Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Prairie Peddlers: The Syrian-Lebanese In North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Paul Whitney, And John Guerrero, Philip M. Kayal

Great Plains Quarterly

This remarkable ethnographic study of the Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota is unique. The data and information are original, never mind that the voices heard are nearly those of the early settlers, certainly those of their children. The authors use the records of the late 1930s (early 1940s) Federal Writers Projects and the Works Progress Administration to understand the reasons for Arab migration to North Dakota and the Great Plains, their employment practices, life styles (marriage patterns, culinary habits), and religious traditions, their distribution, settlements, institutions (or lack thereof), and finally their near total assimilation.

If it were homesteading that attracted …

Notes And News- Spring 2004

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Call For Papers: "Education On The Great Plains"

Homestead Heritage Center

The Prairies: Lost And Found

Canada's Campaign For Immigrants And The Images In Canada West Magazine, Laura A. Detre

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the major challenges that Canadian government officials felt they faced at the end of the nineteenth century was the development of the prairie West. By this time there were large urban centers in eastern Canada, but many Canadians worried that they had not truly ensured the future existence of their country. They hoped that filling the middle, the province of Manitoba and the region that would become the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, with prosperous, white, family farmers would support the industrialized cities of the East. To do this the government engaged in a systematic program to encourage …

Title And Contents- Spring 2004

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 24/ Number 2 / Spring 2004

CONTENTS

RANGERS, MOUNTIES, AND THE SUBJUGATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, 1870-1885 Andrew R. Graybill

"THIS STRANGE WHITE WORLD": RACE AND PLACE IN ERA BELL THOMPSON'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER Michael K. Johnson

CANADA'S CAMPAIGN FOR IMMIGRANTS AND THE IMAGES IN CANADA WEST MAGAZINE Laura A. Detre

BOOK REVIEWS

Susan J. Rosowski, ed. Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination By STEVEN TROUT

Simona Bertacco Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch By CAROL L. BERAN

William Kloefkorn Restoring the Burnt Child: A Primer By DAVID PICHASKE

Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, …

Review Of Out Of Place: The Writings Of Robert Kroetsch By Simona Bertacco, Carol L. Beran

Great Plains Quarterly

The 1965 Johnny Cash rendition of E.T. Rouse's "Orange Blossom Special" includes the line, "I don't care if I do die do die do die do die do die." Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue (1986) echoes the line. In Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch, Simona Bertacco says the passage shows how Kroetsch pushes "'words out of meaning'" and "makes language abandon ... its conventional function to become intransitive and intensive." Kroetsch, however, increases the number of repetitions and ends on the wrong word in the sequence, throwing the allusion into doubly new territory as it moves from …

Review Of Archbishop A.-A. Tache Of St. Boniface: The "Good Fight" And The Illusive Vision By Raymond J. A. Hue!, Robert Choquette

Great Plains Quarterly

Alexandre Tache, one of the very first Canadians to join the French Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate who arrived in Canada in 1841, was sent to work in Canada's Northwest in 1845 where he became second bishop of St. Boniface in 1853, and later archbishop. He remained there until his death in 1894, a half-century during which the region was transformed from a vast hunting emporium for furs to a refuge for tens of thousands of Canadian, American, and European settlers brought into the area after 1860 on the rapidly expanding tracks of American and then Canadian railways. Tache built …

Review Of Children Of The Western Plains: The Nineteenth Century Experience By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Rosemary G. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

The small but growing collection of literature on children in the nineteenth-century American West has been expanded with Marilyn Holt's book about youngsters who migrated to the Great Plains during the 1800s. Children of the Western Plains examines the attention adults paid to young settlers as well as these youngsters' own sense of involvement in the Plains experience. Recognizing the diversity of residents, Holt considers the lives of native-born white, European immigrant, and African American children who contributed to the settlement process. Included in these numbers are military, missionary, and government employee dependents. The author examines young settlers' experiences within …

Review Of Restoring The Burnt Child: A Primer By William Kloefkom, David Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly

