Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Index- Fall 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Index (7 pages)

Fall 1981

Review Of Ho For California! Women's Overland Diaries From The Huntington Library Edited And Annotated By Sandra L. Myres, Merrill J. Mattes

Great Plains Quarterly

The Huntington Library, located in an exclusive suburb of Pasadena, is less famous than the Rose Bowl and is probably even less wellknown than its companion, the marvelous Huntington Botanical Gardens. In the scholarly world of English literature and American history, however, the Huntington Library is distinguished for its collection of rare books and manuscripts, which place it among the foremost research libraries in the world. Included in its collections are more than 150 original manuscript diaries and letters of persons who traveled from "the States" to the Pacific Coast before the railroad revolution. From them Sandra Myres has selected …

Review Of The Jews In Oklahoma By Henry J. Tobias, Moses Rischin

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is one of ten brief volumes published in the Newcomers to a New Land series. These carefully researched volumes analyze and detail the histories of ethnic groups in a state that has not been notably associated with traditions of ethnic pluralism. In Oklahoma, where even the Indians have been immigrants, Blacks, Czechs, Germans, Indians, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Poles, and Germans from Russia are each allotted separate treatment, while the British and Irish are joined together in a single volume

. In five succinct chapters, Henry J. Tobias of the University of Oklahoma outlines the story of Jewish immigration …

The New Rural History: Defining The Parameters, Robert P. Swierenga

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last ten years the "new social history" and its stepchild the "new urban history" have become the dominant sub field s within the history discipline; but the "new rural history" remains an orphan child with little recognized place as yet in academic curricula or historical writings.¹ Unlike urban history, which is studied as a coherent whole, aspects of rural history are usually discussed under such rubrics as the westward movement, agricultural history, land history, frontier development, Indian history, and so forth.

The implicit assumption behind this disjointed scholarly perception is that rural history is an incongruity in …

Title And Contents- Fall 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1981 VOL. I NO.4

CONTENTS

THE NEW RURAL HISTORY: DEFINING THE PARAMETERS Robert P. Swierenga

THE IMMIGRANT CHURCH AS A SYMBOL OF COMMUNITY AND PLACE IN THE UPPER MIDWEST Robert C. Ostergren

BEYOND THE BORDERLANDS: MEXICAN LABOR IN THE CENTRAL PLAINS, 1900-1930 Michael M. Smith

ROL VAAG, GROVE, AND PIONEERING ON THE AMERICAN AND CANADIAN PLAINS Dick Harrison

BOOK REVIEWS

Community on the American Frontier 263

The Explorations of the La Verendryes in the Northern Plains, 1738-43

Ho for California! Women's Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library

The Jews in Oklahoma

The Germans from Russia in …

Review Of The Czechs In Oklahoma By Karel D. Bicha, Bruce M. Garver

Great Plains Quarterly

This booklet, one of ten in the Newcomers in a New Land series, not only addresses a popular audience but offers scholars some new information and a thoughtful examination of many aspects of the Czech-American experience in Oklahoma. Recognizing the typical American reader's unfamiliarity with the history of Czechs in Europe and the United States, Karel Bicha of Marquette University devotes the first two of his nine chapters to a survey of that history. The third chapter, organized chronologically, tells how several thousand Czechs settled in Oklahoma from 1889 to 1910. Each of the next four chapters is organized topically …

Review Of The Kansas Beef Industry By Charles L. Wood, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly

From the mid-nineteenth century until today, the beef cattle industry has played a major role in the economic development of Kansas. Before the late 1890s, however, the harsh environment of the central Great Plains and depressed economic conditions prevented this frontier livelihood from becoming a stable beef-producing industry. Furthermore, by the late nineteenth century, the open range had disappeared, and the days when cattlemen grazed their stock on the Kansas grasslands and herded their cattle to the railhead were long in the past. With decreased mobility, cattlemen were forced to improve their managerial skills to maintain efficient beef production and …

Review Of The Explorations Of The La Verendryes In The Northern Plains, 1738-43 By G. Hubert Smith, Abraham P. Nasatir

Great Plains Quarterly

The La Verendrye family, father and sons, took an active part during the 1730s and 1740s in the movement of the French from Canada toward the West in the interest of the Indian fur trade, international rivalry, and the search for the Western Sea. Excellent fur traders and explorers, they moved south and west from their headquarters north of Lake Superior and pushed the line of French-Canadian posts toward the Rocky Mountains. They were the first Europeans to explore the northern plains area and to leave a record of their passage.

