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Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 4 / Fall 2008

CONTENTS

NEBRASKA'S LIVE STOCK SANITARY COMMISSION AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM

CONTRADICTORY SUBTEXTS IN WILLA CATHER'S 0 PIONEERS! AND THOMAS HARDY'S FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

JEWISH COMMUNITY IN WICHITA, 1920-1970: SAME WAGON, NEW HORSES

REVIEW ESSAY: THE SPINNING OF THE WEST

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Contradictory Subtexts In Willa Cather's O Pioneers! And Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, Grace Wetzel

Great Plains Quarterly

An independent and strong-minded woman gains control of a farm and determines to effect its fruition. Though many doubt her capacity, the female landowner trumps her male counterparts when the farm flourishes under her effective management. In the end, she marries- but on extremely unconventional terms. Rejecting romantic love, she instead weds a devoted friend. Camaraderie hence privileged over passion, the novel ends. This summary outlines the story of not one but two major literary heroines-Bathsheba Everdene of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Alexandra Bergson of Willa Cather's 0 Pioneers! (1913). Critics have analyzed these texts …

Africa, Mark J. Calaguas

Mark J Calaguas

The Africa Committee's contribution to the 2007 Year-in-Review issue of the American Bar Association Section of International Law's quarterly journal, The International Lawyer.

Review Of A Great Restlessness: The Life And Politics Of Dorise Nielsen By Faith Johnston, Valerie Korinek

Great Plains Quarterly

For years, we've known little about Dorise Nielsen, other than the curious fact that she holds the distinction of being the first federally elected communist in Canada. What, one wonders, caused a prairie farm wife and mother to run successfully as the United Progressive candidate for North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1940? The answers are multifaceted according to Faith Johnston's award-winning biography. Partly, Johnston attributes Nielsen's motivation to culture shock at her transformation from a middle-class urban English existence to the isolation, poverty, and deprivation of life on a central Saskatchewan farm during the Depression. Secondly, and equally significantly, Nielsen's personality, …

Why The Homesteading Data Are So Poor (And What Can Be Done About It), Richard Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly

Data available to scholars on homesteading are of very poor quality-inconsistent, unreliable, inaccessible, incomplete-and surprisingly, they haven't been getting any better. Even basic questions such as how much homesteaded land was "proved up," how much land was commuted, or how many actual farms were created by homesteading cannot be answered with any assurance. Moreover, the answers given today mostly depend on quantitative studies completed forty or more years ago.

Why should this be? After all, we have witnessed in recent decades a staggering increase in the capacity and convenience of data handling by using computers. The publication of the Historical …

Review Of True Tales Of The Prairies And Plains By David Dary, Benjamin T. Arrington

Great Plains Quarterly

The cover of True Tales of the Prairies and Plains notes that author David Dary is a past winner of the Cowboy Hall of Fame Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award. One must assume that his previous books made better contributions to the scholarship of the American West than does this one. Fine for a casual reader or one interested in entertaining vignettes about the West, this work has little to offer the serious scholar.

The book is broken into several sections with such titles as "Over the Trails and Rails," "Buried Treasure Legends" (so much for …

Land, Speculation, And Manipulation On The Pecos, Stephen Bogener

Great Plains Quarterly

The Pecos River of the nineteenth century, unlike its faint twenty-first century shadow, was a formidable watercourse. The river stretches some 755 miles, from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe to its eventual merger with the Rio Grande. Control over the public domain of southeastern New Mexico came from controlling access to the Pecos, its tributaries and springs. In the arid environment of New Mexico's Pecos Valley, corporate accumulation of land through manipulation of federal land laws followed the removal of Native Americans, the displacement of Mexican American communities, and the departure of major players in the …

Review Of American Indian Literary Nationalism By Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, And Robert Warrior., Terri Baker

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars of the American Indian experience should read this book. These three authors discuss more issues in American Indian Studies and American Indian literary criticism than you can shake a stick at, and, get this-you won't even chip any teeth trying to pronounce the words, although you might want to have a dictionary handy. Simon Ortiz provides the foundation for the conversation in his foreword, and the appendix includes his 1981 essay "Toward a National Indian Literature." Lisa Brooks provides a thoughtful afterword.