William Kloefkom's second book of memoirs is a blueprint for restoring lives scorched by the fires of fundamentalist Christianity, WCTU crusaders, cigarettes and whiskey, kitchen matches, sore throats, and thermonuclear explosions. The twelve chapters cover Kloefkom's life from age nine, when he torched the family kitchen, to age thirteen, when he delivered news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subscribers of the Wichita Beacon. The book fleshes out stories and personalities already familiar to readers of his poetry: parents and grandparents; life in Attica, Kansas; the slaughter of swallows and rabbits on grandfather's farm; landmarks like Turtle Rock and town marks …

Review Of Native Voices: American Indian Identity And Resistance Edited By Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, And David E. Wilkins, Beth R. Ritter

Great Plains Quarterly

From our current vantage point, the true legacy of Vine Deloria Jr.'s scholarship and activism can neither be fully measured nor overstated. We know with certainty, however, that the landscape of Native American scholarship has been permanently altered-for the best. Native Voices honors Deloria's contributions through the presentation of original Native scholarship inspired by his model. As its editors observe, "Deloria has influenced a whole generation of younger Indian scholars to be self-consciously indigenous thinkers-to reclaim an American Indian intellectual tradition, along with a political activism rooted in the oral traditions of our peoples and the wisdom of our elders …

Review Of The Native Americans Of The Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799 By Maria F. Wade, F. Todd Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Although this book promises to examine the Indians who lived in West Texas between the late sixteenth century to the end of the 1700s, most of the work-and the main original contribution the author makes-deals with two Spanish expeditions of exploration that occurred in the late seventeenth century. The author, an ethnohistorian, has provided a new translation of the 1675 expedition of Fernando del Bosque and Fr. Juan Larios, which left the northern Mexican town of Monclova in April, crossed the Rio Grande, and entered the Edwards Plateau before returning to its point of origin in June. In addition to …

Review Of Real Indians: Identity And The Survival Of Native America By Eva Marie Garroutte, Terry P. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Cherokee sociologist Eva Garroutte has fashioned a genuine contribution to the study of the American Indian in the United States. Herself a mixed-race person of Caucasian and Indian heritage, she focuses on the always troublesome and often controversial issue of Indian identity, one that pervades the consciousness of all Native Americans, and not a few non-Native folks. Her straightforward narrative is informed by published and unpublished sources in law, history, social science, and literature and enhanced by numerous in-depth interviews with Indian and non-Indian people. What results constitutes the single comprehensive book-length examination of "Indian-ness" in print.

Great Plains tribal …

Review Of Coacoochee's Bones: A Seminole Saga By Susan A. Miller, Alcione M. Amos

Great Plains Quarterly

In Coacoochee' s Bones Susan Miller tells the outstanding story of an outstanding leader in an outstanding manner. The repeated use of "outstanding" is necessary because Miller has produced a unique work on the history of the Seminole people, not just Coacoochee. The narrative is written from the point of view of a Seminole, with insights an outsider wouldn't have. Furthermore, she makes judicious use of primary historical Seminole, Mexican, and US sources and of published material, enhanced with knowledge garnered from anthropological studies. The result is a highly informative and readable book.

Miller does not shrink from taking stands …

Review Of Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont And The Course Of American Empire By Tom Chaffin, Robert J. Chandler

Great Plains Quarterly

Who was John Charles Fremont (1813-1890)? Tom Chaffin attempts to map his mind's terrain, but Fremont reveals little. More crucial than lack of personal papers is Fremont's character: Chaffin declares his writings to be "duplicitous apologia."

Chaffin, therefore, travels well-worn paths. Ferol Egan's Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation (1977,1985) comes to mind. While lacking Egan's richness of detail, Chaffin presents a fuller life. Where Egan dotes on "the great love affair" between Fremont and wife Jessie, Chaffin details Fremont's self-destructive womanizing. By 1856, he reports, a "growing distance" between the couple quickly became "a chill."

