O Pioneers

SLOGUM HOUSE--Mari Sandoz--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Gulla Slogum was a mean woman, even for the tough Nebraska frontier. When she got in trouble with the law because she was forcing her older sons to rustle cattle, she squeezed out of it by prostituting a pretty daughter to the sheriff. When her youngest son, Ward, fell in love with the daughter of a Polish settler, Mother Slogum fixed him up neatly: She went to the Pole, tried to buy the girl for her brothel, with the result that Ward was half killed the next time he came courting. When her daughter Annette sneaked off with a poor neighbor boy named Rene, Mother Slogum decided to teach both children a lesson, sent her brutal brother and two sons out to give Rene "a good scare." But even Mother Slogum was frightened when she heard they had castrated the boy.

In Slogum House, Mari Sandoz sets herself the gigantic task of making this unnatural mother humanly understandable, is kept from doing so by Gulla Slogum's many crimes, her lack of all familiar human characteristics except greed. An oldfashioned, 400-page chronicle, slow-moving despite its many melodramatic episodes, Slogum House is set against the same brutal Nebraska-pioneer background pictured in Mari Sandoz' Old Jules, which won the Atlantic Monthly $5,000 Non-Fiction Prize in 1935. That unsparing biography of the author's father showed how he had been hardened by years of struggle against neighbors as mean as himself, quick-shooting cattlemen, sandstorms, dishonest politicians. It made hash of sentimental pioneer legends. But it presented a far kindlier version of life on the sod-house frontier than does Slo-gum House, which shows Gulla's successful villainy still ripening in her rotten old age. Overburdened with violence to a point that occasionally touches burlesque, Slogum House is nevertheless written with power, gives a clearer picture of the wild environment than of the people who fought to make it better or the ones, like Gulla, who tried to make it worse.

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