John Neihardt didn’t stand out among the crowd gathered at Union Station in Omaha on Nov.

28, 1908. Finely built – slightly more than 5 feet tall with a shock of thick, wavy hair – the man from Bancroft peered down the tracks watching for train No. 112 from New York.

Aboard was a woman he had never met, with whom he had been corresponding with for six months and hoped to marry. Inside his coat pocket was a marriage license.

The refined woman arriving on the train – Mona Martinsen – was introduced to Neihardt through his poetry, fell in love with him through his lyrical letters and agreed to his marriage proposal without having met him. After reading A Bundle of Myrrh, Neihardt’s first published collection of poetry, Martinsen – a trained sculptor – found herself smitten with the writer from the Plains. Already in love, they married the next day.

John Neihardt’s long love of the written word began at age 12 while living in Wayne. The boy was bedridden and burning with fever when he experienced a vivid dream. In the vision he felt the presence of a “spirit brother” encouraging him to take a leap of faith. Neihardt took that literary leap months later when he penned his first poem. He would be a grown man of nearly 50 before he would meet his spirit brother, Lakota shaman Nicholas Black Elk. The narrated autobiography of the holy man, Black Elk Speaks, became Neihardt’s definitive work.

Neihardt published 21 books and collections of short stories and poems during his lifetime. In 1921, the Nebraska Legislature designated him as Poet Laureate of Nebraska, a perpetual title still attached to Neihardt nearly five decades after his death.

Neihardt graduated from Wayne Normal College, known now as Wayne State College, at the age of 15. Legally too young to teach in Nebraska, Neihardt continued his education and earned a bachelor’s degree the following year. He earned his tuition by ringing the school’s bell between classes. 

Student became teacher when Neihardt began teaching at a rural Wayne County school for $1 a day. Still a child himself in terms of age, he exercised complete control of his classroom.

“He was a wrestler and fighter,” said Randy Lukasiewicz, longtime member of the Neihardt Foundation board of directors. “When he was teaching, if kids were rabblerousing, he challenged them.”

Neihardt once said he “would let them (the male students) come at me, one at a time. Then I would knock the stuffing out of them. They had run the last teacher out of the county. I knew I could teach them if I could make them know I wouldn’t be run out. So, I just licked them the first day of school, and that got their attention.”

He inherited his appreciation of words from his father, Nicholas. On Jan. 8, 1881, the elder Neihardt named his newborn son John Greenleaf Neihardt, after the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Neihardt later distanced himself from the poet by adopting the middle name, Gneisenau, associated with a military figure who helped defeat Napoleon.

Young John and his sisters, Lulu and Grace, lived with their mother, Alice, and her parents in a sod house in Kansas after Nicholas abandoned the family. They later relocated to Nebraska - to Wayne and then to Bancroft, a railroad town of around 750 people at the edge of the Omaha Indian Reservation in Northeast Nebraska.

“Losing his father from his life at the age of 10 was a terrible blow for young Neihardt, and I think he searched for father figures the rest of his life,” said Tim Anderson, author of Lonesome Dreamer, The Life of John G. Neihardt.

After John and Mona married, they lived in Bancroft where she learned to cook and tend house, while continuing to sculpt and serve as her husband’s literary critic. The adventurous newlyweds were known to escape the heat of Nebraska summer days by skinny-dipping together in nearby Logan Creek.

News of the couple’s shirtless shenanigans became known around Bancroft, and on one occasion a boy hid in a nearby tree hoping to catch a glimpse. When Neihardt spied the boy, he invited the embarrassed youngster to join them, which he did. Some years later when telling the story, the boy, then an old man, said “they might at least have worn bathing suits.”

Neihardt dived into writing as owner and editor of The Bancroft Blade newspaper while simultaneously working as a reporter for the Omaha Daily News. The man who would become one of Nebraska’s most respected writers was fired from his big city gig after editors discovered he was more interested in learning the stories of the people he met than getting the scoop on a news story. That genuine curiosity earned Neihardt the trust of the local members of the Omaha Tribe. He learned their stories, traditions and way of life after being invited into their lodges, a rare honor for a white man at the time.

“He wrote an early poem during his first years in Bancroft, in which he wandered in nature on a Sunday morning musing about how he found God outside, in the trees and plants and so on, rather than inside a building,” Anderson said. “He always believed there was something larger at work than what we encounter in our daily lives, and when he began to learn about Omaha and Lakota concepts of religion, I think they meshed with some of his own thoughts.”

That respect for Native Americans and his curiosity about the settling of the West inspired Neihardt to write two of the books for which he is best known today – Black Elk Speaks and The Cycle of the West, the latter being an epic poem that took him nearly 30 years to complete. The book includes five narrative poems about mountain men, explorers and Native Americans. The last poem, Song of the Messiah, led Neihardt to Nicholas Black Elk. The Lakota spiritual leader witnessed the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was a second cousin to Crazy Horse and also had experienced vision dreams as a boy.

Neihardt met Black Elk in 1930 while researching the Ghost Dance movement, which culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on Dec. 29, 1890. The movement was a notion among some Indians that they had angered their gods by abandoning their beliefs. By practicing the dance and rejecting the white man’s ways, the gods would create a new world.

