American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading The West By Marcia Meredith Hensley, Sandra Schackel

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the republication of Letters of a Woman Homesteader in 1982, Elinore Pruitt Stewart's descriptions of homesteading near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, have served as a model for the single woman's homesteading experience. Although Pruitt held her homestead for barely a week before marrying her employer Clyde Stewart, her letters shaped our notions of the homestead experience in the early twentieth century. Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West, a collection of twentieth-century homesteading accounts, many of them in the Great Plains region, greatly expands this genre.

A newcomer to Wyoming in 1983, author Marcia Meredith Hensley recognized that neither …

Review Of Youth And The Bright Medusa By Willa Cather, Mark A. Robison

Great Plains Quarterly

The Great Plains launched Willa Cather's career. Her multilayered imagining of frontier folk in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) placed the region-and the noveliston the literary map. In 1920, Youth and the Bright Medusa combined recent urban stories" Coming, Aphrodite!," "The Diamond Mine," ''A Gold Slipper," "Scandal"-with four stories from 1905's Troll Garden anthology-"Paul's Case," "A Wagner Matinee," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "'A Death in the Desert.'" Youth and the Bright Medusa explores dilemmas arising from pursuit of the shining Medusa of art. Can pure art reconcile with commercial acceptance? Will a singer survive her parasitic entourage? Who …

Review Of Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade Of James Henry Lane By Bryce Benedict, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly

While this book contains a good deal of useful information, both its research and approach are flawed. The presentation is often tedious, freighted as it is with undigested detail.

The major question must be why so much detail of the military action of the so-called Lane Brigade (the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Kansas Volunteer Regiments) is significant when the personality and background of Lane himself is mostly left out. Benedict opens with a disclaimer that his book is not a biography of Lane, and includes "only the most cursory background information." The reader is referred for Lane's biography to a …

Review Of Anthology Of New Perspectives Edited By John R. Wunder And Kurt E. Kinbacher, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly

This book grew out of the ninth biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference on North American Studies hosted by the Renvall Institute at the University of Helsinki in 2002. It thus includes significant coverage of Canadian as well as American Indian history and several comparative studies of Canadian and American tribes. It is also wide ranging in terms of disciplines, including historical, anthropological, and literary studies.

Of the volume's seventeen articles, nine are authored by scholars either trained in or currently teaching at Finnish and Canadian institutions, thereby contributing an international flavor to the collection. The complexities of Metis identity …

Review Of Regionalism And The Humanities Edited And With An Introduction By Timothy R. Mahoney And Wendy J. Katz, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Emerging out of a 2003 conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, organized by the Consortium of Regional Humanities Centers, the sixteen disparate essays included in this engaging volume, ably edited and introduced by Timothy Mahoney and Wendy Katz, testify to the catholicity and vitality of the "new regionalism" in American studies. They both illustrate and justify what has been labeled by some the "local turn" in humanities scholarship. Because of the location of the conference on the border between the Midwest and the Great Plains, half of these essays focus upon those two regions. Each author assumes that place matters-that in addition …

Review Of Music Of The First Nations: Tradition And Innovation In Native North America Edited By Tara Browner, Anna Hoefnagels

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of nine essays examines diverse traditions and issues in contemporary Native American music from a variety of perspectives. The anthology also covers a wide geographic span, ranging from the Inuits of northern Canada to the Choctaws of Mississippi, and the Passamaquoddies of New Brunswick in eastern Canada to the Coast Salish of western Washington. Many of these chapters highlight the movement of Aboriginal people and their music, as well as the transformations and retentions that characterized these movements and interactions with other Aboriginal groups and European settlers. An article addressing intertribal powwow music and another on country music …

Review Of William Wayne Red Hat, Jr.: Cheyenne Keeper Of The Arrows By William Wayne Red Hat, Jr., Christina Gish Hall

Great Plains Quarterly

In an attempt to add a Cheyenne voice to the voluminous literature published about this Great Plains Indian nation, Sibylle M. Schlesier has come together with William Wayne Red Hat, Jr. to produce a text that transcribes this Cheyenne Arrow Keeper's multiple personal narratives, ranging in topics from his experiences in Vietnam to his religious role in his community to ruminations on Cheyenne history, culture, and oral tradition. As the daughter of anthropologist Karl Schlesier, Schlesier was in a unique position to collaborate with Red Hat, Jr., having known the Red Hat family from childhood. Since Red Hat, Jr. was …

Review Of Frontier Medicine: From The Atlantic To The Pacific, 1492-1941 By David Dary, Joshua Dolezal

