History Commons^™

Review Of He Was Some Kind Of A Man: Masculinities In The B Western By Roderick Mcgillis, John M. Clum

Great Plains Quarterly

It takes something of a masochist to watch close to two hundred B westerns, but Roderick McGillis claims to have done that in researching this book. For those of you who are not film history buffs, a B movie was a cheap, relatively short (sixty to seventy-five minutes), formulaic genre film made to be the second half of a double feature. A lot of B movies were westerns because they were cheap and popular, particularly with boys and young men. They had their own stars, many of whom moved on to television, which killed the B movie: Roy Rogers, Gene …

Wish List Wilderness Endgame In The Black Hills National Forest, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

In January 1979 Dave Foreman loosened his tie, propped his cowboy boots up on his desk, and brooded awhile on RARE II. In a second try at Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE), the u.s. Forest Service had just spent two years deciding once and for all how much of its undeveloped land should be designated Wilderness. To Foreman, a Washington executive of the Wilderness Society, RARE II tasted of bitter defeat, and he lonesomely "popped the top on another Stroh's" as he brooded. The Forest Service had just recommended increasing its Wilderness acres from 18 million to 33 million, …

"If The Lord's Willing And The Creek Don't Rise" Flood Control And The Displaced Rural Communities Of Irving And Broughton, Kansas, Robin A. Hanson

Great Plains Quarterly

In this case study, I examine how the residents of two displaced rural Kansas towns, and their descendants, exhibit a sense of identity common to small farm communities throughout the Great Plains, and how tenacious these ties are even after the physical reminder of their communal bonds no longer exists. By examining the struggles to survive faced by these two towns, Irving and Broughton, the resiliency of the people who called them home, and the continuing expression of community solidarity by the individuals associated with them, I propose that the individuals living within these communities created a transcendental identity similar …

Review Of Delaware Tribe In A Cherokee Nation By Brice Obermeyer, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly

The federal acknowledgment process is a highly contested procedure under the best of circumstances. For the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma the negotiations to establish their national identity while living within the physical boundaries of the Cherokee Nation continue to divide its members and challenge modern interpretations of enrollment. Brice Obermeyer, a cultural anthropologist at Emporia State University and NAGPRA representative for the Delaware Tribe, provides a comprehensive discussion of this historic relationship.

Obermeyer summarizes the histories that brought the Cherokees and Delawares to eastern Oklahoma and the legal efforts to establish an independent Delaware identity since the 1867 Cherokee-Delaware Agreement. …

Review Of The Girl In Saskatoon: A Meditation On Friendship, Memory And Murder By Sharon Butala, Susan Maher

Great Plains Quarterly

On a warm May evening in 1962, young Saskatoon resident Alexandra Wiwcharuk left her flat to mail some letters and enjoy a little time on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River before reporting in for her night shift as a nurse at City Hospital. Sitting near a weir, she was within sight of a parking area and city streets. Many others were out that evening, sharing Alex's delight in heat and late sun on a holiday weekend, walking the paths, laughing over jokes and shared gossip, watching children play, and soaking in the city scene. But none of them …

Review Of Faces Of The Frontier: Photographic Portraits From The American West, 1845-1924 By Frank H. Goodyear Iii, With An Essay By Richard White And Contributions By Maya E. Foo And Amy L. Baskette, Mary Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

The rise of photography in the United States coincided with the spread of Manifest Destiny, and this handsome exhibit catalogue presents a veritable photographic who's who of the men (and a few women) who were pivotal actors in both the conquest and representation of the American West. The National Portrait Gallery organized the exhibition, Faces of the Frontier, in 2009, with travels to the San Diego Historical Society and the Gilcrease Museum in 2010. The book consists of essays by curator Frank H. Goodyear III and Richard White and the portraits themselves, accompanied by biographical captions.

