Love Song to the Plains by Mari Sandoz

Abstract

72 Western American Literature The structure of the book is also engaging. Following the introduction are the three principal divisions of the work: “Songs and Dances,” “Tales,” and “Customs.” Not only does each division have a short explanatory essay but also each individual entry within the division has at least a paragraph telling from whom the item was collected and supplying sufficient scholarly remarks to place it in historical and folkloric perspective. “Songs and Dances” includes the topics “Songs of Trail and Prairie,” “Songs of the Farmers’ Alliance,” and “Square Dances.” This section is en­ hanced by the inclusion of the music for six of the songs. Of particular interest to a generation for whom protest is not an unknown reaction are the “Songs of the Farmers’ Alliance.” In hi-s introduction Mr. Welsch makes it clear that certain folklorists would reject the Alliance songs as folklore and cites reasons for such exclusion. He then observes that “another school . . . would accept them as folksongs for they were born of and sung by ‘the folk.’ ” By including them in his Treasury, he makes his own inclinations clear. And to avoid expending energy upon matters that do not yet admit of resolution, he refers the reader to John Greenway’s American Folksongs of Protest for a recital of the arguments pro and con. This is sound judgment. A motif analysis for the Tales (“Whiteman’s Tales” and “Indian Tales” ) is included as an appendix. Although one might be initially troubled by the title, perhaps this work will restore the luster to good compilations and collections that are indeed treasuries. L o u ie W. A t t e b e r y , The College of Idaho Love Song to the Plains. By Mari Sandoz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book, 1966. 303 pages. $1.85.) Several years ago in Joseph Kirkland’s Zury country a newspaper reporter received a phone call that took him out to a rundown farm where a middleaged farmer was directing a digging operation. The farmer had brought in a giant crane and shovel, and at a spot located with a “witching stick,” had excavated a hole the size of a two-story house. “There’s gold buried down there,” he explained, “left by the Spaniards when they came through here three or four hundred years ago.” Reviews 73 I was reminded of the story of the Spanish gold as I read Mari Sandoz’s Love Song to the Plains, recently re-published in an attractive Bison Book. The mythical Spaniard appears only briefly in the book (“the Plains resisted [his] iron step” ), but he sets the tone, he and his equally legendary fellowPlainsmen — the trapper, the missionary, the soldier; the cattleman and the farmer, the “noble savage” and the “vanishing red face.” And the reader who would appreciate Love Song to the full would do well to expect the ghost rider with the real, the fanciful figure with the fact, the music of the wind with the words of the song. Though she has included an eleven-page bibliography, the author was not one to be penned up within the confines of her research. As a critic commented when the book was published in 1961, Miss Sandoz writes from personal memory as well as the historical record. Her personal memory, one should add, was stocked with the incidents and tales garnered in a life­ long love affair with her native Nebraska. (“I always come back to the Middle West. There’s a vigor here, and a broadness of horizon,” she once wrote). More important, she realized that a historian who would be true to the spirit of a region and of its people may not neglect the tales of the past or the dreams of the future, for these are as much a reality as the people who walk the land or the records they leave behind. In Love Song the tale and the myth become as real as the historical fact. Not that traditional history is neglected. The author deals with the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, the fur trade, the ever-increasing en­ croachment of the whites upon the Indian lands, the struggles between...