Books: Nebraska Pioneer

OLD JULES — Mari Sandoz — Little, Brown ($3).

When Mari Sandoz. writing under a pseudonym, won honorable mention in the Harper Intercollegiate Short Story Contest in 1925, her aging, domineering father thundered at her: “You know I consider writers and artists the maggots of society!” But on the last day of his life, when he was demented with pain, disease and alcohol, “Old Jules” Sandoz broke down and urged her to tell the story of his struggles as a homesteader and community builder, in the desolate Running Water region of western Nebraska. Last week his daughter fulfilled his wish with a biography that won the Atlantic $5,000 Non-Fiction Prize, became the November choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Simply and directly written, Old Jules is the story of a tenacious career in a tough country, presents intelligible pioneers who were made coarse by hardship and loneliness. Although she confesses to an abiding fear of “Old Jules” that dated from her girlhood, Mari Sandoz writes of him with sympathy, without sentimentality, with an honest facing of some unpleasant aspects of his character.

Jules Sandoz was a dark-bearded, ragged young man of 26 when, in 1884, he settled near the upper Niobrara River. He had studied medicine in Zurich, quarreled with his father, left for the U. S. to make his fortune. In Nebraska he married only to leave his wife because she “refused to build the morning fires, to run through the frosty grass to catch up his team.” Locating his homestead at a time when cattlemen were driving off settlers with guns, when mail was held up at the nearest post office for as long as six months, Jules fought with his neighbors, his three succeeding wives, with the law, with fellow-countrymen and friends in his determination to defend his property. While digging a well he was dropped 65 ft., abandoned by Swiss immigrants who were helping him and who were responsible for the accident. Staggering toward an Army camp he collapsed, was found, fought with the doctor who wanted to amputate his foot. Anticipating his death, his fellow-pioneers tried to seize his few possessions. Weaklings could not endure this environment, were left to perish, apparently without regret. “Old Jules’s” second wife. Henrietta, went out from Boston to marry him, drawn by artful letters written by Jules’s sister. She was revolted by his crudeness, suffered in the miserable leaky shack. When Jules became involved in a feud and was accused of setting fire to a neighbor s grain, Henrietta sat up all night, once had a kerosene lamp shot out of her hand, eventually went crazy. Jules picked himself another bride, who ran away after two weeks. His fourth stayed, bore him six children.

Despite all his violence and crafty disregard of the desires of others, “Old Jules” had a single-mindedness and tenacity quietly heroic in character. He wanted to make the barren land produce, and his struggles with nature and with his enemies were all directed to that end. He was mean, shrewd, impulsive, attractive only in his devotion to his land and the orchards he eventually established. In a life that had been stripped to the bone his qualities were essential, or the homestead and his ambitions would have been lost to the cattlemen, the landgrabbers, or the sands that swept across the country in times of drought.