Great Plains Quarterly

This survey of medicine in the U.S. from European contact to World War II rambles from generalities to anecdotes in a manner much like the cowboy Dary describes in his preface, who "started up one canyon and came out another." While the premise of the book might seem self-evident (that the practice of "frontier medicine" began long before the Oregon Trail), it offers little insight into the idea of the frontier, omitting Turner's Frontier Thesis entirely, and relies more on chronology than context for its narrative. For these reasons, Frontier Medicine will be more useful to casual readers than …

Review Of Braiding Histories: Learning From Aboriginal Peoples' Experiences And Perspectives By Susan Dion, Lynne Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

In its final report in 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed that Canadians have little knowledge of Aboriginal people, the issues of importance to them, and the history that underlies Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relationships today. How can this be changed? In Braiding Histories, Susan Dion takes up the complexities of transforming the consciousness of non-Aboriginal people through education.

The book is organized around three focal points. First, the author and her brother Michael Dion {re)write and {re}tell the life stories of several Aboriginal people, including Beothuk survivor Shanawdithit, the Plains Cree leader Mistahimaskwa, and the writers' mother, Audrey Dion, …

Review Of An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs By Allan Blakeney, John C. Courtney

Great Plains Quarterly

As NDP premier of his adopted province for eleven years, Allan Blakeney was one of the main combatants in the federal-provincial turf wars of the 1970s and early 1980s over resource development and taxation and the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Before entering active politics he spent a decade as a public servant in Saskatchewan. For four years he served as a cabinet minister responsible for, successively, three key departments (education, finance, and health), and seven years on the opposition benches (one as leader of the opposition). By the time he left active politics in 1988, Blakeney had devoted thirty-eight …

Review Of Survivance: Narratives Of Native Presence Edited By Gerald Vizenor, Lisa Cole

Great Plains Quarterly

Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance, first introduced in Manifest Manners (1994), articulates a means of conceiving new expressions of Native life, free from the simulated "Indian," thereby highlighting the cultural value of precontact history. In this anthology, eighteen scholars variously acknowledge Vizenor's contribution of survivance to literary analysis and the wide-ranging applications of his insights to contexts such as language, race, and culture.

Vizenor functions as both a contributor to and editor for this volume. His organization of the chapters is particularly noteworthy in the intricate ways each one relates to those in close proximity. Thus, he enters into …

Review Of Outside Looking In: Viewing First Nations Peoples In Canadian Dramatic Television Series By Mary Jane Miller, Doris Baltruschat

Great Plains Quarterly

Mary Jane Miller sets out to answer the question "What are the stories that we tell and show to ourselves about Aboriginal peoples?" The strength of her book lies in its breadthin particular, the timeframe she chose, spanning the past fifty years, for investigating the portrayal of Aboriginal peoples on Canadian television. As a result, she provides a comprehensive overview of dramatic children and adult series, from Radisson to Forest Rangers and The Beachcombers, describing characters, themes, and topics in great detail. Her key point is that these series have mostly been produced from the "outside looking in." In …

Scandal On The Plains: William F. Slocum, Edward S. Parsons, And The Colorado College Controversies, Joe P. Dunn

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a story about a scandal that took place on the western frontier, a sexual harassment crisis involving one of giants of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century education and the disgraceful treatment of the man who pursued the case. The treatment of the two related incidents in the several official histories of the institution constitutes a travesty that one is tempted to call "scandalous." The physical place of this saga is important because the original events transpired within a burgeoning frontier community and at a young western institution that was successfully carving out its place in the national academic scene. …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30/ Number 3 / Summer 2010 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

"Picturing The Past" Farm Women On The Grasslands Frontier, 1850-1900, Sara Brooks Sundberg

Great Plains Quarterly

According to a widely used, recently published college survey text about westward expansion in the United States, "rural life in the great open spaces of the trans-Mississippi west was filled with hard work, monotony, and often stultifying isolation." The textbook goes on to say, "Nowhere were the physical hardships more starkly revealed than in the lives of pioneer women." The authors emphasize this point with a passage from Hamlin Garland's autobiography describing his family's pioneer experience on the prairie: '''My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward my …

Bringing The War Home The Patriotic Imagination In Saskatoon, 1939-1942, Brendan Kelly

