The challenge to write about a book that has changed my life was intriguing all by itself. Where do I even start? Thoreau and Walden, which actually made high school bearable? Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago (especially the chapter titled “The Soul and Barbed Wire”) which can still make me marvel at beautiful writing on a frightening topic? Perhaps even Fred Craddock Overhearing the Gospel, which still informs my rhetoric? There are just so many books and so few bytes.
But then the challenge was expanded, and the call was sent out to also consider works of poetry in particular. I knew as soon as I read this that my selection had been made. I would have to turn to Nebraska native and poet laureate John G. Neihardt. I would have to revisit, with joy, his epic work The Cycle of the West, in particular the last two long poems often packaged as Twilight of the Sioux.
My introduction to Neihardt’s poetry began with a strange assignment in a college course on Oral Interpretation of Literature. In my little college in the north central part of Oklahoma, the Drama Center was just an old, white house across from the auditorium. The classroom was one tiny living room in that house. There was a blackboard on the north wall. And on the board that day, the professor had put up a piece of literature I did not know, apparently part of a poem:
April came,
And once again his undefeated name
Rode every wind. Ingeniously the West
Wrought verities from what the East had guessed
Of what the North knew. Eagerly deceived,
The waiting South progressively believed
The wilder story. April wore away;
Fleet couriers, arriving day by day
With but the farthing mintage of the fact,
Bought credit slowly in that no one lacked
The easy gold of marvelous surmise.
For, gazing northward where the secret skies
Were moody with a coming long deferred,
Whoever spoke of Crazy Horse, still heard
Ten thousand hoofs.
The assignment was simply to figure out what this was about. Well, I was a typical sophomore. Although I’d grown up on the plains, I knew nothing of the Plains Wars. Gradually, and with patient help from the teacher, we worked away at this stanza. We teased out the description of chattering gossip, the monetary metaphor that made the truth seem so dull and unattractive in the presence of wild rumor. But gossip about what, about whom? April? The wind? I now smack my head at how ignorant we were. But when the professor finally, patiently, made the connection between “his undefeated name” and “Crazy Horse,” the pieces fell into place. This was gossip and rumor about a warrior chief.
But—iambic pentameter? Rhymed couplets? I recognized these from Shakespeare. Who would write about the West in such a form?
At the same time that Hollywood was making myths out of the conquest of the Western US, a poet who grew up and was educated in Nebraska was beginning to realize a much truer mythic scope of this history. John G. Neihardt was trained in the classics, and he also had an intense curiosity about people who lived through what was recent history. He could yet interview many who had taken part personally in the great events. (One separate work that came out of these interviews was Black Elk Speaks, which became for awhile quite a popular book.) Neihardt pulled these strands together and began writing what was, literally, an epic work: a five poem Cycle of the West.
The period with which the Cycle deals was one of discovery, exploration and settlement—a genuinely epic period, differing in no essential from the other great epic periods that marked the advance of the Indo-European peoples out of Asia and across Europe. It was a time of intense individualism, a time when society was cut loose from its roots, a time when an old culture was being overcome by that of a powerful people driven by the ancient needs and greeds. For this reason only, the word “epic” has been used in connection with the Cycle; it is properly descriptive of the mood and meaning of the time and of the material with which I have worked. There has been no thought of synthetic Iliads and Odysseys, but only of the richly human saga-stuff of a country that I knew and loved, and of a time in the very fringe of which I was a boy.
The five book-length “Songs” were finished and published over about thirty years. In historical period, they cover the time from the 1820’s to 1890, from the mountain men to the Wounded Knee slaughter. While I have read the first three songs, they are not my favorite. “The Song of Three Friends” and “The Song of Jed Smith” seem to me, at best, Neihardt practicing his art. “The Song of Hugh Glass,” however, is simply a rousing tale, wherein the title character, mauled by a bear and left for dead by his friends, crawls across rugged prairie not only to survive but to seek revenge against those who abandoned him.
The last two, though, are exquisite. “The Song of the Indian Wars” and “The Song of the Messiah”—published together as Twilight of the Sioux—are shattering works of art. Together, they sing of the Plains Indians and their loss of both land and spirit.
Land and spirit are intimately connected, of course. The great chief Red Cloud puts it together best within the poem as he tries to explain (in words “that lacked but little to be song”) to white commissioners:
“My brothers, when you see this prairie here,
You see my mother. Forty snows and four
Have blown and melted since the son she bore
First cried at Platte Forks yonder, weak and blind;
And whether winter-stern or summer-kind,
Her ways with me were wise. Her thousand laps
Have shielded me. Her ever-giving paps
Have suckled me and made me tall for war.