Warrior urges critics to focus on research and finding the ways that have brought the Native world …

Review Of Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life And Legend Of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves. By Art T. Burton, Amy E. Carreiro

Great Plains Quarterly

Art T. Burton's study of African American lawman Bass Reeves contributes to the growing body of work on the black experience in the West. Burton does a fine job of sorting through the fact and fiction surrounding the marshal's career. Although an engaging character, a fulllength study of the marshal did not exist until now. Burton's Black Gun, Silver Star provides insight into the place of race in the Southern Plains in the late 1800s. Burton argues that the significant number of black federal law enforcement agents in Indian Territory "was truly unusual in American history."

Reeves's "accomplishments are all …

Review Of The Calgary Project: Urban Form/Urban Life. By Beverly A. Sandalack And Andrei Nicolai., Pierre Gauthier

Great Plains Quarterly

The Calgary Project is an ambitious narrative. In eight chapters and two appendixes, the authors set about tracing the historical and spatial evolution of Calgary, aiming at drawing conclusions that could inform its planning in the future. The city's development is portrayed through five periods, unfolding from the establishment of a small North West Mounted Police Fort in 1875 to our times. Each period is featured in a chapter that opens with a discussion of the ideas, plans, and planning practices of the time, followed by a discussion of the "spatial structure" of the urbanized areas, and concludes with an …

Review Of Hot Coffee And Cold Truth: Living And Writing The West. Edited By W. C. Jameson, David Mogen

Great Plains Quarterly

As the title suggests, this collection of essays on "Living and Writing the West" is conversational and engaging, sometimes brash and humorous. Editor W. C. Jameson arranges the different voices of twelve popular authors on Western subjects, and the result is indeed like listening in on the thoughts and reminiscences of seasoned writers over a hot cup of coffee on a chilly morning. For aspiring writers and general readers alike, this anthology presents an eclectic array of opinions and stories about the distinctive challenges presented to those who write about "the West."

Jameson introduces his vision of the book by …

Review Of The Rise And Fall Of Indian Country, 1825-1855 By William E. Unrau., Roger Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

This slender volume lays out the story of the creation, evolution, and demise of the mid-nineteenth- century region known as "Indian Country." An amorphous and frequently changing area located in the Plains, one might posit that it existed more on paper than on the ground. The author traces four legal actions underlying the creation of such a region: the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the 1834 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. The latter guaranteed the tribes' rights to their land beyond the Mississippi forever. As Unrau's analysis demonstrates, the contrast between …

Notes And News- Summer 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

DISSERTATION AWARD IN WOMEN'S HISTORY

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

CALL FOR PAPERS

Review Of Blackfoot War Art: Pictographs Of The Reservation Period, 1880-2000 By L. James Dempsey, Gerald T. Conaty

Great Plains Quarterly

Representational art depicting important historical events has always been integral to the lives of First Nations people. James Dempsey's Blackfoot War Art is concerned with the biographical art produced by the Blackfoot-speaking people, the original inhabitants of a vast territory that extended across the Plains of present-day southern Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, and most of Montana. Dempsey begins by situating this art within its cultural context, including a separate chapter on the importance of the "warrior ethic." He then goes on to discuss the art in terms of its artists' media.

Rock art is the oldest surviving example of Blackfoot art, …

Review Of Everett Baker's Saskatchewan: Portraits Of An Era. Selected By Bill Waiser, Patrick C. Douaud

Great Plains Quarterly

The photographs that Everett Baker (1893- 1981) took in Saskatchewan from the 1940s to the 1960s cover just about one-half of the province, mostly the prairie part, at the northern end of the Great Plains. An American citizen, Baker was not drafted into World War I because of an asthmatic condition; after obtaining a BS degree he went to work in Saskatchewan in the hope that the dry climate would be better for his health. There he sold books and farmed in the Palliser Triangle, soon sharing with its rural population the hardships that accompanied the Great Depression. This was …

Review Of Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics From The Ira To Wounded Knee By Akim D. Reinhardt, James V. Fenelon

Great Plains Quarterly

This well-documented book covers twentieth- century Pine Ridge politics by linking two events at Wounded Knee: the United States massacre of 1890 under cover of "war" on the Ghost Dance, and a 1973 American Indian Movement/ Traditionalist reoccupation and subsequent siege.

