Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Many Danes, Some Norwegians: Karen Miller's Diary, 1894 Edited By John W. Nielsen, Ann Marie Legreid

Great Plains Quarterly

Letters, diaries, and other amateur writings provide an important prospect on the immigrant experience in America. Literary expressions of this kind are valuable; while mundane and archaic-sounding, they inform us of the lives of immigrants, their perceptions, their everyday encounters with a larger world. Many Danes, Some Norwegians is the diary of Karen Miller (Moller), a Danish immigrant who wrote from her home at Elko, Scott County, rural Minnesota, in 1894, a year before her death. The original manuscript was translated by Olaf M. Norlie in 1952, then mimeographed and bound. The current version was translated by Ninna Engskow using …

Review Of An Army Of Women: Gender And Politics In Gilded Age Kansas By Michael Lewis Goldberg, Carmen Heider

Great Plains Quarterly

Michael Goldberg, a cultural historian of politics, undertakes a valuable study of the dynamic relationship between politics and gender. His argument is, simply, that to fully understand the actors and organizations in Gilded Age Kansas politics, we must "integrate gender into their story." This "cast of political players" includes the Farmer's Alliance, the Woman Movement, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, and activist leaders such as Annie Diggs and Mary Lease, all of whom are situated within religious, economic, racial, and ethnic contexts. To explore the gendered relationships between and among these groups and individuals, Goldberg uses organizational records, songs, and a …

Review Of The Powder River Expedition Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, R. Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard 1. Dodge served in the United States Army from 1848 to 1891. By the time of the 1876 Powder River Expedition, one of several military responses to the crushing defeat suffered at the Little Big Horn, Dodge had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. At the behest of Brig. Gen. George Crook he accepted the command of the infantry contingent of this winter campaign against SiouxCheyenne foes.

The campaign met with some success, and many historians consider it the beginning of the end of the Great Sioux War. On 25 November 1876, a Cheyenne village of Chief Dull Knife …

History And Nature Representations Of The Great Plains In The Work Of Sharon Butala And Wallace Stegner, Walter Isle

Great Plains Quarterly

When he was five, Wallace Stegner's family moved to a small town and to a homestead on the Great Plains, in the extreme southwestern corner of Saskatchewan just above the Montana border, where they lived for six years before drought and crop failures forced them to move on. Sharon Butala moved to a ranch and farm in the same short-grass prairie country in 1976 when she was thirty-six years old and newly married to Peter Butala, a rancher native to the place. Both Stegner and Butala went on to write about this land, and their representations manifest very different attitudes …

Essay On Place The Map As Big As The World, Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

I have spent a lot of time looking at Kansas maps. Once, I memorized the shapes and names of all lOS counties. On another map, I drew in red magic marker over each highway after I had traveled it, hoping, someday, to have traveled every mile in this 200-by-400-mile rectangle. A huge old school map of Kansas, published by A. J. Nystrom & Co., Chicago, hangs in my east study windows instead of curtains or shades. On sunny mornings, it glows, and since its color comes from elevation- the "3,000 to 4,000 Feet" in western Kansas, to the "Under 1,000 …

Review Of Encyclopedia Of The American West By Charles Phillips And Alan Axelrod, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

The goal of encyclopedias is to make knowledge readily and objectively available to a wide audience. Generally massive undertakings requiring a number of years to complete, they succeed or fail depending not only on accuracy but on their flexibility as reference works to interest a wide range of audiences, both as stopping or starting points for research. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, no strangers to undertaking large projects such as biographical dictionaries, have compiled an excellent Encyclopedia of the American West.

Joining Howard W. Lamar's masterful Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West (1977), now available in a revised edition …

Review Of Capturing Women: The Manipulation Of Cultural Imagery In Canada's Prairie West By Sarah Carter, Catherine Cavanaugh

Great Plains Quarterly

Capturing Women, an extended essay examining the role of Indian captivity narratives in racializing prairie society, is a welcome addition to prairie history, which has been particularly resistant to gender and race analysis. In this small volume Sarah Carter takes up both of these subjects in the context of nineteenth-century imperialism. Beginning with a close reading of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delany, she shows how captivity narrative was used to reestablish white male authority in the aftermath of what has become known as the Second …

Review Of Harvesting The High Plains: John Kriss And The Business Of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950 By Craig Miner, David B. Danbom

Great Plains Quarterly

Craig Miner uses the life and career of Cobly, Kansas-based megafarmer John Kriss to make two points. He argues first that, far from being the forbidding desert suggested by the Dust Bowl experience, the High Plains is an area where productive dry-farming of wheat can be undertaken profitably by intelligent and alert producers. And second, he contends that farming is a business to which planning, efficiency, and economies of scale can and should be applied, regardless of romantic notions about the mythic "family farm."