With his son, Sigurd, Neihardt traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation in search of an old medicine man who could lend insight into spiritual significance of the movement. According to Neihardt’s interpreter, the elder Lakota had rebuffed a curious writer earlier that day. When Neihardt arrived unannounced, it seemed as if Black Elk was expecting him. The men talked all day.

“What I know was given to me for men and it is true and it is beautiful. Soon I shall be under the grass and it will be lost,” Black Elk said to Neihardt. “You were sent to save it, and you must come back so that I can teach you.”

Neihardt returned the following spring with his daughters Enid and Hilda. Black Elk’s son, Ben, served as interpreter. Enid recorded on paper the conversations that lasted from after breakfast until late at night. Those conversations chronicling Black Elk’s life story, the history of his people and his “Great Vision,” became the book Neihardt is known for.

“Black Elk Speaks … has probably done more than any other book to bring us to a new understanding of Indians,” said Neihardt biographer Lucile Aly. “In Song of the Indian Wars, they are fearsome fighters in their tossing war bonnets, but they are also men fighting for the same ends as white man.”

Even prior to writing Black Elk Speaks, Neihardt had published enough notable work – including portions of what would become A Cycle of the West – to prompt the Nebraska Legislature to name him in 1921 as the state’s first ever Poet Laureate.

“There’s a reason he was named Poet Laureate in perpetuity. He recorded stories of the region and was a popular poet nationwide,” said Matt Mason, appointed in 2019 to a five-year term as Nebraska State Poet. As Poet Laureate, Neihardt was expected to “to represent poetry for the state, cheerlead for the other poets there.”

Cheerleading doesn’t necessarily include writing poems about football stadiums, as was requested of Neihardt by University of Nebraska Chancellor Samuel Avery. Memorial Stadium in Lincoln was built in 1923, and the chancellor wanted a poem to recognize the accomplishment. Uninspired by the topic, Neihardt refused, saying he was too busy.

Unfortunately, the title of poet laureate did not come with a healthy stipend from the state. To supplement his income from the sale of books and speaking engagements, Neihardt also worked as a literary critic, columnist, professor and even a camp counselor to earn money to support his family, which eventually included four children. He worked hard to avoid being a starving artist, but a story has fluttered around Bancroft for years claiming that Neihardt was a chicken thief. Fans believe the tale could be folklore or simply refer to a boyish prank from his youth.

In addition to his literary endeavors, Neihardt also loved the outdoors and physical activity. He took boxing and martial arts lessons. His daughter, Hilda, once told of how he raced his horse across the prairie with her “hanging on tight to keep from sliding off.”  She also said her father could raise his own weight – around 125 pounds – over his head with one hand.

And he enjoyed hoisting a cold beer, too – especially Coors – which wasn’t available in Nebraska until the 1980s. To indulge his tastes, Neihardt persuaded friends traveling from Colorado to bring back a case or two, said Ron Hull, a senior advisor with Nebraska Educational Telecommunications.

Hull met Neihardt in the 1960s and arranged to have the poet record programs for broadcast on the network. Hull remembers recording several segments in one day, and how between tapings Neihardt would suggest they go to a local bar for a beer. Years later, when his friend was hospitalized in Lincoln, Hull smuggled a beer into Neihardt’s room.

Neihardt’s frequent appearances on NET renewed Nebraskans’ interest in his work. Television host and comedian Dick Cavett, also from Nebraska, helped elevate Neihardt nationally by interviewing the poet on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972. After that appearance, copies of Black Elk Speaks flew off the shelf, Hull said. The book remains in print by the University of Nebraska Press.

Today, Neihardt’s life and work are honored at the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site in Bancroft. The attraction, an affiliate of History Nebraska operated by the John G. Neihardt Foundation and located near his former home, includes the small study where Neihardt wrote some of his epic works. Soon, writers seeking inspiration can use the one-room cabin in exchange for leaving a piece of writing behind.  

Modeled after Black Elk’s vision, the site’s hoop garden symbolizes the vastness of the universe. The visitor center museum that displays artifacts from Neihardt’s life also is built in a circular fashion.

Near the entrance, life-size bronze sculptures of Neihardt and Black Elk, by Nebraska artist Herb Mignery, capture the meeting where Black Elk revealed his life story to the white man from Nebraska. The Neihardt Spring Conference takes place here in April and Neihardt Day is in August. The Neihardt Beer and Limerick Festival celebrates writing while raising a glass to the writer from Bancroft.   

Neihardt’s life changed dramatically on April 17, 1958, when his beloved Mona died of injuries suffered in a car accident. For 50 years, they had what Neihardt called an “untroubled comradeship.” He once said his A Cycle of the West would not have happened without her. After her death, Neihardt continued to write, teach and make public appearances. He died Nov. 3, 1973, at his daughter’s house near Columbia, Missouri. A bust of the poet sculpted by his wife stands on a pedestal in the Nebraska State Capitol’s Nebraska Hall of Fame in Lincoln.

On the couple’s sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, daughters Hilda and Alice scattered their parents’ ashes from an airplane flying over a bend in the Missouri River. Afterwards, Hilda told Hull that the wind picked up the particles, took them up in the air and how the sun hit them like sparkling diamonds falling back in the river.

For Nebraska’s perpetual poet, it was just one more story to be told, one more vivid vision.

“Death cannot rob me of my life,” Neihardt once said. “I’ve already lived it. Oh, how I’ve lived it. I look forward to it as my last great adventure.”