In explaining the dysfunctionality of the political economy on Pine Ridge, Reinhardt looks at the long-term effects of colonialism and its bureaucratic replacement in the Office of Indian Affairs (later renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs), along with complicated divisions inculcated by government policies, often collectively known as internal colonialism. With astonishing detailed accuracy, he looks at the main …

Review Of Ballots And Bullets: The Bloody County Seat Wars Of Kansas By Robert K. Dearment, Christopher Lovett

Great Plains Quarterly

Kansas's long and distinguished history often has been soaked in the blood of border ruffians, abolitionists, and common criminals. In many respects Kansas is a land of extremes, and a review of the county seat wars in the late nineteenth century dramatizes that point. Robert DeArment, a respected western historian, has examined the violence in western Kansas during the effort to organize the state's western counties in the 1880s. The heart of the matter, according to DeArment, was a problem universally evident during the Gilded Age: uncontrollable greed and the desire to make a financial killing. In Kansas, the speculators …

Book Notes

Great Plains Quarterly

The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia.

New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada's Native Pasts

The Intrepid Explorer: James Hector's Exploration in the Canadian Rockies

The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke: Volume Three, June 1, 1878-June 22, 1880

Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States.

Cloud-Capped Towers: The Utopian Theme in Saskatchewan History and Culture

Voices from Next Year Country: An Oral History of Rural Saskatchewan

Women Who Pioneered Oklahoma: Stories From the WPA Narratives

Cowboy Life: The Letters of George Philip.

Title And Contents- Summer 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 3 / Summer 2008

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S NOTE

WHY THE HOMESTEADING DATA ARE SO POOR: (AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT)

SHAPING NEBRASKA: AN ANALYSIS OF RAILROAD AND LAND SALES, 1870-1880

LAND, SPECULATION, AND MANIPULATION ON THE PECOS

LEWIS AND CLARK: GONE; AMERICAN INDIANS: STILL HERE

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of Radical Hope: Ethics In The Face Of Cultural Devastation. By Jonathan Lear, Rodney Frey

Great Plains Quarterly

Jonathan Lear's Racial Hope is a most remarkable, engaging, and thought-provoking interpretation of one man's account of the collapse of his culture, as well as the hope he offers for a future for his people. Based on the life story of Plenty Coups (as recorded by Frank Linderman during the late 1920s), Lear considers two equally profound images offered by this Crow elder, one eng rained in the statement, "after this nothing happened," referring to what happened after being placed on a reservation, and the other in the medicine dreams of Plenty Coups in which the destruction of the Indian …

Review Of Identity By Design: Tradition, Change, And Celebration In Native Women's Dresses Edited By Emil Her Many Horses, Emma Hansen

Great Plains Quarterly

The National Museum of the American Indian published this book in conjunction with a 2007 exhibition of the same title. The book and the exhibition focus on women's dresses and related clothing and accessories from the North American Plains, Plateau, and Great Basin regions dating from the 1830s to the present, although the majority of the clothing and writing relates to the Plains.

After a foreword by then NMAI director W. Richard West Jr., exhibition curator and book editor Emil Her Many Horses provides an introductory chapter addressing the familial and spiritual significance of women's decorated dresses and describing basic …

Review Of Searching For Sacred Ground: The Journey Of Chief Lawrence Hart, Mennonite By Raylene Hinz-Penner, Clyde Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly

In Oklahoma's Cheyenne community, Lawrence Hart has led a life framed by service and self-sacrifice. Widely regarded by his people as the embodiment of what a leader should be, Hart has spent decades tending to their cultural, spiritual, and political health. In Hinz-Penner's hands, Hart's biography is not simply his life story, but also a reflection of the shifting contours of contemporary Native life and a story that tells us much about what it means to be Cheyenne in the modern world. Writing with a keen appreciation for the larger issues at play in Hart's life, Hinz-Penner deftly broadens her …

Review Of The Texas Book: Profiles, History, And Reminiscences Of The University. Edited By Richard A. Holland, Dwonna Naomi Goldstone

Great Plains Quarterly

The Texas Book is an extensive-and exhaustive- collection of essays about the University of Texas at Austin in celebration of its hundredand- twenty-fifth anniversary. In his introduction, editor Richard Holland explains that the book is "not a beginning-to-end narrative history" but a selection of essays whose purpose is to "bring to life a handful of notables who have walked the Forty Acres."

