On the day of what seemed a chance meeting in 1930, the normally reclusive Black Elk declared through an interpreter: “I feel in this man beside me a strong desire to know the things of the other world. Neihardt met the great Lakota Sioux holy man Black Elk. The Nebraska State Legislature named him “Poet Laureate of Nebraska and the Plains.” 1930 Neihardt moved his family to Branson, Missouri, which remained their main home until 1947. This work is honored by many critics as among the greatest poetic achievements in the English language, and it earned Neihardt the fitting stature as “the American Homer.” 1920 Neihardt began his great epic work, A Cycle of the West (1948). They would remain together almost fifty years and have four children (Enid, Sigurd, Hilda and Alice.) 1912 In that same year he married the sculptress Mona Martinsen (who knew him only by correspondence before they decided to marry).
Neihardt made a dangerous trip by canoe down the Missouri River which he chronicled in The River and I (1910). In those years, he also published volumes of lyric poetry that established him as one of America’s most gifted young poets. Deeply impressed, he wrote widely successful short stories based on these talks. In that job he got to know many of the old “long hairs” on the Omaha reservation nearby. The family moved to Bancroft, Nebraska, where Neihardt worked for an Indian trader. 1897Īt sixteen, Neihardt graduated from Nebraska Normal College (now Wayne State) which lifted him “to a higher, creative level of being.” 1900
In later years, Neihardt remembered Wayne fondly as his “hill of vision.” For there, only eleven years old, in a fevered dream, he received his calling to become a poet. His father left the family, and they moved to Wayne, Nebraska.
The family lived in Kansas City, where, on Sunday walks with his father, encounters with the great Missouri River gave Neihardt the “first wee glimpse into the infinite” that grew into a lifelong spiritual vision. In his autobiographical book, All Is But A Beginning, Neihardt talks vividly of these early years. There at an early age he gained the visions of a vast land and its elemental powers that infused all his later life and writings. John G Neihardt lived for a year with his mother and two sisters in the sodhouse of his maternal grandfather near Stockton, Kansas. John Gneisenau Neihardt was born in a one-room cabin near Sharpsburg, Illinois.
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