Timothy G. Anderson - Lonesome Dreamer: The Life of John G. Neihardt

Each year on the last Saturday of April the John G. Neihardt Center in Bancroft, Nebraska, hosts its annual spring conference. Some sixty to seventy attendeesamong them people old enough to have met John Neihardt, who died in 1973, or at least heard him speak or recite his poetryspend the day listening to historians and musicians and other writers and artists present a program on Neihardt and the issues he cared about.

Many of the attendees are repeat customers at this outpost of the Nebraska State Historical Society, and they are likely to know more about Neihardt than the average person. They are likely to know, first of all, that Neihardt moved to Bancroft in 1900, living there for two decades, and that he spent the last part of his long life teaching at the University of Missouri. They know the book for which he is best known, an as-told-to biography of a Lakota holy man titled Black Elk Speaks. Perhaps most important, they are likely to know that he also wrote a great many other books, works of fiction and nonfiction and books of poems, both short and epic.

Most people in the twenty-first century, if they have heard of John Neihardt at all, know of him because of Black Elk Speaks, first published in 1932, then reissued to wide acclaim in the 1960s. For two decades after Neihardts death, a considerable body of scholarship arose around Black Elk Speaks, much of it an attempt to discern how much of it was Black Elk speaking and how much of it was John Neihardt. Questions were raised about Neihardts appropriation of Lakota culture, about the influence of Christianity on Black Elk and on Neihardt, about what Black Elk had told Neihardt that had not made it into the book, and about passages Neihardt had added on his own. The situation was clarified substantially in the mid-1980s, when Raymond DeMallie published the transcripts of Neihardts interviews with Black Elk, originally recorded in shorthand by his daughter Enid after being translated from Lakota by Black Elks son Ben. Throughout the years, people continued to read and admire the book.

What many people outside this circle of Neihardt devotees may not know is that Black Elk Speaks was a byproduct of what Neihardt considered his lifes work, five volumes of long narrative poems he hoped would preserve the history of white exploration and settlement of the Great Plains and of the wars between the U.S. Army and the Indian population that resulted from Euro-American intrusion.

Like many others, I came to Neihardt through Black Elk Speaks. I had read the book in college in the early 1970s, and after stumbling onto it again nearly twenty-five years later, I began to wonder about the man who wrote it. About a year before Neihardt died, I had met him briefly at a book signing for his memoir All Is But a Beginning, and I tried to imagine how this little white-haired man shakily autographing books had managed to interview a Lakota man who remembered the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Wounded Knee Massacre. How had he found Black Elk, and why had Black Elk spoken to him? What had prepared Neihardt for that meeting? In the front of Neihardts memoir was a long list of other books he had written, none familiar to me, and I wondered what was behind them. Before long, I had so many questions I knew I was going to have to find answers.

This book is what I found.

Timothy G. Anderson

Lincoln, Nebraska