What presents shall I trade my mother for?
A string of beads? A scarlet rag or two?”
Already he was going ere they knew
That he had ceased.
The rest of the tragedy spins out from the complete inability of the two cultures to understand one another. And so much of it is there in the song: Beecher’s Island, Fetterman’s defeat, the building of the railroad, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, even the Little Big Horn debacle is sung, mostly from the point of view of Reno’s charge and retreat up the bluff. (“The hunted troopers blundered at a steep/more suited to the flight of mountain sheep/than horses…”) And finally, the ruinous winter, the surrender of chief Crazy Horse, and his death at Fort Robinson.
“The Song of the Messiah” sings the tale of the Ghost Dance movement, the attempt to reclaim the soul of a shattered people. Shaped by contact with Christian missionaries, the Plains tribes grasped at a vision where the Messiah would return with all the ancestors, where the land would be restored, where peace would reign and the face of the enemy would be seen as the brother. The vision became appropriated as costume and as a dance, and, of course, these were seen by whites as a threat.
So clearly they were mad,
These dancing heathen, ludicrously clad
For superstitious doings in a day
Of Christian light and progress! Who could say
What devilment they hatched against the whites,
What lonely roofs would flare across the nights
To mark a path of murder!
It must cease.
And from this apprehension arise the tragedies of Sitting Bull’s death and the disaster at Wounded Knee. Irony piles on irony: The dancers accuse the white agents and the Indian police of murdering Jesus. Sitting Bull’s horse, a present from Buffalo Bill, hears the gunfire and goes through his show routine, thinking he is hearing applause. The chief Sitanka, ill in his tent at Wounded Knee, achieves his vision of the enemy soldier as brother just as the soldier kills him. A South Dakota blizzard covers the carnage.
The bugles blared retreat.
Triumphant in the blindness of defeat,
The iron-footed squadron marched away.
And darkness fell upon the face of day.
The mounting blizzard broke. All night it swept
The bloody field of victory that kept
The secret of the Everlasting Word.
And so, the last line unmatched with any rhyme, the five-part epic ends unfinished.
My teacher, Professor Jerry Turpin at Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, had studied under Neihardt. And he had permission to use material from the Cycle not only in classes but in theatre works that he was developing. So I was privileged to do the lighting design for a readers theatre production of Song of the Indian Wars, and then to analyze and make a first draft of “Messiah” for a class in Readers Theatre. I’ve since had the joy of hearing Hilda Neihardt, the poet’s daughter, perform the death of Crazy Horse at a reading in Nebraska. I have used several sections of the poems to help student readers practice interpreting poetry, much the same way in which Prof Turpin introduced me to the works. I’m pleased to pass them on to you.
How did these songs change me? I grew up in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. I grew up in a land, but I did not know the land. I grew up surrounded by myths made in studios by people who kept insisting that Kansas looks like Monument Valley. (My Flint Hills had their own stark beauty.) The myths of rugged individualism and self-made pioneers who came to settle an empty land—I had imbibed these for as long as I knew.
Neihardt gave me an alternative myth, and one that is, I think, more true to the reality. He allows me yet to hear voices that are often silenced (“But there were others, and they were human too…”). He allows me to see characters that are rounded, often in conflict with themselves. (Well, maybe not Custer. But in every history I have read of him I find that he seems to have gone out of his way to make of himself a caricature.) And while he reminds me that I have every reason to be suspicious of good intentions honeying over evil deeds, Neihardt keeps drawing me back to something grander. That secret at the end, that Everlasting Word, it still nags at me. People can find it, lose it, have it blasted from them, and still in the end it draws me on towards hope. Aristotle says that tragedies can be cathartic. I usually just snort at him when I hear it, but with this work I think it might be true.
And now that I am living far from that particular land, Neihardt’s words are a reminder of home. I read them, and I feel the wind, the heat, the dust. Then I turn my eyes to the mountains of southwest Virginia, and I strain to hear the silenced voices here. I wonder: who sings for them?
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Are you ready for some epic poetry—American epic poetry at that?
The Cycle comes in two parts: The Mountain Men and Twilight of the Sioux.
If poetry is not your thing, The Splendid Wayfaring is a prose version of the early history of trapping and exploration.
The Neihardt Center is well worth a visit, but since most of you probably won’t make it to Bancroft, Nebraska, you can find the website here.