Some events defy explanation. …

Review Of The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude To Indian Reform By Valerie Sherer Mathes And Richard Lowitt, Sidney L. Harring

Great Plains Quarterly

Standing Bear v. George Crook, an 1879 case brought in the Federal District Court in Omaha, is today little more than a footnote in United States Indian law. Yet this case, like thousands of other cases that American Indians brought to US courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an important effort by one group of Indians to define their relationship with the United States through law. The Ponca story is among the best known, but certainly no more tragic than many of the other Indian cases.

The Ponca's lands were given to the Lakota, without their …

Review Of The Bizarre Careers Of John R. Brinkley By R. Alton Lee, Bob Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly

R. Alton Lee has produced an engaging book that details the full life of John R. Brinkley. As someone interested in quackery in the US, I already knew Brinkley as an exemplar of this genre, but there is much more to him. He was a complex man who carried many labels, some contradictory: quack, caring healer; devoted family man, liar and con-man; would be Governor, community booster, and radio station entrepreneur, the latter as a way to promote mail-order sales of his medical remedies and also to draw in patients to his hospital.

Lee's biography is an informative and entertaining …

Review Of Lynching In Colorado, 1859-1919 By Stephen J. Leonard, Jesse T. Moore Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

The term lynching likely conjures up in the minds of most Americans images of robed and hooded white men in the states of the Old Confederacy taking the law into their own hands to punish black males accused of violating white womanhood. Groups known as Regulators "enforced the law" in South Carolina as early as 1790. Lynching remained a form of punishment in Southern states until well into the twentieth century, despite the fact that most residents of the region frowned upon it.

Judge Lynch's powerful ghost prowled Colorado for more than half a century, "in part because he could …

Review Of Invisible Natives: Myth And Identity In The American Western By Armando Jose Prats, Peter N. Peregrine

Great Plains Quarterly

The relationship between the Great Plains and the Hollywood Western has always been a strange one. The "classic" era of the Hollywood Western, the period between roughly 1864 and 1887, is also the "classic" era of the Great Plains-the era of the pioneer, the gunslinger, the cattleman, and, of course, the Indian fighter. Oddly, the Great Plains are rarely featured prominently in Hollywood Westerns; rather, it is the desert Southwest that is most often depicted. The flowing grasslands and wooded river valleys upon which the events of the "classic" era of the Western unfolded are often shown as rocky wastelands. …

Review Of Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination Edited By Susan J. Rosowski, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly

In "A Guided Tour of Ecocriticism with Excursions to Catherland," one of the many fine essays contained in this new volume of Cather Studies, Cheryl Glotfelty remarks, "If the last decade of Cather [scholarship] has been the 'gender and sexuality' period, the new millennium may well begin with a fruitful ecocritical decade." It is ironic, given this prediction, that not all of the sixteen essays presented in Cather Studies 5 fall within the emerging field of ecocriticism. Indeed, the most impressive piece in the collection, Charles Johanningsmeier's "Unmasking Willa Cather's 'Mortal Enemy,'" is a tour de force of old-fashioned …

Rangers, Mounties, And The Subjugation Of Indigenous Peoples, 1870 .. 1885, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. The rapid environmental degradation of this area had the ·effect of driving the bison to the extreme Northern and Southern Plains, where white hide-hunters slaughtered the animals.¹ By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation.²

The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, …

"This Strange White World" Race And Place In Era Bell Thompson's American Daughter, Michael K. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly

Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography American Daughter (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: "Suddenly there was snow-miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray sky; deep banks of snow drifted against wooden snow fences .... All day long we rode through the silent fields of snow, a cold depression spreading over us." Thompson's realistic winter landscape descriptions also allegorically represent the social situation of herself and her family. The phrase "this strange white world," which …

Book Review: Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey, Chris Axworthy

Great Plains Quarterly

This important book about the life and contributions of Brian Dickson (1916-1998), perhaps Canada's greatest judge, is valuable not only because it traces that life but because it analyzes one of the most important periods of Canada's growth to full nationhood. That makes this not just a lawyer's book, nor simply a biography, but a book of important modern Canadian political history.