In 1950 the National Park Service appointed G. Hubert …

Review Of The Germans From Russia In Oklahoma By Douglas Hale, Norman Saul

Great Plains Quarterly

This small, compact volume is one of the Newcomers to a New Land series, which describes the roles of the major ethnic groups in the settlement and development of Oklahoma. The contribution of the Germans from Russia Mennonites of Dutch and Swiss ancestry from the Ukraine and Protestant and Catholic Volga Germans-to the social and economic life of the Great Plains is now better known, thanks to the activities of many local historical societies, the publications and collections of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia based in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the efforts of veteran scholars such as Karl …

Review Of William Robinson Leigh: Western Artist By D. Duane Cummins, Robert Spence

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1979 the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma Press, published Mildred Ladner's useful study of the Montana painter Olaf C. Seltzer, one of Charlie Russell's proteges. Gilcrease director Fred Myers, in a foreword, described this venture as "a harbinger of Gilcrease participation in the maturation of American art and art awareness."

Duane Cummins's William Robinson Leigh now follows quickly as the second volume in this series and attests to the seriousness of the Gilcrease commitment-if not to the maturation of American art, then at least to the enhanced understanding and …

Review Of Panhandle Cowboy By John R. Erickson, Nellie Snyder Yost

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is a valuable contribution to the history of the working cowboy and the ranches that brought him into being. The twentieth century has furnished a wealth of books, both historical and fictional, delineating the cowboy and his way of life. Most have dealt with the old-time cowboy who followed cattle up the long trails from Texas and carved out his livelihood on the open ranges of the West. Few have been written on the modern cowboy, living within fences and under vastly changed conditions.

John Erickson has provided this modern version. An excellent writer, Erickson has spiced his …

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 …

Beyond The Borderlands: Mexican Labor In The Central Plains, 1900-1930, Michael M. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

The northern and central plains states, lying well beyond the Spanish borderlands and containing no great urban metropolises, have received scant attention in published studies of Mexican migration to and Mexican labor in the United States. Although this region did not attract Mexican immigrants in large numbers, compared to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado and such cities as Chicago or Detroit, there was a dramatic increase in the number of Mexican immigrants to the plains states between 1900 and 1930. These persons filled a vital, yet generally ignored, role in the economic life of the region.¹

This …

Review Of Progressive Oklahoma: The Making Of A New Kind Of State By Danney Goble, John Braeman

Great Plains Quarterly

At the time of its adoption, the Oklahoma state constitution of 1907 was widely regarded as the epitome of advanced progressivism. Yet that auspicious beginning has scarcely been matched by the state's later history, in which leading motifs have been corruption, demagoguery, and control-not always unchallenged, but largely successfully maintained-by vested private interests. The virtue of the present work lies in its providing clues to explain this apparent paradox. Its defect is Goble's failure to grapple with this question-or even to recognize that a problem exists.

In part, the difficulty is a result of the book's chronological limits. Goble focuses …

Review Of Community On The American Frontier By Robert V. Hine, Robert Dykstra

Great Plains Quarterly

This appears to be a very "personal" book. Robert V. Hine's motive in writing it evidently stemmed not from any historiographical issuea gap in the literature, for example-but simply out of a fascination with the commune movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What was there of the true communal impulse, he asked himself, in the westward movement? His answer: not much. This apparently will surprise today's "commune people," who look to the American pioneer experience for community models. One suspects that it will surprise few historians.

But I could be wrong, and for those who find the question of interest, …

Review Of The Great Plains: Environment And Culture Edited By Brian W. Blouet And Frederick C. Luebke, John F. Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of twelve essays presents a selection of the offerings to the 1977 symposium on the culture heritage of the plains sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies.

