Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Wichita Indians: Traders Of Texas And The Southern Plains, 1540-1845 By F. Todd Smith, Howard Meredith

Great Plains Quarterly

The perception of order in seeming chaos in The Wichita Indians arises from the historical discipline of Todd Smith. Building upon the studies of Elizabeth A. Harper John and the work of several archaeologists, Smith states that his study is not intended to be the final word on the Wichita Nations, but an attempt at an objective point of view providing a base of diplomatic and military historical interpretation for future work by "other scholars to build upon and produce more detailed studies .... " These will include Anglo-American historians and Wichita scholars and leaders such as Gary McAdams and …

Review Of The Texas Sheriff; Lord Of The County Line By Thad Sitton, Nail Sapper

Great Plains Quarterly

Thad Sitton's The Texas Sheriff, an anecdotal collage of reminiscences about local law enforcement in Texas in the first half of the twentieth century, is based upon extensive interviews with more than thirty retired Texas county sheriffs as well as articles from the Sheriffs' Association of Texas Magazine and the Texas Lawman. Sitton also draws upon memoirs and newspaper columns written by former Texas county sheriffs and reportage in the popular press.

Unfortunately for this book, Texas is a large state with 254 counties. The Texas Sheriff focuses on only a few counties with colorful or communicative sheriffs. In …

"No Place To Hide" Wright Morris's Great Plains, Joseph J. Wydeven

Great Plains Quarterly

Perhaps echoing Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," Wright Morris begins his finest novel, Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), with an invitation to the reader: "Come to the window," we are beckoned, and then we are told what is there to be seen: not much. But what is there is a view of the Great Plains that is highly conceptual and paradoxically suggestive in its emptiness. Outside the window, "[t]he view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky." With us inside the hotel is an old man, Tom Scanlon, who, soured on experience and addicted to nostalgia, has …

Review Of The Literary History Of Alberta: Volume Two By George Melnyk, Kristjana Gunnars

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1988 the Alberta 2005 Centennial History Society started to commission a series of specialized studies on Alberta, called Alberta Reflections, to be ready for the 2005 Provincial Centennial. George Melnyk's The Literary History of Alberta, a survey of the publishing history of Alberta up to the end of the twentieth century, is part of that series; the author is himself a member of Alberta's literary community. The second volume of his literary history covers the last fifty years of Alberta literature, and Melnyk takes care to point out the hazards of his position. Writing from inside the …

Review Of The Prairie People: Forgotten Anabaptists By Rod Janzen, Courtney Muir Wallner

Great Plains Quarterly

In his latest book, The Prairie People: Forgotten Anabaptists, Rod Janzen examines the Prairieleut, a sect of Germanic Anabaptists who have largely escaped the public view, even as researchers have focused on their relatives, the Hutterites.

The Prairieleut and modern-day Hutterites are descendants of a small group of radical Christians who rejected the orthodox doctrines of infant baptism and Transubstantiation and began living communally in 1528. After more than three centuries of religious persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Hutterites fled overseas in the 1870s and settled on the northern Great Plains. They selected a sparsely populated area …

Review Of Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen: Reflections At Sixty And Beyond By Larry Mcmurtry, University Of Texas At Austin

Great Plains Quarterly

Larry McMurtry's question for Walter Benjamin is "what kind of stories arise in a place where nothing has ever happened . . . ?" All that happens in Archer County are "accidents, injuries, bad choices, good choices, mistakes made with horses, misjudgments of neighbors, and the like."

What McMurty occasionally realizes, but often forgets, is that he is writing about his personal experience, not about the American West. For him, the most important characteristic of prairie life is "emptiness." What "rodeos, movies, Western art, and pulp fiction all miss is the overwhelming loneliness of the westering experience."

Reflecting on his …

Review Of Gentle Eminence: A Life Of Cardinal Flahiff By P. Wallace Platt, Johannes C. Wolfart

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a very odd book. It is also very interesting- remarkably so. What I cannot determine is whether it is interesting merely because it is odd. Certainly its main subject, George Bernard Flahiff, once Cardinal and Archbishop of Winnipeg, does not appear to have been a very interesting man.

What is interesting, however, is the relationship of the biographer to his subject, a man whom P. Wallace Platt obviously admires. Flahiff was Platt's Basilian confrere and spiritual director. It should be no surprise, then, that Platt has much to say about the essential goodness of the man. Indeed, he …

Review Of Sam Bass & Gang By Rick Miller, Larry D. Ball

Great Plains Quarterly

Since his death in 1878, outlaw Sam Bass has inspired a considerable body of "Wild West" literature, much of it unreliable. Rick Miller's Sam Bass & Gang is a useful corrective.

