A Cycle of the West

A Cycle of the West

By John G. Neihardt.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. The Song of Three Friends
   1. To Hilda
   2. Note
   3. The Song of Three Friends
      1. I: Ashley’s Hundred
      2. II: The Up-Stream Men
      3. III: To the Musselshell
      4. IV: The Net Is Cast
      5. V: The Quarrel
      6. VI: The Shooting of the Cup
      7. VII: The Third Rider
      8. VIII: Vengeance
4. The Song of Hugh Glass
   1. To Sigurd, Scarcely Three
   2. Note
   3. Introduction
   4. The Song of Hugh Glass
      1. I: Graybeard and Goldhair
      2. II: The Awakening
      3. III: The Crawl
      4. IV: The Return of the Ghost
      5. V: Jamie
5. The Song of the Indian Wars
   1. To Alice, Three Years Old
   2. Preface
   3. The Song of the Indian Wars
      1. I: The Sowing of the Dragon
      2. II: Red Cloud
      3. III: The Council on the Powder
      4. IV: Fort Phil Kearney
      5. V: Rubbed Out
      6. VI: The Wagon Boxes
      7. VII: Beecher’s Island
      8. VIII: The Yellow God
      9. IX: The Village of Crazy Horse
      10. X: The Sun Dance
      11. XI: The Seventh Marches
      12. XII: High Noon on the Little Horn
      13. XIII: The Twilight
      14. XIV: The Death of Crazy Horse
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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The Song of Three Friends

To Hilda

Οιον το γλυκύμαλον ερεύθεται άκρω επ’ ύσδω άκρον επ’ ακροτάτω: λελάθοντο δε μαλοδρόπηες, ου μαν εκλελαθοντ’, αλλ’ ούκ εδύναντ’ επίκεσθαι.

Note

The following narrative, though complete in itself, is designed to be the first piece in a cycle of poems dealing with the fur trade period of the Trans-Missouri region. The Song of Hugh Glass, which was published in the fall of 1915, is the second in the series.

The four decades during which the fur trade flourished west of the Missouri River may be regarded as a typical heroic period, differing in no essential from the many other great heroic periods that have made glorious the story of the Aryan migration. Jane Harrison says that heroic characters do not arise from any peculiarity of race or even of geographical surroundings; but that, given certain social conditions, they may and do appear anywhere and at any time. The heroic spirit, as seen in heroic poetry, we are told, is the outcome of a society cut loose from its roots, of a time of migrations, of the shifting of populations. Such conditions are to be found during the time of the Spanish conquests of Central and South America; and they are to be found also in those wonderful years of our own West, when wandering bands of trappers were exploring the rivers and the mountains and the plains and the deserts from the British possessions to Mexico, and from the Missouri to the Pacific.

As a result of our individualistic tendencies, our numerous jostling nationalities, and our materialistic temper, we Americans are prone to regard the Past as being separated from us as by an insurmountable wall. We lack the sense of racial continuity. For us it is almost as though the world began yesterday morning; and too much of our contemporary literature is based upon that view. The affairs of antiquity seem to the generality of us to be as remote as the dimmest star, and as little related to our activities. But what we call the slow lapse of ages is really only the blinking of an eye. Sometimes this sense of the close unity of all time and all human experience has come upon me so strongly that I have felt, for an intense moment, how just a little hurry on my part might get me there in time to hear Aeschylus training a Chorus, or to see the wizard chisel still busy with the Parthenon frieze, or to hear Socrates telling his dreams to his judges. It is in some such mood that I approach that body of precious saga-stuff which I have called the Western American Epos; and I see it, not as a thing in itself, but rather as one phase of the whole race life from the beginning; indeed, the final link in that long chain of heroic periods stretching from the region of the Euphrates eastward into India and westward to our own Pacific Coast.

Like causes produce like effects; and as we follow the Aryan migration, we find that, over and over again, heroic periods occur; and out of each period have grown epic and saga, celebrating the deeds of the heroes. In India we find the Mahabharata and Ramayana; in Persia, the Shah Nameh; among the Greeks, the Homeric poems; in Rome, the Aeneid; in Germany, the Niebelungenlied; in France, the Chanson de Roland;