John Neihardt's reputation rests on five historical epics begun in 1912, completed in 1941, and collected in the 656-page volume, A Cycle of the West (1949). The heroes are the white trappers who opened the Rocky Mountains to fur trading, the explorers who pushed overland to California, and the Indian populations decimated by white settlement on the plains of Montana and Wyoming. Neihardt used historical situations to explore archetypal human passions such as loyalty and betrayal, love and lust, courage and cowardice, pride in cultural values, and the will to survive. Each hero is tested in a crisis whose outcome has profound moral consequences, revealing human compassion and fortitude, or betraying bestial self-interest. The often powerful epics avoid narrow didacticism, but their aesthetic values remain firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century modes of thought. While this trait ensured Neihardt an early and apparently lasting popularity in the Midwest, it raises problems about his place in the relativistic sophistications of twentieth-century literature.