Four thematic sections …

Review Of Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman And American Indian Thought By David Martinez, Gwen W. Westerman

Great Plains Quarterly

As a Dakota man, Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) carried the values and history of his people into a rapidly changing world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most often noted for his contributions as a narrator of Dakota life on the Great Plains in Indian Boyhood and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman was also an intellectual and an activist who worked diligently to address contemporary issues of Indian rights-efforts now brought into a new light in Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought.

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30 / Number 4 / Fall 2010

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic By Michael F. Steltenkamp, Dale Stover

Great Plains Quarterly

In Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic, Michael Steltenkamp explains that because of his chance acquaintance with Black Elk's daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, who "wanted people to know about his [Black Elk's] life as a catechist, I became the biographer of his life in the twentieth century." The author claims that his earlier book, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala (1993), which reports Lucy's version of her father's life, "showed how this otherwise stereo typically Plains Indian medicine man assumed a Christian identity, and how this was the religious legacy for which he was most remembered within …

Review Of Addie Of The Flint Hills: A Prairie Child During The Depression (1915-1935) By Adaline Sorace, Karen Manners Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

In her early nineties, decades after she had left the Kansas Flint Hills, Adaline Beedle Sorace sat down with her daughter to write her memoirs. With extraordinarily vivid recall, she evokes the place and the people of her youth, weaving the strands of a family and personal saga that stretches from the 1860s to the 1930s.

"Addie" Sorace's maternal forebears, the pioneering RogIer family, were German immigrants who settled in Chase County, Kansas, in the 1860s. Over the decades, the Roglers acquired thousands of acres of rolling grassland and became one of the wealthiest and most influential cattle ranching families …

Review Of Taming The Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs Of The Texas High Plains By John Miller Morris, Anne E. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly

The advent of the real photographic postcard (RPPC) and the burgeoning growth in the early twentieth century of the Texas Panhandle area of the southern Great Plains coincide. More than 100,000 "optimists" spilled into the region after 1906. The frontier receded as farmsteads grew around railroad towns. The era also witnessed a surge in popularity of the real photographic postcard from 1906 into the 1920s, mailed by the tens of thousands and collected in albums documenting the region. As the population grew, photographers increasingly worked for land developers making images of farmland and also of excursionists traveling to see the …

Review Of Indian Tribes Of Oklahoma: A Guide By Blue Clark, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly

Oklahoma's license plates, which formerly displayed an Osage shield, now depict a representation of Native son Allan Houser's evocative sculpture of a fellow Apache preparing to fire an arrow at the sky. The legend running across the bottom of the plate reads: "Native America." This is an apt statement about Oklahoma, site of pre-Columbian Indian settlements, westernmost extension of Mississippian mound building cultures, home for Kiowa and Comanche buffalo hunters, and adopted land of Cherokees and others forced to abandon familiar stomping grounds east of the Mississippi River. On a per capita basis, Oklahoma boasts the nation's largest Native American …

Review Of Crisscrossing Borders In Literature Of The American West Edited By Reginald Dyck And Cheli Reutter, Linda K. Karell

Great Plains Quarterly

With its uninspired Pepto-Bismol pink-colored cover, Crisscrossing Borders in the Literature of the American West might escape attention. That would be a loss because this new collection, edited by Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter, is a striking series of essays that simultaneously argue for and model new postnational and transnational approaches to western literary studies. In the introduction, Dyck asks, "Is it possible to have a western literary studies that recognizes the many forms of difference that create borders within and around the region while neither reifying those borders nor discounting their power?" The strategies employed by the various authors …

Review Of Charles Deas And 1840s America By Carol Clark, With Contributions By Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Frederick E. Hoxie, And Guy Jordan, Gail E. Husch

Great Plains Quarterly

His known works are not many-ninety-eight paintings, drawings, and prints are listed in Carol Clark's catalogue at the end of this richly documented volume-and almost half have not been located. Most of the artist's extant paintings were produced between 1833 and 1849. By the age of thirty, Charles Deas (1818-1867) was disturbed enough to require institutionalization; he spent the rest of his days in one asylum or another. With a career of such apparently limited scope and scale, one might wonder whether the artist deserves the attention he is given in this book and in the exhibition at the Denver …