Kriss is the right sort of farmer to illustrate these points. Starting but as a farm …

Review Of Tejano Legacy: Rancheros And Settlers In South Texas, 1734-1900 By Armando Alonzo, Arnoldo De Leon

Great Plains Quarterly

Tejano Legacy depicts Mexican Americans in Texas-the subjects of the inquiry-as historical actors engaged in a process of adjustment to wrest a living from a rough physical setting and a constantly changing social environment. Their experience in the Texas Borderlands resembled that of other settlers in the trans-Mississippi West who confronted similar forces.

The author wishes to revise and update numerous long-standing interpretations of Texas-Mexican life in the Lower Valley of Texas (which includes those counties in deep South Texas that parallel the Rio Grande). He posits that Tejano history in the region begins with the first colonies founded during …

Review Of Billy The Kid: His Life And Legend By Jon Tuska, Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly

Jon Tuska is a leading authority on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. In fact, in the opening chapter of this reprinted book (originally published by Greenwood Press in 1994), Tuska exhibits his tenacious pursuit of nearly every fact about these much-researched subjects. This one-hundred-page section, illustrating Tuska's diligence, will be particularly useful to all specialists and general readers. Unfortunately, however, the author's flawed approach to his subject seriously limits the book's overall value.

Most of all, T uska attempts to provide a sound historical chronology of the major events of Billy the Kid's life and the Lincoln …

Review Of Comparing Cowboys And Frontiers By Richard W. Slatta, Thomas D. Hall

Great Plains Quarterly

The goal of this collection is to encourage the comparative study of frontiers and social history. The first part, six chapters, focuses on "Topics" for comparisons, while the second part, four chapters, discusses how to do comparative history and critically evaluates much recent work. Slatta begins with a comparative discussion of the Venezuelan Llanos, southern Chile, the Pampas, Brazil, and the Great Plains of North America, suggesting that a frontier is a membrane metaphor through which objects, people, and ideas pass in both directions.

Slatta then discusses how indigenous peoples quickly adopted feral (or sometimes stolen) horses, which led to …

Review Of Policing The Elephant: Crime, Punishment, And Social Behavior On The Overland Trail By John Phillip Reid, Lorna R. Mclean

Great Plains Quarterly

Policing the Elephant is a companion volume to John Reid's Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (1980). Through an incisive analysis of the diaries, journals, and letters of emigrants crossing from Missouri or Iowa to Oregon or California, Reid examines how overland travellers experienced and responded to anti-social actions and theii' punishment. Along the trail, emigrants watched for the elephant. "To see the elephant," Reid explains, "meant undergoing hardships, to learn the realities of a situation firsthand, or to encounter the unbelievable."

Reid skillfully adapts the symbol of the elephant to explore what average …

Review Of Updating The Literary West Sponsored By The Western Literature Association, Barbara Howard-Meldrum

Great Plains Quarterly

When A Literary History of the American West (LHAW) appeared in 1987, it legitimized the field of western American literary studies, defining a tradition and a canon. Yet even as that lengthy volume was completed, the indefiniteness of its title-A, not The-called for a sequel. Updating the Literary West (ULW) provides that necessary sequel, not simply updating but in significant ways reconstructing the West's literary history.

The central core of the new volume provides most of the updating. Some of the authors given individual chapters in LHAW reappear with discussions of their recent works and reviews …

Review Of Profiles In Dissent: The Shaping Of Radical Thought In The Canadian West By Harry Gutkin And Mildred Gutkin, James Naylor

Great Plains Quarterly

The social explosion of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was the product of various combustibles, both material and ideological. In this collective biography of ten arrested strike leaders, Harry and Mildred Gutkin explore the ideas and experiences that led individuals to play prominent roles in the strike. This is an effective approach, allowing the authors to trace individually the various strands of social radicalism that crossed in the spring of 1919 and to follow their post-strike trajectories. Some of the subjects are familiar, such as future Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) leader J. S. Woodsworth. Others have received far too …

Review Of Many Wests: Place, Culture, And Regional Identity Edited By David M. Wrobel And Michael C. Steiner, Diane D. Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly

Anyone interested in any place west of the Mississippi will find some part of Many Wests valuable. Editors David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner have collected essays that, in content and style, confirm the variety in the over-used term the West. Divided into four sections, the essays concern "Environment and Economy," "Aesthetic Wests," "Race and Ethnicity," and "Extended Wests"-Alaska, Hawaii, and British Columbia. They range from historical surveys to engaging personal accounts like Bret Wallach's essay focusing on typical Oklahoma houses and the people who inhabit them. Some scholars concentrate on a unique aspect of a region. Ann Hyde …

Notes And News- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

In Memoriam

Indian Prose Award

Gpq's Home In Cyberspace

Communities Through Photographs

Montana Manuscript Prize

Life On The Great Plains

Cfp: Into The Next Millennium

Nebraska Research Grant

Great Plains Music, Dance, And ...Bison!