Sam Bass's foray into crime was short and inglorious. Born in Indiana in 1851, he wandered into Texas in the 1870s. Largely unschooled and having no trade, Bass worked at odd jobs until the sporting life attracted him. With a partner, he purchased a fast horse and followed the racing circuit. In 1876 Bass joined Joel Collins, a saloon man and cattle dealer, to drive a herd to the …

Review Of Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion By Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Bruce Allen Dick

Great Plains Quarterly

Rudolfo Anaya is one of today's leading Chicano writers. Since the release of Bless Me, Ultima, his groundbreaking first novel in 1972, Anaya has published eight additional novels, a collection of short stories, a travel journal, an epic poem, and several plays. Over the years his work has received widespread praise throughout the Latino literary community, earning him such laudatory epithets as "Godfather and guru of Chicano literature," "the most acclaimed and universal Chicano writer," and "our poet of the llano and the barrio."

Margarite Fernandez Olmos discusses how Anaya garnered this standing-and more-in Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical …

Review Of The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 By Scott Riney, Amy M. Goodburn

Great Plains Quarterly

This book contributes to the growing canon of historical accounts of American Indian government boarding schools that operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing specifically on the thirty-five year history of the Rapid City Indian School, Riney analyzes interactions between school administrators and Northern Plains Indian parents and their children. Organized around such themes as curriculum, discipline, cycles of days and years, employees, and BIA influence, the book describes the Rapid City Indian School's regional importance to schooling on the Northern Plains and its relationship to the larger history of US Indian education.

The most groundbreaking chapter, …

Title And Contents- Summer 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 3 / Summer 2001

CONTENTS

"THE WORST FLOODS IN HISTORY": FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE FLOODS OF 1944 IN THE ELKHORN RIVER BASIN Todd Kerstetter

THE NEW DEAL'S LAND UTILZATION PROGRAM IN THE GREAT PLAINS Geoff Cunfer

A NEW VISION OF AMERICA: LEWIS AND CLARK AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION James P. Hendrix Jr.

BOOK REVIEWS

Michael L. Tate The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West By RICHARD BRUCE WINDERS

Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith Frontier Children By SUSAN ARRINGTON MADSEN

Larry Sklenar To Hell With Honor: Custer and the Little …

Review Of Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature By Dee Horne, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly

In Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (1998), Louis Owens critiques a formative study of post-colonial literature, The Empire Writes Back (1990), because it "ignores entirely the impressive body of literature written by American Indian authors." Such an "omission," he suggests, is symptomatic of American Indian literature's marginalization even within marginalized literary studies. Dee Horne's Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature seeks to remedy this omission by reading selected First Nations authors through the lens of post-colonial theory. Horne's overarching goal is to explore the ways in which American Indian writers, to borrow Audre Lorde's formulation, use the "master's" linguistic …

Review Of Voices In The Wind: A Waterton-Glacier Anthology Edited By Barbara Grinder, Valerie Haigbrown, And Kevin Van Tighem, Pamela Banting

Great Plains Quarterly

Voices in the Wind is a diverse collection of personal essays, anecdotes, profiles, and journalism contributed by some of the participants in the three Waterton-Glacier International Writers' Conferences held in 1995, 1997, and 1999. Offering three days of writing, editing, and publishing workshops, the conference also includes field trips with local experts and encourages participants to write and publish articles about issues relating to the ecology of the region. Voices in the Wind collects some of these articles by both Canadian and American conferees. Several are full-time journalists, editors, or photographers, but the majority work as biologists, wildlife technicians, range …

Review Of Waiting On The Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary Of Mary Knackstedt Dyck Edited By Pamela Rineykehrberg, Brian Q. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

Thanks to Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, the University of Iowa Press, and the daughters of Mary Knackstedt Dyck, we have a wonderful new resource for studying farm life on the Southern Plains: Mary Dyck's edited diaries from 1936 to 1941. A farm woman in southwestern Kansas, Mary Dyck began keeping a detailed diary sometime during the 1930s. Although her earliest journals have been lost, her writings stretching over nearly two decades from 1936 to 1955 have been preserved by her family. Based upon the entries' historical value and their depiction of core elements of Mary Dyck's world, Riney-Kehrberg carefully selected roughly one-third …

Review Of Holding Stone Hands: On The Trail Of The Cheyenne Exodus By Alan Boye, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1995 Alan Boye, an English professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont, began a thousand-mile journey on foot retracing the steps of Little Wolf's and Dull Knife's Northern Cheyennes in 1878-1879 that took them from Indian Territory to Montana. The Cheyennes were escaping from deplorable conditions on the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian Reservation at Darlington Agency near Fort Reno, Indian Territory. Troops from four federal military departments were eventually placed in the field to stop them.

