When the Tree Flowered: The Fictional Autobiography of Eagle Voice, A Sioux Indian, like Black Elk Speaks resulted from John G. Neihardt's interviews with Sioux Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation. While visiting the reservation in 1944, Neihardt interviewed many different members of the tribe in an effort to gather information for a cultural history. Among those he interviewed was Eagle Elk, whose life became the basis for When the Tree Flowered. The interviews with Eagle Elk, rather than providing the basis for a cultural history, led to the composition of a collection of stories about Sioux life held together by the character of Eagle Voice and his life.

Neihardt began writing this poetic narrative, as it has been called, while living in Branson, Missouri, in the late 1940s. In writing the story of Eagle Elk, as when writing A Cycle of the West, once Neihardt put the words on paper, he did not revise his work. He felt that revision damaged the unity of the story. Upon it's completion in 1950, the book was a success, selling 15,000 copies before it's publication and going into a second printing the following year.

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	"This is a scholarly work, told with great care and simiplicity, but it is no dull history. Its pages bring to life the cruelty and kindness, the wisdom and the folk-lore of a people who were forced away from their way of life by the invading white man, and driven to savage revenge by the unjust rulings of the greedy, gold-hunting pioneers."

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Neihardt Exhibit