Introduction Imagining Literary Landscapes, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

In compiling this issue of Great Plains Quarterly, Charlene Porsild responds to issues at the heart of the rising "new regionalism." One premise of the renewed interest in regionalism is that learning to navigate the virtual world of cyberspace means needing to know place in the actual world, and understanding mapping means learning how to orient oneself, how to read a landscape, and how to move from one place to another. The four essays presented here offer complementary responses to that challenge.

One's stance in time undergirds one's relation to place, as Walter Isle demonstrates in "History and Nature: …

The "In Between" Landscapes Of Transformation In Ted Kooser's Weather Central, Mary Lou K. Stillwell

Great Plains Quarterly

"Etude," which launches Weather Central, Ted Kooser's most recent full-length collection of poems, is in many ways typical of the poet's work. The poem is what it professes to be: an etude, a study, a preview of all the poems that are to follow. It also defines the major poetic devices or characteristics that will be important throughout the 1994 volume: direct, plain-spoken language; use of interior and exterior landscape{s); and explicit metaphor that particularizes the poet's life.

Many of us who make our home on the plains recognize the Great Blue Heron in the cattails, the bubbles along the …

A Topographic Map Of Words Parables Of Cartography In William Least Heat,Moon's Prairyerth, O. Alan Weltzien

Great Plains Quarterly

In "Thought and Landscape," geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes an essential double perspective required for any comprehensive understanding of rural landscape. A geographer studies landscape "from 'above,'" for example, but "The side view ... is personal, moral, and aesthetic. A person is in the landscape ... from a particular spot and not from an abstract point in space. If the essential character of landscape is that it combines these two views (objective and subjective), it is clear that the combination can take place only in the mind's eye. Landscape appears to us through an effort of the imagination .... It is …

Title And Contents- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 19/ Number 2 / Spring 1999

Contents

Introduction: Imagining Literary Landscapes

History And Nature: Representations Of The Great Plains In The Work Of Sharon Butala And Wallace Stegner

The "In-Between": Landscapes Of Transformation In Ted Kooser's Weather Central

A Topographic Map Of Words: Parables Of Cartography In William Least Heat-Moon's Prairyerth

Essay On Place: The Map As Big As The World

Review Essay: Crime And Responsibility

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes And News

Book Notes- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

BOOK NOTES

Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853-1895. By William A. Dobak

The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse: A Source Book About a Tragic Episode in Lakota History. Volume XXI of the Frontier Military Series. Compiled and edited by Richard G. Hardorff

The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado. By Robert Adams

William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist. By L. David Norris, James C. Milligan, and Odie B. Faulk

Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher. By Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth

Of Earth and Elders: Visions and Voices …

Review Of The Social Gospel Of E. Nicholas Comfort: Founder Of The Oklahoma School Of Religion By Robert C. Cottrell, Leslie Hewes

Great Plains Quarterly

Early in the autumn of 1924, when I attended my first Saturday night open house at the First Presbyterian Church in Norman, Oklahoma, the newly appointed student pastor, Nick Comfort, made me feel at home by saying, "We are both freshmen." Next year, after I had satisfied most freshman requirements, I enrolled in a course on comparative religion at the University of Oklahoma taught by Rev. Comfort.

The social gospel, as pointed out by Cottrell repeatedly, emphasized the "fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man." As espoused by Comfort, the gospel was egalitarian, without color barriers, non-violent, nonsectarian, and based …

Review Of Frontiers Of Historical Imagination: Narrating The European Conquest Of Native America, 1890-1990 By Kerwin Lee Klein, Alex Long

Great Plains Quarterly

In Frontiers of Historical Imagination, Kerwin Klein traces the changes in the historical discourse of the European conquest of Native America. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study synthesizes twentieth-century historiography, encompassing debates in history, anthropology, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. While Frederick Jackson Turner's writings serve as organizing texts for Klein's account, the changing interpretations and narratives of the American frontier provide the thematic focus.