Fighting their way through Indian Territory and Kansas, the Indians eventually split into two groups in Nebraska. Dull Knife's followers were captured …

Review Of Larry Mcmurtry: A Critical Companion By John M. Reilly, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly

In his recent travel book, Roads: Driving America's Great Highways, Larry McMurtry declares himself a plainsman born and bred. He makes no bones about his preference for the American West-especially the Great Plains-over the East and the South. Certainly much of McMurtry's fiction implicitly suggests this preference. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, for example, follows an epic nineteenth-century cattle drive from the tip of south Texas to Montana near the Canadian border, and the writer's feeling for the land comes through loud and clear in his descriptive prose.

That McMurtry was chosen as the subject of one …

Review Of Will Rogers: A Biography By Ben Yagoda, James M. Smallwood

Great Plains Quarterly

Ben Yagoda has produced an excellent biography of Oklahoma's Will Rogers, the "All American Common Man" who spoke for the dispossessed and lowly, while poking fun at the rich and powerful. Yet what helps make Yagoda's study a good one may well cause controversy. Most of the previous works on Will Rogers, perhaps even my own, have tended to let him evolve into a legendary, almost mythical, character, glorifying his saintly virtues and ignoring his vices.

Will represented an old West where manly virtues abounded. Born the son of an Indian rancher, he grew up in the Cattle Kingdom that …

Review Of New Moon At Batoche: Reflections On The Urban Prairie By George Melnyk, Birk Sproxton

Great Plains Quarterly

In his latest book of cultural analysis, George Melnyk deplores the fact that although the great majority of Prairie Canadians live in urban areas, the dominant iconography of the region celebrates the land and denigrates the city. Melnyk asks how such a huge number of people (more than seven in ten) could be "excluded from the region's imagination?" "This is only possible," he says, answering his own question, "because city life has not been associated with the region's identity in any major way." Imagining the city is the role of artists and intellectuals, and in the nine essays that make …

Review Of The Family Farmers' Advocate: South Dakota Farmers Union, 1914-2000 By Lynwood E. Oyos, Herbert T. Hoover

Great Plains Quarterly

Two themes stand out in this extraordinary analysis of decline in family farm population on the Northern Great Plains since the 1930s. One is the organization of farmers and ranchers as a reaction to economic colonialism and inhospitable natural conditions. Lynwood Oyos properly portrays the Farmers Union as the largest rural organization with a politically liberal disposition in the history of his state. Its leaders, representing as many as 21, 600 members (in 1949), fashioned "a triangle" of functions to include cooperative services, education of members, and lobbying for assistance from both state and national governments. Oyos chronicles the Farmers …

Review Of Lines Of Site: Ideas, Forms, And Materialities Curated By Desmond Rochfort With Ryoji Ikeda, Gary Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

Desmond Rochfort has documented an extraordinary exhibition of printed artworks created in the Canadian West over the past twenty-five years. His perceptive essay in the catalogue, "Printmaking, Technologies and the Culture of the Reproducible Image," discusses the relationship between the tradition of the hand-pulled, limited edition prints of the past five hundred years and the novel technologies of the pixilated, global "Image Culture" employing "multi-reproducible digital imaging" computers.

The exhibition contains the work of a cross section of contemporary artists: twenty-five graduate students, two printmaking technicians, and three printmaking faculty from the University of Alberta. The wide variety of prints, …

The New Deal's Land Utilization Program In The Great Plains, Geoff Cunfer

Great Plains Quarterly

Drive the remote highways of the Great Plains and you will find signs marking US Forest Service property in the midst of the nation's vast interior grassland, a place where it could be miles to the next tree, let alone a forest. In fact, the Forest Service (USFS) manages several million acres of land in the Great Plains, public land designated "National Grasslands" and committed to grazing by private cattle ranchers. The National Grasslands are remnants of the Great Plains past, their story rooted in pioneer homesteads and in the drought and depression of the 1930s. USFS brochures explain the …

Notes And News- Summer 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award 2001

Great Plains Migrations (7-9 March 2002)

75th Anniversary Of Prairie Schooner

New Director For Emporia State University's Center For Great Plains Studies

Great Plains Restoration Council

National Cowgirl Museum And Hall Of Fame

Review Of The Frontier Army In The Settlement Of The West By Michael L. Tate, Richard Winders

Great Plains Quarterly

Readers conditioned to expect any book with "army" in its title to be filled with detailed descriptions of campaigns and battles will be disappointed with Michael L. Tate's Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West. Instead of focusing on the conquest of the West by force of arms, Tate describes the army's vital role as agent for economic and cultural development. An example of new military history, an approach that examines the social aspects of soldiering, his work is a significant contribution to our understanding of the American West.

