Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center

On the campus of Chadron State College sits the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center, dedicated to one of the most important voices the Great Plains ever produced. Mari Sandoz was born in eighteen ninety-six in the Sandhills of Nebraska, daughter of a Swiss immigrant homesteader. She grew up speaking German at home and did not learn English until she was about nine and spent her life writing with documentary rigor about the world she had witnessed firsthand.

Her biography of her father, Old Jules, published in nineteen thirty-five, won the Atlantic Monthly nonfiction prize. Her later work Cheyenne Autumn told the story of the Northern Cheyenne flight of eighteen seventy-eight with compassion that was rare for its era. The center houses her archives, manuscripts, and a recreation of her writing studio, preserving the memory of a woman who gave the High Plains its literary conscience.