Review Of All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives On Montana Literature Edited By Brady Harrison, Sue Hart

Great Plains Quarterly

This remarkable collection of essays offers something for every reader interested in Montana literature, from the well read to newcomers to the field. All the contributors are literary scholars, but some of their subject matter might come as a surprise. For example, Nancy Cook examines romance writers' use of Montana as a setting in her essay, pointing out in a footnote that despite the number of young, handsome ranch owners available in the pages of such books, "the average age of a farm/ranch operator in Montana [in 1997] was fifty-four, with the number of men under age thirty-four about 0.5 …

Review Of Writing Indian, Native Conversations By John Lloyd Purdy, Geraldine Mendoza Gutwein

Great Plains Quarterly

Writing Indian, Native Conversations provides keen discussion across three decades of Native American literature in the twentieth century along with consideration of literature in the new millennium. Interviews with well-known Native American scholars and authors such as Paula Gunn Allen, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Louis Owens provide a foreground from which Purdy delves more deeply into the works of Silko, Welch, Erdrich, King, Vizenor, and others. The critical, theoretical framework from which he analyzes the works is based on a construct that has at its core the assumption that "we all come to a work of literature …

Review Of Lanterns On The Prairie: The Blackfeet Photographs Of Walter Mcclintock Edited By Steven L. Grafe, With Contributions By William E. Farr, Sherry L. Smith, And Darrell Robes Kipp, Brian W. Dippie

Great Plains Quarterly

Walter McClintock (1870-1949) is principally known for two books, The Old North Trail; or Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians (1910) and Old Indian Trails (1923). Both are illustrated with McClintock's photographs, The Old North Trail generously so. They convey an idealized vision of the traditional Blackfeet culture that captivated McClintock when, as a Yale graduate aspiring to a career in forestry, he visited the Blackfeet reservation in Montana in 1896. On subsequent visits through 1912 his collection grew to over 2,000 photographs, and he established himself as an authority on the tribe, delivering lectures in America and …

Review Of "I Am A Man": Chief Standing Bear's Journey For Justice By Joe Starita, John M. Coward

Great Plains Quarterly

On the night of January 2, 1879, Standing Bear and thirty other Ponca men, women, and children slipped away from their disease-ridden new home in Indian Territory. Standing Bear was on a mission, leading his band back to the tribe's ancestral lands along the Nebraska-South Dakota border where he could honor his dying son's last wish, to be buried near the sacred chalk bluffs above the Missouri River.

As author Joe Starita explains, Standing Bear's journey was plagued by subzero temperatures and gales. When their Omaha Indian friends went out to meet them 600 miles and two months later, Starita …

Review Of Border To Border: Historic Quilts And Quiltmakers Of Montana By Annie Hanshew, Barbara Caron

Great Plains Quarterly

State-wide efforts to document quilts began with the Kentucky project in 1981; by 2010 more than fifty books reported the findings of projects in thirty-seven states. Border to Border is the culmination of the Montana Historic Quilt Project, which began in 1987 and ultimately registered more than 2,000 quilts. A perceptive introduction by Mary Murphy, professor of history at Montana State University - Bozeman, places Montana quilts within a wider context not only of needlework and women's roles, but also of westward expansion, industrialization, transportation networks, consumerism, fairs and expositions, and other state and world events. Murphy commends the Montana …

Review Of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941 By Suzanne Barta Julin, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

"Tourists," said Doane Robinson, the father of Mount Rushmore, "soon get fed up on scenery." As car-based tourism exploded after World War I, South Dakotans believed the Black Hills needed not just pretty pines and streams, but a new layer of roadside attractions to bring in more tourists and keep them spending longer. This book is about the making of that tourist landscape-not so much the landscape itself, or the tourists looking at it, but the makers and movers behind the scenes who drove the transformation.

