Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Confessions Of A Maddog: A Romp Through The High-Flying Texas Music And Literary Era Of The Fifties To The Seventies By Jay Dunston Milner, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

The title Confessions of a Maddog carries a reference that most readers will not recognize: the "Maddogs" were an assortment of Texas writers and musicians, rowdy "good-old-boys" (and a few girls), who in the 1960s created a social circle-Maddogs, Inc.-complete with official membership cards and a slogan. Milner's book is part autobiography, but mostly a memoir/reminiscence of a particular time and group of people. Billie Lee Brammer, Larry L. King, Bud Shrake, Dan Jenkins, Peter Gent, Gary Cartwright, and Milner himself led the somewhat motley crew. Musician Jerry Jeff Walker was a regular participant. More famous individuals, including Willie Nelson, …

Review Of Texas And Northeastern Mexico, 1630-1690 By Juan Bautista Chapa, Kimberly Henke Breuer

Great Plains Quarterly

This English translation of two seventeenth- century manuscripts concerning the exploration and settlement of northeastern Mexico and Texas is long overdue. The majority of the book is dedicated to Juan Bautista Chapa's Historia del nuevo reino de León de 1650 a 1690; the other translated manuscript is the revised 1690 expedition diary of Governor Alonso de León (the younger). This is the first widely published translation of Chapa's Historia into English. De León's revised diary is published here for the first time in either Spanish or English. Ned Brierley's translations, from the original manuscripts, are eminently readable and accessible.

Review Of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity In The Hollywood Western By Michael Coyne, John G. Cawelti

Great Plains Quarterly

English and French scholars began to write serious critical commentaries on the American Western almost before Americans did. Beginning with Andre Bazin's important essays of the 1950s, the analyses of Jean Mitry and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, and coming down to Paul Bleton's 1997 collection Les hauts et les bas de l'imaginaire western, the French have helped us realize the artistic importance of the generic Western just as they showed Americans how to appreciate Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, and many other major figures. The English critical tradition on the Western has been equally rich but different in its orientation. Beginning …

Review Of Cowboy Justice: Tale Of A Texas Lawman By Jim Gober, Mark R. Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1980, James Gober inherited a discolored and aged bundle of papers that had once belonged to his grandfather, Jim RansIer Gober. To his surprise, he found they contained a rough, unedited autobiographical account of his grandfather's life as a Great Plains cowboy, lawman, detective, gambler, and saloon- keeper. Although Jim Gober was a relatively unknown Great Plains figure, his grandson believed his life story contributed significantly to the history of this region; with the assistance of B. Byron Price, a historian and executive director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, he edited and organized the narrative for publication.

Review Of Constructing The Little House: Gender, Culture, And Laura Ingalls Wilder By Ann Romines, Fred Erisman

Great Plains Quarterly

Linking her own experiences with those of the fictional and historical Laura Ingalls Wilders, Ann Romines advances several issues she considers central to a fuller understanding of Wilder's well-known "Little House" books. Her five chapters (plus a conclusion) take up the books in chronological order, from Little House in the Big Woods (1932) to the posthumously published The First Four Years (1971), exploring the personal, cultural, and literary processes at work in each.

Review Of Creating The New Woman: The Rise Of Southern Women's Progressive Culture In Texas By Judith N. Mcarthur, Nancy Baker Jones

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is another significant contribution to the growing list of scholarly studies of the history of Texas women. Within the larger contexts of southern culture, the Progressive Movement, and the history of feminism, McArthur has produced a convincing chronology of the transformation of middle-class, white Texas women from members of a "patriarchal, evangelical culture that discouraged the formation of independent women's networks" to "volunteerists" who worked openly for social and political reform through their own clubs and associations. Between the 1890s and World War I, women's increasing use of "maternalist politics" challenged male dominance of the public sphere, thereby …

Review Of Women Of Oklahoma, 1890-1920 By Linda Williams Reese, Patricia Loughlin

Great Plains Quarterly

In Women of Oklahoma, Linda Williams Reese traces the experiences of African American, Native American, and white women from the creation of Oklahoma Territory in 1890 to the decade following statehood. Using a wealth of source material including diaries, letters, newspaper articles, oral histories, and census materials, Reese reconstructs the lives of Oklahoma women-offering a record of the past often overlooked in Oklahoma history prior to this important work.