Opening with an essay on J. Frank Dobie, perhaps one of the foremost writers and speakers of Texas and the Southwest from the early 1900s until his death in 1964, the volume ends with two speeches by Barbara …

Review Of One West, Two Myths Ii: Essays On Comparison Edited By C. L. Higham And Robert Thacker, Molly Rozum

Great Plains Quarterly

With this collection, editors C. L. Higham and Robert Thacker aim to define the parameters and potential of the Canada-U.S. comparative Wests field of study, with particular reference to its myths. The American Review of Canadian Studies (winter 2003) originally published the main body of essays, but this republication has important additions. New appendices include Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and J. M. S. Careless's 1954 essay on "Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History." Both are useful for understanding what R. Douglas Frances in a separate essay states as the persistent "difficulty …

Review Of What Becomes You. By Aaron Raz Link And Hilda Raz, Gayle Salamon

Great Plains Quarterly

What Becomes You is one book of two stories. The first is the memoir of Aaron Raz Link, a transsexual man raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, who describes his journey through trans life and queer kinship. Trained as a scientist, Link has a sharp eye for detail and offers keen descriptions of gender transition, even as he inverts many of its stereotypes. He describes the process of coming out to friends and family as watching them undergo a "sex change": a sudden reordering of their perceptions once they realize he is a man rather than a woman-and has been all along. …

Review Of Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains Indians Edited By David J. Wishart, James Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly

While there is little new in this volume, scholars and students of the Great Plains, the American West, and, of course, of Indian peoples will find this a useful reference tool. Editor David J. Wishart, a noted author on subjects of the Great Plains, culled the entries on Indian peoples from the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (2004), which he also edited.

The time span of this work reaches back to around 10,000 BP and takes readers up to the present. Wishart included a precise, succinct introduction by Philip Deloria and Christopher K. Riggs, excerpted from the Encyclopedia of the …

Review Of To Remain An Indian: Lessons In Democracy From A Century Of Native American Education By K. Tsianina Lomawaima And Teresa L. Mccarty, Ruth Spack

Great Plains Quarterly

As they trace the shifts in United States government Indian policy over the course of a century, K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty develop a theoretical framework they label "the safety zone" as a way to explain the continuing conflict over the issue of cultural difference in educational settings. Drawing on extensive archival material, the authors illustrate convincingly how educational policies and practices have reflected the federal government's attempt to make a distinction between "safe" and "dangerous" Indigenous beliefs and practices.

Using Western cultural norms as the standard against which to measure Indigenous ways of being, the government might, …

Review Of Art Of The Cherokee: Prehistory To The Present By Susan C. Power, Mary Jo Watson

Great Plains Quarterly

Native American art history concerning Southeastern and Oklahoma Indian art is enhanced by Susan Power's ambitious book on Cherokee art. Its wide historic and artistic focus spans from the sixteenth century through transitional phases including European contact, removal, revival, and contemporary art. Power locates the Cherokees within the older Mississippian mound culture throughout the Tennessee Valley and North Carolina and provides examples of early sites where surviving pottery, beads, gorgets, rattles, painting, weaving, and sculpture indicate an interest in both utility and aesthetics. Early Cherokee arts demonstrate concern with color, form, design, patterns, and symbolism; and there is evidence that …

Editor's Note- Summer 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

EDITOR'S NOTE

In May 2007, the Center for Great Plains Studies held their 33rd Interdisciplinary Symposium. The topic was Homesteading Reconsidered. Chaired by Homestead National Monument Historian Todd Arrington, and organized by the staff of the Center, the conference examined homesteading and its legacy from many angles: reviewing recent and forthcoming scholarship, probing conflicting interpretations, and covering differing perspectives on the historical and ecological significance of homesteading. Competitive papers and invited presentations examined such diverse topics as: Native American views of homesteading; federal land policies in the U.S. and Canada; ecological impact on the natural environment of the Great Plains; …

Shaping Nebraska An Analysis Of Railroad And Land Sales, 1870-1880, Kurt E. Kinbacher, William G. Thomas Iii

Great Plains Quarterly

On December 23, 1878, Ohio resident D. F. Vanniss wrote to George P. Cather, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad's land agent in Red Cloud, Nebraska. He asked Cather to buy for him "the best 160 acres of R. R. Land in your county," and just to be clear he emphasized, "I want it before somebody else gets it." Cather received many such breathless letters, urgent, pleading, and intense inquiries about the lands the railroad had for sale. Nearly all wanted to know the position of the allimportant railroad. Almost all inquired about the availability of the all-important resource: water. …