Distrustful of Leatherstocking and of the vast body of sentimental literature of the frontier, some of us have long suspected that the true conqueror of the land was a hero as brutal as its icy winters but, at times, as picturesque as the sunflowers along its sand trails…. Romanticists have tinted the stark fact of such men, and realists have dimmed their romance, until in our present attempts to relive the life of the West we encounter either the Rousseauesque natural man, ennobled beyond all probability, or the free trapper with his ax and rifle, keeping his bare journal, too sterile, too colorless to be the true mirror of the explorer's life. The extraordinary power of [Old Jules] appears to be in conveying truth of event and scene on the frontier in the medium of a style so vital and imaginative that instead of fiction or a trader's diary we read the very minds of these pioneer men and women. (pp. 391-92)
The story of Old Jules himself is absorbing. So are the glimpses of the frontier women, as authentic as those in the untutored pages of St. John de Crèvecoeur of the eighteenth century. I think the story itself a valuable bit of Americana: how Jules Sandoz quarrelled with his father; how he came out of the East in the spring over the pale green prairie to found his home and race. Two passions moved him, to obtain a woman for his home, and to subdue the land. To fulfil the first aim he had four wives, one of whom became insane. For the latter he fought, setting out claims, developing townships, growing orchards, and, with the aid of a medical book, delivering babies. So he lived, until at the end of the road, where the signpost read FORTY MILES TO OLD JULES, he lay dying and bade farewell at the age of seventy-one to this world…. Perhaps this story is enough, but two other elements are the true gold of the book. Throughout the turmoil of Old Jules's life may be heard the deeper murmur of the nation's battle with the frontier. Familiar figures pass for a moment and are gone—a youthful doctor named Walter Reed, a young lawyer called Bryan, a hunter known as Theodore Roosevelt, and a lad, of the same surname, known as Franklin Delano. We look down over the terrible aftermath of the massacre of Wounded Knee; we hear the new railroad, and Old Jules learning to use the telephone. In brief, the march of civilization westward is the ground-tone of the book. But, most of all, we are conscious of the land, the terrible, the beautiful land, with its grass, yellow or green, its magnesia white bluffs, its haze on the horizon, its naked knolls and canyons, its silver ribbon of the Niobrara. Surely never, save perhaps in the novels of Miss Willa Cather, has the sinister enchantress, the frontier, seemed so real as in this narrative of the Swiss frontiersman Old Jules. (pp. 392-93)
Stanley T. Williams, "A Nebraska Outpost," in The Yale Review (copyright 1935 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), Vol. XXV, No. 2, December, 1935, pp. 391-93.
This is a free excerpt of 530 words. There are 535 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Sandoz, Mari (Susette) 1896–1966: Critical Essay by Stanley T. Williams Access Pass.