Great Plains Quarterly

In The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War, noted historian Gerald D. Nash argued that the war, more than any other event in the West's history, completely altered that region.1 There is as yet no equivalent of Nash's fine study for the Great Plains north of the forty-ninth parallel, or what Canadians call the "prairies."² This gap notwithstanding, historians of western Canada have begun to explore at least one key aspect of Nash's research: the war's impact on cities. Since 1995 there have been three histories of urban centers in wartime: Red Deer (Alberta), Lethbridge …

Review Of Broken Treaties: United States And Canadian Relations With The Lakotas And The Plains Cree, 1868-1885 By Jill St. Germain, Laura Woodworth-Ney

Great Plains Quarterly

What appears to be another book exploring the broken treaty relationships of the United States and Canadian federal governments turns out to be nothing of the sort. In challenging the long-honored "broken treaties tradition," Jill St. Germain has written a groundbreaking and welcome revision of the history of treaty and reservation-making on both sides of the United States-Canadian border.

Using a fresh, comparative approach to the analysis of federal records and the manuscript collections of federal Indian agents and officials, St. Germain focuses on the implementation of the Treaty of 1868 between the United States and the Lakota Sioux, and …

Review Of Savages And Scoundrels: The Untold Story Of America's Road To Empire Through Indian Territory By Paul Vandevelder, Robert J. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Paul VanDevelder has written a lively and fast-paced account of some of the major examples of the United States' acquisition of American Indian lands and assets. He focuses largely, though, on the Northern Plains, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and the modernday example of the taking of tribal lands via the Pick-Sloan Garrison Dam project. He depicts graphically the destruction the dam and its reservoir have brought to the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota and the inundation of some of the richest farmland in America. In fact, he shows that ninety-two percent of the land taken to control …

Review Of Warriors In Uniform: The Legacy Of American Indian Heroism By Herman J. Viola, Janne Lahti

Great Plains Quarterly

This book celebrates the military contributions of American Indians in United States wars. It is a fluently written, although mainly descriptive, overview of American Indian participation stretching from the American Revolution to the present War on Terrorism. Visually, everything is stunning; the illustrations are numerous and impressive. At the beginning the narrative sufficiently describes some of the main events of various conflicts and Native participation, but as the book progresses closer to the present day the often very interesting personal stories of American Indian soldiers take much more space, so much that they seem to leave too little room for …

Review Of Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating The Journals Of Lewis And Clark: The Complete Collection By Charles Fritz, Rock Hushka

Great Plains Quarterly

The traditional Lewis and Clark buff will find much enjoyment in Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating the Journals of Lewis and Clark: The Complete Collection. Fritz's delineation gives accurate impressions of the majesty of diverse topographies, ranging from the low-slung prairies of Nebraska to the rugged mountain chains at the Great Divide. His depictions of the North Dakota winter convey the special quality of light produced only by the frigid stillness of the High Plains. Fritz has an extraordinary ability to paint water, from the slow grace of the Missouri River to the thundering falls on the Columbia to …

Review Of Death Of A Gunfighter: The Quest For Jack Slade, The West's Most Elusive Legend By Dan Rottenberg, J. Randolph Cox

Great Plains Quarterly

Freight teamster and wagon master along the Overland Trail, stagecoach driver in Texas, as well as stagecoach division superintendent along the Central Overland route, Joseph Alfred "Jack" Slade (1831-1864) is remembered for having helped launch and operate the Pony Express in 1860-61. He is also remembered as a gunfighter and the "Law West of Kearney." The legends about him (including those in Mark Twain's Roughing It and Prentiss Ingraham's dime novels about Buffalo Bill) are largely false, but the truth has been difficult to establish.

Dan Rottenberg was faced with three challenges in writing this book, the first to deal …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder And Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, And Culture By John E. Miller, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly

In his third book on Laura Ingalls Wilder, John E. Miller presents another fascinating study of this most cherished writer and her times. Miller weighs in on a number of the continuing controversies surrounding Wilder's books, foremost among them the question of how the Little House books were authored. He also enters into the continuing debate on the racial politics of Wilder's writing, especially in Little House on the Prairie, that has become the focus of many newer studies of Wilder's work. Miller presents Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane as products of their respective times, showing how during …

Review Of Mennonite Women In Canada: A History By Marlene Epp, Katherine Jellison

Great Plains Quarterly

Marlene Epp's overview of two hundred years of Mennonite women's history in Canada focuses largely on the two major sites of Mennonite settlement-Ontario and the Great Plains of Manitoba. Her discussion of the Manitoba settlers-so-called "Russian Mennonites" whose Germanic ancestors migrated to Russia in the early nineteenth century-encompasses their history from the group's arrival on the Plains in the 1870s to the present. Her study provides a wealth of material for historians of Great Plains women, immigrants, and religious minorities.

