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“How Badly Can Cattle And Land Sales Suffer From This?” Drought And Cattle Sickness On The Ja Ranch, 1910–1918, Matthew M. Day

Great Plains Quarterly

Timothy Dwight Hobart, general manager of the JA Ranch in northwestern Texas, had a problem on his hands. Trying to sell his cattle in 1918, he had helped transport hundreds of head of cattle within the ranch. However, J. W. Kent, who was with the JA Ranch for a substantial portion of its history to date, noticed that the cattle were not feeling well. Anthrax had poisoned the cattle, and it was spreading quickly. “We are burning the carcasses,” Hobart wrote, “and not leaving a stone unturned to stamp out the disease.” What was he to do?

In this study …

Immigration To The Great Plains, 1865-1914 War, Politics, Technology, And Economic Development, Bruce Garver

Great Plains Quarterly

The advent and vast extent of immigration to the Great Plains states during the years 1865 to 1914 is perhaps best understood in light of the new international context that emerged during the 1860s in the aftermath of six large wars whose consequences included the enlargement of civil liberties, an acceleration of economic growth and technological innovation, the expansion of world markets, and the advent of mass immigration to the United States from east-central and southern Europe.1 Facilitating all of these changes was the achievement of widespread literacy through universal, free, compulsory, and state-funded elementary education in the United States, …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored Immigrants In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Renee M. Laegreid

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's move to Nebraska as a child, the people she met there, and the seemingly endless prairie around her captured her imagination and became the inspiration for her novel O Pioneers! In this work, Cather introduces her readers to the diversity of immigrants who settled in the area around her home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather's novel represents the age-old appeal of the West-hope, optimism, mystery-as well as the Janus-face dilemma of acculturation: the longing to partake in all that the new land has to offer and the reluctance to give up a rich and comforting cultural heritage.

While …

Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala

Great Plains Quarterly

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning factor" of American experience, and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dramatizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American …

"The Boy's Mother" Nineteenth-Century Drug Dependence In The Life Of Kate M. Cleary, Susanne George Bloomfield

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning at age fourteen, Kate McPhelim Cleary published voluminously in turn-of-the century American periodicals and newspapers. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she was born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1863. Her father died when she was young, and her mother moved the family back to Ireland for a short time before immigrating to Philadelphia. In 1880 the McPhelim family-Kate, her mother Margaret, and her two brothers-relocated to Chicago where they supported themselves by writing. There, Kate McPhelim met and married Michael Cleary. In 1884 the newlyweds, along with Kate's mother, moved to recently established Hubbell, Nebraska, where they lived for …

Margaret Laurence's ''Album'' Songs Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings, Wes Mantooth

Great Plains Quarterly

While Margaret Laurence's artistic legacy rests primarily, and rightly so, on her output of novels, her memoirs and published letters reveal tantalizing glimpses into a much less known, and yet not unrelated, aspect of her artistic interests-a lifelong passion for music, which included a desire to explore song-writing as a creative outlet. Drawing on these memoirs and letters, along with my own primary research, I have tried to sketch a portrait of Laurence's musical life, with a particular focus on how her musical interests coalesced in The Diviners' "Album"-four songs included in the text of The Diviners, compiled …

Index

Great Plains Quarterly

Index 279-286 (8 pages)

The Farm Policy Debate Of 1949-50: Plains State Reaction To The Brannan Plan, Virgil W. Dean

Great Plains Quarterly

A storm of controversy arose in April 1949 when Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan unveiled the Truman administration's postwar policy for agriculture. The most controversial aspect of the so-called Brannan plan was its production payments feature, a direct, undisguised farm subsidy designed to bring relief to producers and consumers alike. Other aspects of the complex plan also elicited both praise and blame, but disagreements during this fractious time were not limited to farm questions. In a year of apparent victories for the world's communist monolith, spy trials, and labor unrest, discussions of farm policy on the Great Plains and …

The Mystery Of Francis Jeffrey Dickens, N.W.M.P., And Eric Nicol's Dickens Of The Mounted, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly

Almost from its inception in 1873, but certainly since its "Great March" west during the summer of 1874 across "the Great Lone Land" of the Plains that had been the Hudson's Bay Company's domain only a few years before, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has been among the world's most famous corporate entities; it is, perhaps, the most famous police force. ² Its reputation is rooted in the very real heroism of its early years and the high standards of excellent service it has had since then; but the mythic quality of that reputation-as a cadre of judicious superheroes-has been …

"The Greatest Thing I Ever Did Was Join The Union": A History Of The Dakota Teamsters During The Depression, Jonathan F. Wagner

Great Plains Quarterly

During the Great Depression the Dakota Teamsters established themselves as the most important union on the northern Plains. ¹ Their success involved struggle and sacrifice, with a full complement of setbacks and losses as well as advances and gains. From the 1930s on, the union has reflected certain of the general characteristics of the parent body, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America. Like the International, the Dakota Teamsters was always basically a truck drivers' union, but also something more. As with the International, the concept of jurisdiction was elastic. "In our teamsters union," the Minot, …

The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I, Sylvia Lea Sallquist

Great Plains Quarterly

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given …

Citizens And Strangers: Geographic Mobility In The Sioux City Region, 1860--1900, William Silag

Great Plains Quarterly

An American literary and scholarly tradition upholds the Midwestern town as a bastion of social stability. In novels by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and a host of nineteenth century authors, comforting images of small town tranquility provide sharp contrast to scenes of urban turmoil in the age of industrialism. Even the town's critics, from Edgar Watson Howe to Sherwood Anderson, pay tribute to popular views of small-town folk as more sedentary and self-contented than the ambitious urbanites who crowded the streets of nineteenth-century New York and Boston and Chicago. These images were not restricted to works of fiction. America's …

The Immigrant Church As A Symbol Of Community And Place In The Upper Midwest, Robert C. Ostergren

Great Plains Quarterly

There can be little doubt that the church as an institution played a major role in the organization and development of community on nineteenth-century American frontiers, especially in the Middle West. Zealous missionary activity was characteristic of American Protestantism in the nineteenth century, and a good portion of that effort was expended on midwestern frontier populations. Thus the region emerged as a locus of fierce competition between the established American denominations. In addition, the Midwest was fertile ground for the establishment of new denominations. Many who settled the region were immigrants who came directly from Europe. Their uprooting severed ties …