Book Review: Gone: Photographs Of Abandonment On The High Plains, David Taylor

Great Plains Quarterly

Steve Fitch's photographs depicting the interior of abandoned houses, schools, and stores on the High Plains are struck though with melancholy. Not the self-absorbed and self-pitying brand, but that of an observer who has come upon something tragic - lost potential, displaced lives, failed communities.

Fall 2004 Table Of Contents, Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Cover & Table of Contents from the Fall 2004 issue of Great Plains Quarterly.

Book Review: Profiting From The Plains: The Great Northern Railway And Corporate Development Of The American West, Barbara Handy-Marchello

Great Plains Quarterly

A former colleague of mine once remarked of James J. Hill, with some emphasis, that he was a "great man!" This statement seems subject to some qualifications, which my colleague did not provide, but which Claire Strom offers in Profiting from the Plains. Hill, the "empire builder," was a great man with many shortcomings, not the least of which was his conception of himself as a great man.

Book Review: The Future Of The Southern Plains, Ken Rainwater

Great Plains Quarterly

The Future of the Southern Plains is a collection of essays that evolved from a symposium at Southern Methodist University in 2001. The text's primary concern is how oil and water depletion in the Southern Plains affects the economy, autonomy, and aesthetics of the region.

Book Review: William S. Hart: Projecting The American West, Scott Simon

Great Plains Quarterly

This first biography of the early film star William S. Hart is solidly researched and full of useful information, even if written in unexciting prose. Hart is a difficult subject, a taciturn, self-dramatizing figure about whose peripatetic childhood on the Great Plains little is known and who came to live the Western persona created through his silent movies. He was forty-nine before his first film in 1914, and his career lasted only a decade. Still, in those years he starred in forty-eight feature-length films (and an additional nineteen two-reelers), for many of which he also served as de facto writer …

Book Review: A Great Plains Reader, Philip R. Coleman-Hull

Great Plains Quarterly

How does one describe the nature of this place that is the Great Plains? Diane Quantic and P. Jane Hafen do not attempt to answer that question in A Great Plains Reader, a marvelous collection of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction reflecting varied responses to the land and its inhabitants. They do, however, initiate a process of discovery and inquiry that compels the collection's reader to consider past and present, physical and psychological boundaries, and placement and displacement. And to that end, the title reflects the editors' double concern with both product and process: to compile a set …

Book Review: Down And Out On The Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation In The Great Plains, 1929-1945, Paula M. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

Anyone who loves the Great Plains and the life that took root there in the nineteenth century has had to face in recent years the decline and disappearance of that rural world. The Great Depression and the drought years of the 1930s were a key turning point in the evolution of farming on the Plains and helped set the stage for the long-term restructuring of farm life that has gone on there ever since. In Down and Out on the Family Farm: Rural Rehabilitation in the Great Plains, 1929-1945, Michael Grant provides a clear and concise economic history of …

Book Review: Galvanized Yankees On The Upper Missouri: The Face Of Loyalty, Vance E. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

Visitors to Fort Rice State Historic Site have little idea of the drama that took place there during the first few years after its construction in 1864. The site's historical marker contains no mention of the important task rendered by former Confederate soldiers who became known as "the Galvanized Yankees."

Book Review: Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education And The Teaching Of Writing, Susanne George Bloomfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Rural Voices, a collection of pedagogical essays from ten rural Nebraska elementary and secondary teachers, members of the Nebraska Writing Project's Rural Voices, Country Schools team, combines theory and practice to connect students and teachers with their surrounding communities, teaching them "to live well, actively, and fully in a given place." Robert Brooke's introduction begins, as does each of the essays, with a personal story about his connection to the Great Plains. Since "[l]ocal communities, regions, and histories are the places where we shape our individual lives," Brooke believes, they are essential to making education and writing relevant to …