Review Of Modern American Indian Leaders: Their Lives And Their Works 2 Vols. By Dean Chavers, Deborah Welch

Great Plains Quarterly

This two-volume set contains eighty-seven biographical sketches of notable Indian men and women drawn almost exclusively from the last half of the twentieth century. The author (Dean Chavers is director of Catching the Dream, an American Indian scholarship program) categorizes his subjects into eight leadership sections-Tribal, War, Sports, Literary, Education, Movement, Religious, and Other. Each division includes familiar names: Phillip Martin and Wilma Mankiller (tribal leaders), Ira Hayes (war), Jim Thorpe (sports), N. Scott Momaday {literary), Beatrice Medicine (education), Dennis Banks (movement), and Leon Shenandoah (religious), among others. Roughly half of the biographies focus on lesser-known leaders, many of whose …

"This Must Have Been A Grand Sight": George Bent And The Battle Of Platte Bridge, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly

The Battle of Platte Bridge, July 26, 1865, is a noteworthy event in the annals of the American Indian Wars. An alliance of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapahoe, numbering in excess of 2,000 warriors, traveled three days to a specific military objective, an undertaking unusual both in terms of its magnitude and its level of organization. The battle is also of interest because we have a detailed description of the event written from the Native American viewpoint. This description comes in the form of a number of letters written to George Hyde by Southern Cheyenne George Bent. George Bent, son of …

Review Of Forts Of The Northern Plains: Guide To Historic Military Posts Of The Plains Indians Wars By Jeff Barnes, Barton H. Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly

Jeff Barnes's book presents brief histories and the historical importance of about fifty military forts in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming. Only sites that played roles in the "Indian Wars" of the West, roughly from 1820 to 1890, are included. Each entry describes the post and its significance, and offers good suggestions for further reading. Barnes also provides a sidebar offering directions to each site, its hours of operation, admission costs, special events, and available amenities to help visitors plan their trips.

Barnes offers updated information on posts that have been treated in a number …

Review Of Sitting Bull By Bill Yenne, Carole A. Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly

Yenne's Sitting Bull is not so much a biography as it is a panorama of Northern Plains history from the time of Sitting Bull's birth, about 1831, to a period beyond his death in 1890. In this telling, Sitting Bull becomes the dominant figure in a history seeking to explain and analyze the great clash of cultures, lifeways, and worldviews that took place in the nineteenth-century American West. Yenne views Sitting Bull as an enigma, and by sifting through the "flickering amalgam of images" he seeks to present the reader with a portrait of a "great man ... but also …

Review Of Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning The American West Edited And With An Introduction By Shirley A. Leckie And Nancy J. Parezo, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly

Pioneering women ethnohistorians and anthropologists who studied American Indians and the trans-Mississippi West deserve greater recognition, not only for the important information they gathered but also for their theoretical insights and methodological advances. As we learn about these women's lives and scholarly contributions, we also come to understand the barriers and prejudices they dealt with in order to pursue the work they valued. This is the argument of Shirley Leckie and Nancy Parezo's collection of intellectual biographies of ten women, born between 1873 and 1910, whose active research careers spanned most of the twentieth century. Their Own Frontier extends the …

Review Of War Of A Thousand Deserts, Jesús F. De La Teja

Great Plains Quarterly

Among the challenges that battered Mexico in the decades following independence was raiding from independent Indian groups that increasingly found plunder preferable to peace. In this ambitious and erudite work Brian DeLay argues that it was exhaustion from fighting Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas among northern Mexicans that largely made for the easy victory of the United States in its 1846- 1847 war of conquest against Mexico. As the evidence mounted for American policy makers that the Mexican government was not only unable to develop its northern territories properly but was incapable of defending them, the logic of incorporating Texas into …

Review Of Waiting For Coyote's Call: An Eco-Memoir From The Missouri River Bluff By Jerry Wilson, Mark D. Dixon

Great Plains Quarterly

This book documents its author's move to the bluffs of the Missouri River valley in southeastern South Dakota and his experiences and personal reflections during twenty-five years of life there. In the spirit of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Jerry Wilson weaves together observations about the natural and human history of the bluffs and reflections-derived from his experiences on the South Dakota bluffs and his childhood on an Oklahoma farm-about how to live ethically on the land and toward its creatures. In so doing, he fashions an intimate tapestry of the Missouri River bluffs and woodlands that are …