Dee Brown and Mari Sandoz Feature of Talk

On July 28th at Fort Phil Kearny, Author Shannon Smith Author of “Give Me Eighty Men:” Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Fight (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), presented talk on authors Dee Brown and Mari Sandoz,

She said since the year 2000, she has been at Fort Phil Kearny studying, researching and falling in love with the area. She talked about how she started researching the fort and Fetterman.

Currently, she said she has been doing consulting on Native American culture projects, working with the northern Cheyenne Tribe in Nebraska, where she lives. She is president of the Mari Sandoz heritage society in Nebraska, that protects and promotes the legacy of the history of the west.

She said that in 1999, when she was studying history at the University of Nebraska, she got interested in pursuing the differences between the two writers. While doing her research she found books in the archives that were from Mari Sandoz’s apartment. She wanted a certain book and asked the librarian to find it, which was a process at that time. She said they found the wrong book, Dee Brown’s Fort Phil Kearny, An American Saga. She asked them to leave it for her to read anyway.

Smith had a slide of the book with Sandoz’s red pencil notes on the pages.

She talked about both authors, their backgrounds and the way they approached writing history. Smith said that Sandoz used primary sources in her research, while Brown would use secondary as well as primary sources. Both the authors wrote about the Plains Indians and the Indian Wars, and both of their writings are considered classics.

She said that Mari Sandoz was born in the Sandhill County of Nebraska, in 1896. The eldest of six children, she had a rough upbringing on the family homestead, and as the oldest she was often in charge of her younger siblings. Her domineering father was very brutal to his wife and children, and did not like Sandoz’s writing talent and tried to discourage her from pursuing it. Still, she continued to write, and among her many books is a biography of her father, Old Jules, first published in 1935, and is still in print today. Other books include Cheyenne Autumn and Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas.

Dee Brown is a well-known western historian and the author of numerous history books including several on the Plains Indian Wars. He was born in 1908 in the sawmill town of Alberta, Louisiana. Later, his family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. He wrote such well-known books as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West, and Showdown at Little Bighorn among others.

As well as historic non-fiction, both authors wrote several novels as well.

The talk was well attended and held in the new Fort Phil Kearny Interpretive Center at the Fort.