Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings of Mari Sandoz

A book that will delight Miss Sandoz’s wide and admiring audience. –K. Ross Toole, History News.
Sandoz’s compressed and iron-biting style, which cuts to the bone, is well suited to clearing up the confusion between the two Sitting Bulls, confounded by legend and history; to telling of the hidden burial of Crazy Horse; and to etching, in the story ‘Peachstone Basket,’ a sardonic and unforgettable picture of small-town life in the area [northwestern Nebraska and the Dakotas] around 1920. –Library Journal. Here in one volume are Mari Sandoz’s reminiscences of life in the Sandhills country; a study of the two Sitting Bulls (the Hunkpapa and the Oglala) and other Indian pieces; a novelette, Bone Joe and the Smokin’ Woman; and nine short stories, mostly with a rural setting, including The Vine, her first to be published. Introduced by an autogiographical sketch of the author’s early years and linked by a commentary derived from her letters, articles, and interviews, the separate pieces coalesce into an illuminating picture both of the Niobrara River country and of Mari Sandoz’s emergence as a major American writer.