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A stark truth about life on the plainsOld Jules is a fascinating look at life on the northern Great Plains and provides a great counter to the sanitized versions of America's frontier, for those of us that learned about it through media like "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bonanza" style depictions. For that, it is a great book.
But it is up to each reader to decide if Jules was a great guy who succeeded despite the tribulations and hardhip of his place and time, or if he was an abusive husband/father who fled his prior home and simply did as he pleased for the rest of his life. This is the enigma...My own opinion is that Jules was somewhat mentally unstable. His leaving Switzerland is understandable, despite the vast majority of immigrants from Europe having been from lower class families than his who had rather more limited opportunities in the 'old country'. By that I mean the West had plenty of cultured people who were attracted to the openess of the frontier (both societal and geo-physical); we just don't hear so much about them. But this story indicates he was educated and may have been a medical student, although it's left speculative. He apparently consulted frontier doctors, and performed rude medicinal and sanitary practices that don't square with what one could safely assume he ought to know if he had medical training (even for those times). Possible explanations for his lack of concern for his family never really come out, and although both author/daughter Mari Sandoz and her brother (who wrote "Son of Old Jules") later dismissed the idea that their childhoods were unusual for that place and time, they clearly were extreme.
I highly recommend the book. It begins immediately after the "Indian Wars" period but before society with its laws and structure had really taken hold. One thing I was unaware of is the prevalence of suicide in those days: it seems to have been fairly common among settlers who reached the end of their endurance (this occurs in another famous book "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. Though technically fiction, Cather's book is the same timeframe and is based on real people and events she knew as a child). There is also mention of several cases of people being sent East to asylums. They just couldn't take the hardship of their ordeals.
For me, the biggest problem in understanding Jules the man is trying to square his upbringing (young Swiss priveleged playboy/student) with what he became (a greasy old man who disdained government - despite the letters he wrote and his advocacy of the farmers versus cattlemen in the stuggle to control western Nebraska - who had minimal concern for his own family).
I wonder if some sort of movie could be made of the story. It tells a lot about the REAL frontier and its hardships, rather than the "log cabin" or "cowboy" themes we're all used to. This era is almost forgotten today. Notice that you can today buy homes modeled on log cabins, of which there are any number of restored examples - but there are almost no old sod houses left. Its almost like there's no nostalgia for that epoch of American history, which is telling by itself.
Review of "Old Jules"I found this book to be very interesting. I have ready only one other book by Mari Sandoz - but recognized many of the titles listed inside. It's a tough thing to write about your father - and capture the uniqueness. She was able to describe him and keep herself as a "bystander" when much of his disciplinary methods were directed at herself and her siblings. She was also able to give the reader a preview of what the Nebraska panhandle was like as it opened up to settlement and beyond. I have lived in the Black Hills about 30 years ago - and I could picture her descriptions of the land very well. This is a book that supplements historical accounts - a "looking glass" view into the life of one man and how he viewed his corner of that world. I especially liked the end where she listed all the people who came to his sickbed. He was a force - and the reader should decide a "force for what?"
Masterpiece of Western AmericanaThis is a book you can't put down once the first sentence leaps off the page at you. Vividly told, with accompanying pictures of the land and the people, it is one that was surely deserving of the literary honors it received upon it's first publishing. It is a story of a highly intelligent, manipulative, yet visionary man driven by many things; unrequited love which forever tormented him, an abusive inner nature that only needed the urging found on the untamed primitive Nebraska plains to emerge and effect the "control of others"; the obsession to "settle the country" and bring farms and families into a community that could survive all hardships toward a common goal. He was married six times; drove the weakest one of them into the insane asylum; and nearly drove his last and most tenacious wife to suicide during an incident where he struck her with a strand of barbed wire when she couldn't "hold a calf down firmly enough to keep it from kicking" while being worked.
It is also a history of the Valentine, Nebraska area, backed by historical facts "gleaned from the newspapers" of the times for a series of incredible events; including vigilante justice, a brush with a pleasant horse thief ("Gentleman Jim") in the hills where he was saved only by his ignorance of the circumstances; inhumane treatment of the plains indians (but amazingly, not by Jules) and persecution of his own kind by still others.
I found it amazing that Ms. Sandoz could write so objectively about her father in the effort to tell his story, but she considered it not only an honor, but a duty since he asked it of her on his deathbed; and I am sure the only reason that could be was perhaps at least partially due to the fact that Old Jules never established a bond with any of his children. They were a "product" to him; a means to accomplish a goal; a workforce. Therefore, it may have been easier for her to be brutally honest when writing of him.
Perhaps it was meant to be that way. Because the story is in a class apart and therefore, I highly recommend it to anyone seeking Western American History the "way it was" (although assuredly not all families were headed up by an Old Jules) rather than the "way it is sometimes told" in movies and other types of literature. I have a "First Edition" of this book - a priceless item, it holds a very special place in my home library since my own parents were early settlers of Wyoming.
Nebraska HistoryThis books tells of a pioneer emmigrant that survives the panhandle Nebraska, as a farmer(more his 4th wife than him), when most people thought it couldn't be done. What a great story of a man, and what he puts his family through. This is no Little House on The Prairie.
Old Jules sucks old ballsIt's a long, boring book about some old dirt farmer out in bumf&*k, Nebraska beating his wife and having kids he doesn't love. The end.
Product DescriptionFirst published in 1935, Old Jules is unquestionably Mari Sandoz's masterpiece. This portrait of her pioneer father grew out of "the silent hours of listening behind the stove or the wood box, when it was assumed, of course, that I was asleep in bed. So it was that I heard the accounts of the hunts," Sandoz recalls. "Of the fights with the cattlemen and the sheepmen, of the tragic scarcity of women, when a man had to 'marry anything that got off the train,' of the droughts, the storms, the wind and isolation. But the most impressive stories were those told me by Old Jules himself." This Bison Books edition includes a new introduction by Linda M. Hasselstrom. Mari Sandoz (1896-1966) is the noted author of Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, and The Battle of the Little Bighorn, all available in Bison Books editions. Linda M. Hasselstrom, teacher and editor, is the author of eleven books of nonfiction and poetry about the northern plains, including Between Grass and Sky and Feels Like Far: A Rancher's Life on the Great Plains.
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