Review Of Tempest Over Teapot Dome: The Story Of Albert B. Fall By David H. Stratton, Roy Lujan

Great Plains Quarterly

David H. Stratton has written a brilliant, comprehensive biography of Albert B. Fall, Secretary of Interior during the Harding administration and the first cabinet member ever convicted and imprisoned for crimes committed while holding office. Fall had leased to Harry E. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny naval oil reserves in Wyoming's Teapot Dome and California's Elk Mountain and accepted $404,000 from these oil tycoons. The book proposes that out of his early career as a western speculator and corporation lawyer, Fall developed an anti-conservation philosophy and espoused unrestrained and immediate disposition of public lands to private enterprise. Thus, had he …

Review Of William Lindsay White, 1900-1973: In The Shadow Of His Father By E. Jay Jernigan, Joel Mathis

Great Plains Quarterly

E. Jay Jernigan's biography of Bill White results from deep research through personal family correspondence and unindexed Gazette files, as well as the libraries of several Kansas universities. Jernigan uses this research to paint a multifaceted portrait of Bill White, whose Eastern sensibilities made his fellow Emporians regard him as an elitist, yet whose capabilities, Jernigan says, often exceeded those of his more famous father. The end result is a fascinating biography of a man who never entirely escaped his father's shadow-but made every effort to cast one of his own.

Review Of Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation Of The Rural North, 1870-1930 By Hal S. Barron, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly

Mixed Harvest is a good title for a book that documents the complexity of interests involved in twentieth-century farming. A broad swipe at characterization too often substitutes in histories for a more careful analysis in which surface affinities fall apart. Barron uses case studies from selected counties of the battles fought across the East and Midwest over roads, consolidated schools, farmers' grain elevators, and mail-order buying to probe a "second transformation" of American society following the initial spread of industrial capitalism early in the nineteenth century. This "transformation" was marked by centralization of the economy, expansion of state power and …

Review Of Mexican Americans In The 1990s: Politics, Policies, And Perceptions, Ed. Juan Garcia, Ed A. Muñoz

Great Plains Quarterly

In Mexican Americans in the 1990s, Juan Garda assembles a fine collection of essays addressing the tremendous diversity and fluidity of the Latino/Chicano/Mexican American political experience in contemporary US society. More importantly, the contributors' admirable analyses and interpretations of Latino/Chicano/Mexican American identity, culture, and politics in the thirty-year wake of the Chicano Movement provide a refreshing alternative to those who view the decline of strict cultural nationalism and oppositional politics as detrimental to Chicano self-determination and community empowerment.

Review Of A Thousand Honey Creeks Later: My Life In Music From Basie To Motown And Beyond By Preston Love, Annette L. Murrell

Great Plains Quarterly

That's why his book is an intriguing combination of autobiography, sermon, and manifesto. Love's mission is not only to recount his life's many memorable moments, but also to lament the present state of jazz in America (particularly the weak music scene in Omaha, a city that between the 1930s and 1960s boasted of world class musicians and a thriving club scene), and the "whitewashing" of jazz which he considers to be black music. "If my anger seems excessive," he writes, "consider that Elvis Presley became the biggest star in the history of show business and was referred to as the …

Review Of Oil, Wheat, And Wobblies: The Industrial Workers Of The World In Oklahoma, 1905-1930 By Nigel Anthony Sellars, Salvatore Salerno

Great Plains Quarterly

The strength of Sellars's work is that it draws attention to the activities of the IWW at a local level during the least understood period of its history. This is particularly true of the book's focus on the A WOo A pioneer in the development of some of the IWW's most important strategies during this period, the A WO has received little previous attention. While Sellars illuminates the local, his work runs into trouble in its treatment of larger struggles within the IWW, the relative importance of the IWW's industrial unions, and the movement's culture. For example, although the book …

Title And Contents- Winter 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 19/ Number 1 / Winter 1999

Contents

The Death Of Edward Mcmurty

Litigation, Mitigation, And The American Indian Religious Freedom Act: The Bear Butte Example

Literacy Practices At The Genoa Industrial Indian School

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of Beyond The Frontier: Exploring The Indian Country By Stan Hoig, Suzanne Jones-Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly

In Beyond the Frontier: Exploring the Indian Country, Stan Hoig has compiled a compendium of explorers who traversed present-day Oklahoma from 12 July 1541 to 15 June 1860. Intended for non-scholarly audiences, the book offers just the plain unvarnished facts-culled from a variety of primary and secondary sources-about these adventurers and their probes.

The introduction establishes the geographic limits of Indian Territory, delineates the period under consideration, and discusses the various jurisdictional disputes over this area. For the reader's convenience the author has provided a brief biographic sketch of each explorer.

