Beneath his poems lay a lifelong devotion to magic, divination, and a visionary system that shaped his most prophetic work.

What roiled the mind of Nebraska poet John Neihardt with whom Black Elk, the iconic Lakota holy man, shared his story?

Published in 1923, The Prophet became a perpetual best-seller, birthed a genre, and marked the poet as retrograde, sentimental, and florid.