Klein arranges his study into four books, each in turn, organized around a trope-a la Hayden White's Metahistory: metaphor ("The Language of History")' metonym ("From Spirit to System"), synecdoche ("Time Immemorial"), and …

Review Of El Llano Estacada: Exploration And Imagination On The High Plains Of Texas And New Mexico, 1536-1860 By John Miller Morris, Valerie M. Mendoza

Great Plains Quarterly

El Llano Estacado is located on the High Plains of eastern New Mexico and western Texas covering over 50,000 square miles of land, and may be, according to Morris, the "largest isolated non-mountainous area in North America." It is the creation of this landscape in the European mind that Morris proposes to study. In his words, "the landscape itself is the hero" of the story.

In this respect Morris succeeds. Through his use of Spanish and American exploration texts (letters, journals, official reports, reminiscences), he conveys the mental representations of this region. In addition to textual analysis, he also uses …

Review Of The Journals Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition, Volume 11: The J Oumals Of Joseph Whitehouse, May 14, 1804-April2, 1806 Edited By Gary E. Moulton, Kerry R. Oman, Fred R. Gowens

Great Plains Quarterly

This eleventh volume in the series of the Louis and Clark Expedition continues Gary Moulton's masterful work. Here the story of the journey is seen through the eyes of one of the enlisted men, Joseph Whitehouse, whose journal is the only surviving record of a. private on the expedition. In the introduction, Moulton briefly covers Whitehouse's life before and after the expedition, although there is little known of him during these times. He was one of the men who joined Lewis at Kaskasia, from Captain Russell Bissell's company of the First Infantry. The volume itself contains two versions of Whitehouse's …

Review Of Cowboy Fiddler In Bob Wills' Band By Frankie Mcwhorter, John Schmitz

Great Plains Quarterly

Reading this book, as written in Frankie McWhorter's own words, is like being out on the West Texas Plains, sitting around the campfire listening to a veteran cowboy tell his stories. It has an authentic bunkhouse feeling, deservedly so coming from a man who has spent almost fifty years as a working cowboy.

The book is written in two-part form. The first half deals with McWhorter's musical background and his time in the Bob Wills band. The latter half recounts McWhorter's experiences as a working cowboy. McWhorter's family lived in the Texas Panhandle town of Plaska, about twenty-five miles from …

Review Of The Brandon Teena Story Produced And Directed By Susan Muska And Greta Olafsdottir, June Perry Levine

Great Plains Quarterly

CRIME AND RESPONSIBILITY

The Brandon Teena Story, Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's recently released documentary, addresses the circumstances of a triple murder that occurred on the last day of December 1993 in a rural farmhouse in southeastern Nebraska. The crime received national media coverage because one of its victims, the principal target of the attack, was a young woman who had, for some time, been living as a man. The two other victims, a young man and woman, were killed because they were witnesses. The murderers were quickly apprehended and tried, one sentenced to life in prison, the other …

Romantic Women And La Lucha Denise Chavez's Face Of An Angel, Francine K. Ramsey Richter

Great Plains Quarterly

Denise Chavez's skillful and evocative Face of an Angel (1994) examines the inequitable and discomfiting, yet somehow powerful, place of women in New Mexico border culture.! Their lives are mainly devoted to the hard work of serving others, and Chavez connects the past and present of the women of the area through the life story of the main character Soveida Dosamantes (born in 1948). Much of what makes up Soveida's present, everyday existence has its origins over the border in Old Mexico, and the established customs and traditions have a great deal of impact upon Soveida and her family in …

Review Of Researching Western History: Topics In The Twentieth Century, Gerald D. Nash And Richard W. Etulain, Eds., Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

Between bookend pieces by Earl Pomeroy and Gene M. Gressley, this anthology of hopes comprises essays on economic history by Gerald D. Nash, environmental history by Thomas R. Cox, urban history by Roger W. Lotchin, political history by Robert W. Cherny, women's history by Glenda Riley, cultural history (mainly literature) by Richard W. Etulain, and mythic history (mainly film) by Fred Erisman. The authors vary in the degree to which they emphasize historiography (what already has been done) or the historical agenda (what they think ought to be done), but the formula is much the same throughout: scan the recent …

Review Of Thomas Jefferson And The Changing West: From Conquest To Conservation, James P. Ronda, Ed., John Lauritz Larson

Great Plains Quarterly

Thomas Jefferson would have liked the idea of this book (if not all the essays themselves) since the American West was a canvas on which he loved to paint. Obvious links to western history can be found in Jefferson's 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory and his central role in launching the subsequent expedition of Lewis and Clark. Of more subtle relevance was Jefferson's propensity to construct worlds in his imagination, usually filled with sturdy yeomen laboring virtuously on freehold farms carved out of a continental wilderness that he preferred to think of as empty and inviting. Hence the monument …