by lead colic, when
intimidation didn't work); and planted his lands to orchards and
vineyards in a series of horticultural experiments that earned him a
reputation as the Luther Burbank of the Sand Hills. Also he begat six
children on Mary, his last wife, for her to raise. The eldest, Marie
(she changed the name to Mari when she became an author), was born in
1896 without benefit of a doctor in the little house in the canyon of
the Niobrara she later called the River Place, where her father moved
after abandoning the dugout on the west side of the Niobrara.
Mari Sandoz grew up conversing with her friends the
Sioux on Indian Hill, above the River Place. She died in 1966 in New
York City, where she had moved in the '40s to be near her publisher
and indulge her taste for the theater. (Like Willa Cather, another
Nebraskan of roughly the same vintage, she took an apartment in
Greenwich Village.) In between she wrote twenty-two books, all of them
set in the same region of the American West, mostly nonfiction, but
including several novels as well. Her aim, she wrote, was to
understand as much as possible about man, shaped by and shaping his
world. I decided early that most writers do their best work in
material with which they have emotional identity. Therefore I
restricted myself to the trans Missouri country-and its nearer
settlement origins-examining modern man's occupancy in the region from
the stone axe to the A-bomb and jet propulsion. Through the discovery
of this one region, this one drop of water, I hope to discover
something of the nature of the ocean.
So the books kept coming: The Beaver Men,
The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen; Crazy Horse,
Cheyenne Autumn, These Were the Sioux, Winter
Thunder..The first, Old Jules, a biography of her father, is
the best known of her works as well as, perhaps, the best. "You know I
consider writers and artists the maggots of society," Jules wrote his
daughter when he learned of her literary activities. On his death day,
he requested that she write the story "of his struggles as a locator,
a builder of communities, bringer of fruit to the Panhandle."
It's 234 miles from Laramie, Wyoming to Chadron,
Nebraska, Laramie Peak in the Medicine Bow in sight for 174 of them
before the descent from the Pine Ridge escarpment-the same Laramie
Peak that the girl Marie used to strain to glimpse over the horizon
from Indian Hill--begins. Chadron, home to Chadron State College, is a
town 5000 people, plus change. Driving in on the main street I
recognized Ed Detrixhe in his Carhart overalls coming out of a
bookstore around the corner and followed his truck to the motel room
he'd taken an hour before. It had been better than a 500-mile drive
from Clyde, Kansas to Chadron, spread over a two-day trip to allow for
investigation of the local necropoli along the way (cemetaries having
a particular interest for Ed). We drank a couple of beers in the room
before going to supper at the Old Main Street Inn, and sat up late
over a bottle of brandy and a handful of publications orienting
visitors to Sandoz country.
By morning, an early September weather disturbance
caused by a cold air mass from Canada had passed through and the
sunshine struck directly from a washed sky as if earth's atmosphere
had been lifted away at the horizon. We made an early start from
Chadron, headed east to Hay Springs, then south across the high brown
tableland to Mirage Flats where Old Jules settled his Dutchmen more
than a century before.
Ed carried a map he'd acquired on his last trip to
the Sand Hills, drawn by Mari's sister Caroline Pifer (still alive
today at age 91) whom he met in '92. This map was a cartographical
disaster, completely out of scale and giving inaccurate mileages
between the indicated points of interest. We were looking for the
Church of the Sacred Heart, built on a lot donated by Old Jules to the
Catholics (in the interest of community building rather than piety).
Though the country looked familiar to Ed after nine years, a lack of
topographical distinction inherent in something called the Flats made
identifying landmarks difficult although the Sand Hills themselves
were visible now, floating like a tumulous fogbank on the eastern
horizon across the Niobrara. Finally, he stopped to ask directions
from a farmer inspecting the damage last night's frost had done to his
tomato plants and learned we were less than a mile from the church on
the washboard road.
Sacred Heart was a dusty stone block with cracked
walls, standing within a shelterbreak of brown trees on five acres of
sunburnt ground that crackled underfoot. We tried the locked doors and
walked back to the cemetary behind the church, its stones inscribed
with the familiar names: Freese, Minten, Peters, Staskiewicz, Skudlas-Skudlases
and Staskiewiczs buried within ten feet of each other, and Victoria
Staskiewicz lying off by herself a little. Ed Skudlas, having been in
the bushes with the blooming Victoria as well as with her older
sister, married Maggie after she informed him she was pregnant. When
in due time he discovered the lie, he looked up Victoria whom Maggie
had scared into keeping her mouth shut about her own pregnancy. By
now, Victoria had produced Ed's child; two years later she poisoned
herself with strychnine and died, aged nineteen. Today the
Staskiewiczs and Skudlases all lie together, almost side by side,
under thin weedy soil back of the locked-up church with its Mass
schedule dropping, letter by yellowed letter, from the announcement
board standing to the left of the concrete steps.
Half a mile south from Sacred Heart we came to the
dugout site, where practical jokers dropped Old Jules sixty-five feet
to the bottom of the well he was digging. They left the injured man by
the side of the road for the soldiers to find on their way over to Ft.
Robinson where Jules was treated by the post's army surgeon, Dr.
Walter Reed, who wanted to amputate but was dissuaded by the patient's
threat to kill him if he removed the injured foot. Though Jules kept
the foot, it never healed and he remained a cripple for the rest of
his life. "I can make a living better crippled than lots of men with
two good feet."