Tate's thesis is that the army provided civilians in …

A New Vision Of America Lewis And Clark And The Emergence Of The American Imagination, James P. Hendrix Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

When Lewis and Clark awakened in St. Louis on 24 September 1806, one suspects that they felt quite well rested. They had just slept in regular beds for the first time in 864 days. As men who "had forgotten the use of chairs ... they must have had a way of standing and a look in their eyes," Bernard De Yoto imagines.¹ Now was the time for reverie, and celebration, as the capital of the Northern Louisiana Territory welcomed back explorers who had been given up as lost.

Two days later, as the initial fanfare began to subside, Clark …

"The Worst Floods In History" Federal Government And The Floods Of 1944 In The Elkhorn River Basin, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly

Water has played a critical, even defining, role in the history of the American West. Typically, scarcity determined water's significance. Farmers descended of European stock found too little water in the West to continue their traditional agriculture. Battles linger to this day over water rights for irrigation and urban usage. In a less-examined phenomenon, excess water has shaped the otherwise arid Plains by influencing the relationship between humans and their environment. In Nebraska's Elkhorn River Basin, a steady history of flooding led humans to alter the basin in attempts to control or mitigate flooding. Record flooding in 1944 revealed the …

Review Of To Hell With Honor: Custer And The Little Bighorn By Larry Sklenar, Thomas R. Buecker

Great Plains Quarterly

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is seen as one of the paramount events in the long struggle between whites and Native peoples on the Great Plains. Consequently, new studies of the battle and the personalities involved regularly appear each year. To Hell With Honor is one of the best recent works to join the steady stream of Little Bighorn literature.

Author Larry Sklenar, in his own words "an analyst by inclination and by experience," could not resist trying to untangle the puzzle of what happened that fateful day. Sklenar examined the vast array of reports, testimony, recollections, and previous …

Review Of Sing With The Heart Of A Bear: Fusions Of Native And American Poetry, 1890~ 1999 By Kenneth Lincoln, William M. Clements

Great Plains Quarterly

In the North American Review for 1815, Walter Channing suggested that America could compensate for its lack of a literary heritage distinct from Europe by attending to the "oral literature of its aborigines." Though probably not the first to propose this idea, Channing was among the earliest to call upon writers in the United States to found an indigenous belletristic tradition upon Native American models. The call has been periodically taken up by commentators on American literature ever since; William Gilmore Simms, Mary Austin, and now Kenneth Lincoln have all found the roots of a truly American literature in American …

Review Of Aboriginal People And Colonizers Of Western Canada To 1900 By Sarah Carter, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly

This critical survey of Western Canadian history seeks to set the record straight. Sarah Carter takes issue with prevalent versions, much of which she sees as distorted because of inadequate or suppressed information, as well as from biases and misconceptions. As she points out, in some cases there have been actual misrepresentations: the accounts of explorer Samuel Hearne (1745-92), who reached the Arctic Ocean overland, and artist Paul Kane (1810- 71), who recorded Plains Indian life in his paintings while keeping a diary, were altered by publishers with an eye to sales. A consistent underestimation of the role of Indians …

Review Of Black Cowboys Of Texas Edited By Sara R. Massey, Chiyuma Elliott

Great Plains Quarterly

This is one of those rare books that truly push the boundaries of the extant primary source material. Black Cowboys of Texas is the collaborative work of twenty-seven professional and amateur historians. The majority of the book's twenty-five chapters are biographical sketches of individual African American cowboys or cowgirls. Most chapters successfully weave the scant information available about individuals into short, engaging profiles. The collection focuses on Texas, but also details cattle drives to Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota.

The work is divided into three sections. Part one, "The Early Cowboys," deals with the establishment and …

Review Of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong By James W. Loewen, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

Fairness demands confession of a certain chronology in my preparing this review. I read the work under discussion and then, before writing about it, began reading The Use and Abuse of Australian History (2000) by Graeme Davison. Lies Across America suffers by comparison to the masterly Australian work. My yellow-pad notes document, however, that before reading Davison I had already recorded my disappointments with James W. Loewen's work.

To give it its due, the book is entertaining and thought-provoking. Where Loewen finds fault, there generally is fault, and the accumulation of such faults in perceptible patterns gives pause. It is …