According to Hoig, by focusing on the minute …

Review Of Proclaiming The Gospel To The Indians And The Metis: The Missionary Oblates Of Mary I Mmaculate In Western Canada, 1845-1945 By Raymond ]. A. Huel, Gerhard J. Ens

Great Plains Quarterly

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate were the dominant Catholic clergy in western Canada and as such played an important role in the colonization of the Great Plains. Proclaiming the Gospel to the Indians and the Metis, the third volume in the Western Oblate History Project, has as its focus the Oblates' missionary work in Canada's prairie provinces from 1845 to 1945.

Raymond Huel begins his study by delineating the ideological values and goals that motivated the Oblate mission in Canada, and then provides a useful analysis of the order's various mission initiatives. During their early years in western Canada …

Review Of The Nebraska Indian Wars Reader, 1865-1877 Edited By R. Eli Paul, James O. Gump

Great Plains Quarterly

Between 1854 and 1890, the military frontier in western Nebraska witnessed major events, including Harney's victory over the Sioux at Ash Hollow in 1855, the Republican River Expedition of 1869, the Battle of Massacre Canyon in 1873, skirmishes in the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, and the killing of Crazy Horse in 1877. These years also featured the activities of such famous Lakota leaders as Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Crazy Horse, the US Fifth Cavalry headquartered at Fort McPherson, as well as the "Dandy Fifth's" leading personalities, including General Eugene Carr, "Buffalo Bill" Cody (chief of scouts), and Major …

Review Of The Night Has A Naked Soul: Witchcraft And Sorcery Among The Western Cherokee. By Alan Kilpatrick, Pekka Hamalainen

Great Plains Quarterly

This fascinating, slim volume provides a rare glimpse of the supernatural world of the' Cherokee Indians, a topic shielded by linguis.-" tic, cultural, and mental barriers. The Chero~ kees possess an extraordinary corpus of magical texts, recorded over one hundred and fifty yearsby their folk healers in small ledger notebooks .. These texts, written in the Sequoyah syllabary and known as idi:gawe:sdi, contain a large body of knowledge of such occult subjects as love magic, rainmaking, and protective charms. In The Night Has a Naked Soul, Alan Kilpatrick, an associate professor of American Indian studies at San Diego State …

Review Of Seeing The White Buffalo By Robert B. Pickering, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly

For those unfamiliar with the White Buffalo and its relationship with Native American spirituality, this is the book to read. The author, curator of anthropology for the Denver Museum of Natural History, has written an accessible, informative guide that surveys the popular response to Miracle, the female white buffalo calf born in 1994. Pickering covers four areas: first, the personal perspectives of Dave and Val Heider, the Janesville, Minnesota, couple who run a small buffalo herd in which Miracle was born; then the "historical-cultural perspectives of American Indians"; the "spiritual perspectives" of Native and non-Native peoples toward Miracle; and the …

Review Of Readings In American Indian Law: Recalling The Rhythm Of Survival Edited By Jo Carrillo, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly

In most law school curricula, the study of "American Indian law" concentrates on cases involving Native Americans in United States courts and usually has little to do with the systems Native Americans used to govern interpersonal relations before they began to interact with their conqueror's courts. This anthology of readings attempts, in the words of its jacket copy, to "expand doctrinal discussions into understandings of culture, strategy, history, identity, and hopes for the future ... [with] an array of alternative paradigms as strong antidotes to our usual conceptions of federal Indian law."

The book fulfills part of that bold promise. …

Review Of Satanta: The Life And Death Of A War Chief. By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Benjamin R. Kracht

Great Plains Quarterly

Set-t' ainte, or "White Bear," whose name was Anglicized into Satanta, was one of the most feared Southern Plains warriors and raiders in the mid-nineteenth century. Robinson's biography of Satanta also remembered as the "Orator of the Plains"-grew out of the author's research into the history of Fort Richardson and the May 1871 killing of seven teamsters outside the nearby town of Jacksboro, Texas. White Bear and Big Tree, the two Kiowa warriors held responsible for the teamsters' deaths, were the first American Indian leaders to be tried in a civil court (State of Texas v. Satanta and Big …

The Death Of Edward Mcmurty, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

Edward McMurty would have been lost to history if it hadn't been for the way he died and for what it meant in frontier Nebraska. McMurty's bloated body was found on 20 June 1869 in a pond on an island in the Platte River, about five miles from the town of Columbus (Fig. 1). He had been missing for six weeks. His body had been tethered to a large log and weighted down in the water. But distant snowmelts in the Rocky Mountains and a torrential Nebraska downpour on June 19th swelled the Platte, which flowed onto the island, flooding …