A Response to Hilda Neihardt’s August 1995 “Note”

Abstract

Notes A Response to Hilda Neihardt’s August 1995 “Note” I read with great interest Hilda Neihardt’s comments in the August issue of Western American Literatureabout her father,John G. Neihardt, and Mari Sandoz. It brought back memories of my own discovery that both had been on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1930. I, too, assumed for some time that it was Sandoz whom Black Elk had refused to allow to interview him. However, while reading the Sandoz correspondence, both at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and at the home of Mari’s sister, Caroline Sandoz Pifer, I found evidence that indicated otherwise. I believe that the young woman was Eleanor Hinman, the friend with whom Sandoz traveled 3,000 miles that summer through the High Plains reservations. I have discussed that trip in detail in my biography, Mari Sandoz, Story Catcherof the Plains, as well as quoting specific letters in other publications, so will mention only briefly what I surmise happened that summer. Sandoz and Hinman had the great good fortune to interview Crazy Horse’s lifelong friend and fellow warrior, He Dog, along with his relatives and including Red Feather, Crazy Horse’s brother-in-law. These old men were Crazy Horse’s contemporaries. In 1930 they were in another part of the reservation than Black Elk; furthermore, an old schism divided them from Black Elk and his relatives. In an undated note I found among material at the Pifer home, Mari commiserated with her friend, telling her not to be down-hearted because of Black Elk’s refusal to talk to her. It was unlikely, she said, that a conservative Oglala man would want to talk about Indian history to an unknown white woman. (The two had been given entrée to their sources through the auspices of someone who knew and could vouch for them. Even so, there was considerable suspicion at first.) In later letters to Hinman, Sandoz suggested that another obstacle to the interview would have been the schism. In drawing my conclusion about the 1930 summer, I tried to evaluate what the various people involved were attempting to do then. Both Black Elk and Neihardt had purposes wonderfully compatible in their desire to share the religious and mystical aspects of the Oglala Lakota life of pre-reservation and early reservation years. Eleanor Hinman, who was an anthropologist, journalist, poet, and aspiring fiction writer, wanted to write a novel about the great Oglala war chief and hero of the Indian Wars, Crazy Horse. Mari Sandoz was certainly interested in him, but at that time contemplated no more than an article or two about him. She had not yet written anything of consequence about the Indians of the Plains, concentrating her short stories and essays on white protagonists. She was interested in Plains Indian history; however, she wanted to write about a contemporary of Crazy Horse, Young Man Afraid of his Horses. Also, the story of the little group of Cheyennes who attempted to leave the reservation in the South to return to their homeland in Montana in 1878-79 had been the object of her research and emotions for some time. Sandoz attended the He Dog interviews with Hinman, but it was Hinman who took copious notes. Sandoz’s are relatively meager. (Hinman worked on her Crazy Horse novel for some years, but in 1939 she gave it up and turned all her notes 422 Western American Literature over to her friend, Mari Sandoz. Hinman told me she could not afford the time and expense required for further research.) It should be remembered that the interviews and non-interview took place in 1930, before Neihardt wrote Black Elk Speaks and made the man famous. Sandoz and Hinman knew Black Elk primarily as the considerably younger second cousin of Crazy Horse. They knew he was a holy man and that he would know a lot about his cousin, but I doubt if their knowledge went much beyond that. If Neihardt learned no more from Black Elk than the statement that he saw “a nice looking lady” but that he did not want to talk to her, Neihardt could well have supposed that itwas Sandoz...