We took the road east from the vanished dugout and
crossed the Niobrara River, shallow and shrunken but freely flowing
still in its meandering channel, to the River Place whose stone marker
sits behind a wire fence just above the highwater mark. "When Mari and
I were here in '92, we wondered why Jules left all this for the
Sandhills," Ed remarked. "When we saw the Hill Place, though, we
realized that--in this case, anyway--he wasn't crazy." (Ed's being
married to a Mari of his own produced uncertainty for either of us
only when the name came at the beginning of a sentence, and then only
for the space of a couple of seconds or so.)
The foundation was still outlined in the grass, not
over twenty feet by twenty, after someone moved the house away,
leaving a thin debris field--bits of bottles and china, the brass ends
of shotgun shells-like a foundered ship's. Following the fenceline we
came to a couple of forlorn apple trees dying branch by branch,
twenty-five yards apart. More then a century old, they were all that
remained of Old Jules's orchard, just enough strength left to bear a
few wormy apples hanging haphazardly like forgotten ornaments on an
abandoned Christmas tree. Ed and I picked an apple each, polished them
on our shirt sleeves, and ate carefully around the worm holes. The
flesh was firm and pleasantly chill, a tart communion host bringing us
into the presence of a long-dead past. Between the orchard and the
river ash and hackberry trees grew, and below them the current bushes
from which Old Jules made his wine. Lastly, we climbed Indian Hill and
from its small summit looked out over the valley where Jules once
presided over a hanging and the corpse of the Sioux Chief Conquering
Bear had lain out on its funeral scaffold in 1854. Though I stood on
my toes to look over the horizon, I couldn't see as far as Laramie
Peak, either.
The Sand Hills begin on climbout from the eastern
rim of the Niobrara canyon. They are not made of the gravelly mixture
Wyoming calls sand but real sand, beach sand from an ancient sea
formed by moisture and the wind into gray dunes that in time caught
the blowing prairie grass seed and sodded themselves. Here and there,
blowouts occur in the sod, sandy craters on which human beings lay
automobile tires to keep them from expanding until entire hills are
lifted and spun away on the winds. Between the hills and ridges,
folded over and softly rounded, are many lakes, ponds, and sinkholes,
surrounded by dark reed beds and spotted by flocks of waterfowl. In
Jules's time the Sand Hills were home to wolves, coyotes, deer, elk,
antelope, and rattlesnakes, as well as birds; today, only the wolves
are gone from them, along with the Indians who have been replaced by
white ranchers (some descendents of Jules's settlers, a few of them
Sandozes) scattered over the mostly depopulated country. The Sand
Hills, like a heaving green sea arrested in motion, are a surreal
place: impressionistic, haunting, and mystical, a vague and separate
world uplifted from the surrounding plains above which they seem to
float, without an earthy contact. In moving from the River to the Hill
Place, Old Jules transferred his family some thirty or forty miles
eastward by wagon. The entrance to his last home, owned by Mari's
niece Celia Ostrander since her sister Flora Sandoz's death in 1995,
is signaled by an historic marker beside the paved highway. Ed turned
his Dodge truck into the dirt track leading away from the road at a
right angle, then made another right-angle turn left across a
cattleguard. "Oh," he exclaimed as the truck topped a rise, "it looks
different than it did in '92."
We were looking into a long valley stretching
between a straight ridge on the south side and broken hills making a
barrier to the north. The valley was green, with marsh grasses in the
bottom of the swale where in spring the shallow lake formed that Jules
had put a rowboat on. At the eastern end of the valley, against the
hills, two houses stood beneath mature shade trees, facing an apple
orchard lying against the ridge. Beyond the valley, an expanse of blue
water crinkled the afternoon sunlight. At the western end, opposite
where the Dodge stood idling, a fenced plot showed against the steep
rising behind it. "Over there's where she's buried," Ed said. He
added, "They cut down the orchard between there and the dry lake-just
scores and scores of fruit trees."
A sign pointing to the grave site invited visitors
to make themselves at home in the orchard, planted by Flora to
Harrelson apple trees. Though the trees did not look well-tended, the
apples tasted fine. The single-story, cream-colored house that Jules
built had been prettified since his time with windowboxes filled with
flowers and other female improvements. We turned the truck around in
the yard, drove back down the valley, and parked in the two-track
below the grave.
Mari Sandoz lies parallel to the hillside beneath a
handsome stone of purple granite surrounded by the wild prairie
grasses. The guestbook, placed in a mailbox set on a post, was signed
by people from around the United States and the world, the better part
of them women. Celia, who tends the grave, signs in every time she
pays a visit to the site. We added our names, and took a few pictures.
"She's been here thirty-five years already," Ed remarked, gently.
Jules, who died in Alliance in November 1928, is buried over in the
cemetery there, with Mary beside him.
Old Jules was refused by thirteen publishers
before being accepted by Hastings House in New York in 1935. According
to Helen Winter Stauffer, Mari's biographer, the manuscript unsettled
many editorial readers, in part by the author's vengeful attitude
toward her father in earlier drafts of the book. Now she lies where he
should be lying, the rise of the hill behind the grave plot vividly
green in the light of the evening sun, tufts of pink Little Bluestem
grass tossing on the wind; a living tombstone behind the granite one.
Nothing here now but silence and peace-a final reconciliation,
achieved by art and eternity, between the violent undefeated pioneer
and his firstborn child, the dauntless artist he so strangely sired. |