It was probably Walter Prescott Webb's famous The Great Plains (1931) that sparked interest in the study of the region. This interest has gathered momentum during the last two decades and has stimulated many publications on various aspects of the plains and its subdivisions. The study of the region is obviously not the sole preserve of anyone discipline; Webb, Kraenzel, and others have shown that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary …

Review Of Law For The Elephant By John Phillip Reid, Stephanie E. Kalish

Great Plains Quarterly

Most Americans in the mid-nineteenth century lived within a society of laws. There are at least two opposed views with respect to what American attitudes and actions were like outside of such a lawful society. On the one hand, some historians have speculated that frontier life was lawless and violent. Might entailed right, according to this view. On the other hand, others have suggested that frontier life was natural and good. Americans, freed of the restraints of law, intuitively acted justly.

John Phillip Reid here examines countless diaries and letters of American emigrants on the Overland Trail at mid-century. In …

Title And Contents- Summer 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Summer 1981 Vol. I No.3

CONTENTS

FRIENDS AND ALLIES: THE TONKAWA INDIANS AND THE ANGLO-AMERICANS, 1823-1884 Thomas W. Dunlay

IMMIGRANT VOTERS AND THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE IN NEBRASKA, 1917-1920 Burton W. Folsom, Jr.

AGRICULTURAL PIONEERING IN DAKOTA: A CASE STUDY Gilbert C. Fite

LAWRENCE GOODWYN AND NEBRASKA POPULISM: A REVIEW ESSAY Robert W. Cherny

BOOK REVIEWS

Comparative Frontiers: A Proposal for Studying the American West

The Great Plains: Environment and Culture

The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes

William H. Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West

Law for the Elephant

The British and Irish in oklahoma The …

Review Of Comparative Frontiers: A Proposal For Studying The American West By Jerome O. Steffen, Leonard T. Guelke

Great Plains Quarterly

In this short, readable book Jerome Steffen puts forward a framework for the comparative study of frontier societies of the American West. The foundation of Steffen's proposal is the idea that frontier activity can be construed as a contest between the demands of the environment and the principles and practices that settlers brought with them to the frontier. The outcome of this contest, Steffen argues, will largely determine whether changes in the character of frontier societies should be classified as modal or fundamental. In Steffen's words, "Modal change usually represented an altered overt manifestation of a practice or belief whose …

Review Of The Germans In Oklahoma By Richard C. Rohrs, Lavern Rippley

Great Plains Quarterly

This small but competent book correctly concludes that the German experience in Oklahoma was extremely limited, primarily because the settlement of Germans there was sparse. In addition, the Germans, like most white settlers in the state, arrived only after periods of time spent in other states, notably in the Midwestern states of Nebraska, Wisconson, Iowa, and Illinois. In Oklahoma the Germans were concentrated near the center of the state in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and Blaine counties.

One in a series of small books treating the newcomer ethnic groups to Oklahoma, this volume contains a bibliographical essay and footnotes for each of …

Review Of The Blacks In Oklahoma By Jimmie Lewis Franklin, Arvarh E. Strickland

Great Plains Quarterly

The history of black people in Oklahoma is both typical and atypical of the black experience in America. Some black Oklahomans had a slave experience, but they were mostly the slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory. When emancipation came, these freedmen, unlike the former slaves in other slave-holding areas, shared in land distribution. Blacks were also among the Sooners who participated in the land rush when the Oklahoma Territory was opened to settlement.

For a time many Afro-Americans were led to hope that the millenarian black nationalist dream of an all-black state, which had not been …

Review Of The Mexicans In Oklahoma By Michael M. Smith, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly

Because so little is known about the Mexican-American population living outside the Spanish-Mexican borderlands, this short introductory survey of the Mexican experience in Oklahoma adds to our knowledge of one state's "invisible minority." The book comprises nine chapters, a bibliographical essay, and four pages of notes. An index is lacking, but the ten photos illustrating the text add to the attractiveness of the work. Sources used by the author include secondary works, interviews, census reports and other U.S. government publications, newspaper articles, and three theses.

The first chapter is a readable and interesting summary of the distant relationship between Oklahoma …

Review Of Folklore From Kansas: Customs, Beliefs, And Superstitions By William E. Koch, Roger L. Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly

The labor that Bill Koch has put into this volume is heroic. For those of us who study the plains, it is truly a valuable contribution. There are more than five thousand items, maps, tables, charts, and an astonishing inventory of collectors and informants. Each item is documented by sex, age, urban-rural orientation of the informant, and the year the item was collected. I am delighted that this impressive corpus has been made available to us. There is no question but that scholars will long be grateful to Koch for his effort.

Now, anyone who reads book reviews regularly knows …

Friends And Allies: The Tonkawa Indians And The Anglo-Americans, 1823-1884, Thomas W. Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly

Historical models of Indian-white contact on the frontier emphasize conflict and hostility, yet historians are not unaware that whites and Indians interacted in many different ways in different regions and time periods. Even in cases of Indian-white conflict, it was not at all uncommon to find Indians fighting beside the whites against other Indians, often greatly enhancing the capabilities of the white forces. Some tribes were notable for their long-standing alliance with whites against other Indian tribes; examples include the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Pawnees of Nebraska, the Wyoming Shoshonis led by Chief Washakie, and the Crows of Montana. …

Agricultural Pioneering In Dakota: A Case Study, Gilbert C. Fite

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent years many historians have increasingly turned their attention to what might be called microhistory. Rather than studying broad topics in a sweeping and comprehensive manner, they have preferred to examine a county, a city, political or social groups within a locality, or an individual firm or institution. The aim has been to present history from the grassroots or the sidewalks-a people-oriented history, so to speak. As a result of such works, historical understanding has been greatly enhanced.¹

Little serious microhistory, however, has been done on pioneer agriculture, farm life, and standards of living. While there have been …

Notes And News- Summer 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Christlieb Gallery: Opening And Dedication

Flandreau Santee Videotape Project

Czech Heritage Program

Center Governing Board

New Center Publications

American Pioneer Landscapes Symposium

Atlas Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition Planned

Review Of The Peace Chiefs Of The Cheyennes By Stan Hoig, John C. Ewers

Great Plains Quarterly

Stan Hoig here retraces a critical half-century of Cheyenne history from the tribe's first treaty with the United States in 1825 to the settlement of the traditionally nomadic northern and southern Cheyenne upon separate reservations in present day Montana and Oklahoma. The uniqueness of this book lies in its emphasis upon the roles played by some seventeen chiefs in serving the interests of their tribe through peaceful means. As did George Bent before him, Hoig points out that among the Cheyenne the recognized chiefs were not the young war leaders, but were mature men who assumed the more difficult role …

Review Of The Italians In Oklahoma By Kenny L. Brown, George E. Pozzetta

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is part of a Newcomers to a New Land series design led to analyze the major ethnic groups of Oklahoma. Kenny L. Brown has studied the experience of Italians in the state and provides many interesting details on this little known topic.

Though few in number, Italians concentrated heavily in the coal mining districts of Oklahoma and contributed importantly to the communities in which they lived. As miners, they moved early into the labor unions of the coal fields and participated fully in the recurrent strikes that characterized this region in the period 1890-1925. Like their counterparts elsewhere, …

Review Of The British And Irish In Oklahoma By Patrick J. Blessing, Wilbur S. Shepperson

Great Plains Quarterly

To suggest accurately the impact of the British-Irish immigration on Oklahoma is a difficult and perhaps an impossible task. Eighteenth-century Americans were primarily of British-Irish stock, and the immigration movement increased throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1914 some 14 million persons from the United Kingdom arrived in the United States. The British-Irish were also the most heterogeneous of all immigrant groups. They rarely cooperated in attempting American settlement, and their speech, culture, and ideology have rendered them the most difficult nationality to isolate and study historically. As a whole, migrants from the United Kingdom found immigration a less …

Review Of William H. Ashley: Enterprise And Politics In The Trans-Mississippi West By Richard M. Clokey, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Clokey's biography of William Ashley is the product of fifteen years of research. The time was well spent; this is a thorough, perceptive, and interesting study of a man who played an important role in the early development of the American West. Perhaps more could have been made of Ashley in the existential sense, giving the reader more insight into his personality, but as a historian (and not a psychohistorian) Clokey understandably chose to emphasize the public rather than the private man. Still, Ashley emerges from his actions as a man who "sought respect and admiration and,. .. projected …