This is, in other words, a book about economic planning. It is a left-wing …

Review Of The Lipan Apaches: People Of The Wind And Lightning By Thomas A. Britten, Deborah Bernsten

Great Plains Quarterly

The Lipan Apaches is the first comprehensive study of a people who were important, integral actors in the history of the Southern Plains, most especially the history of Texas. Rather than casting the Lipans as the victims of Spanish or later American conquest, this meticulously researched work brings to life Lipan history, one steeped in a "tradition of adaptation and cultural reinvention" that of necessity was constantly responding to new and often painful shifting social realities. Britten poses these questions: Who were the Lipan Apaches and under what circumstances did a tribal identity emerge ? To what extent did they …

Review Of The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story By Elliott West, Dennis Baird

Great Plains Quarterly

The Nez Perce people (who call themselves Nimiipuu) are ancient inhabitants of Idaho's Clearwater Valley and of the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon. Driven by both curiosity and economics, they have a rich history of travels to distant places, including California, the Rio Grande Valley, and across the Plains to Missouri. Buffalo drew large segments of the tribe to the Great Plains, where many leaders where born. They have an equally rich history of generosity to visitors, a category that included Lewis and Clark, fur traders and missionaries, and eventually the miners and settlers who helped various federal officials …

Review Of Reopening The Frontier: Homesteading In The Modern West By Brian Q. Cannon, Benjamin T. Arrington

Great Plains Quarterly

Brian Q. Cannon has established himself as one of America's preeminent historians of agriculture and the modern West. Reopening the Frontier will only add to this well-deserved reputation. In it, he examines the rejuvenation of western homesteading- the idea of the federal government providing cost-free land to settlers willing to live on and cultivate it-after World War II. As Cannon demonstrates, the challenges of homesteading in 1950s Washington or Oregon were often just as severe as those of trying to "prove up" a claim in 1870s Nebraska or Kansas.

Review Of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait Of A Community In Black And White By Bob Ray Sanders, Carla Williams

Great Plains Quarterly

Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White came about through the confluence of two significant events around 1994: the enthusiastic reception surrounding the publication of a similarly themed title, Behold the People: R. C. Hickman's Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949-1961; and Littlejohn's family contacting the director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin about possibly donating his prints and negatives there. These are significant because they point to the need for an archive to preserve and organize material of this scope-some 70,000 negatives and 55,000 prints made over …

Review Of Native Liberty: Natural Reason And Cultural Survivance By Gerald Vizenor, Michael Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly

Poet, novelist, and critic Gerald Vizenor is arguably the most accomplished and prolific intellectual in the field of Native American studies. His new collection of cultural criticism includes four original essays and nine expanded revisions of uncollected published pieces. "Ontic Images," perhaps the finest selection, applies his concept of Native transmotion to representations of Natives in photography. Two perceptive pieces of art criticism discuss the aesthetics and contributions of Anishinaabe artists George Morrison and David Bradley. On the whole, this work serves as a useful introduction to the theory and criticism of this brilliant Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe, Chippewa) writer.

Review Of Uprising! Woody Crumbo's Indian Art By Robert Perry, Robert B. Pickering

Great Plains Quarterly

In any discussion of important Indian artists of the twentieth century, Woody Crumbo (1912-1989) is a pivotal player. His dynamic figures, brilliant colors, and traditional themes were combined to create a new kind of art. He used traditional art forms and themes from his Potawatomi background as well as themes and incidents from other tribal traditions to inspire his work. Not satisfied with just creating art, Crumbo mentored other artists, and for much of his life he was personally involved in the business of art-creating new opportunities for himself and other Indian artists.

Review Of African Americans On The Great Plains: An Anthology Edited And With An Introduction By Bruce A. Glasrud And Charles A. Braithwaite, David J. Peavler

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last decade, Great Plains Quarterly has taken the lead in soliciting and publishing articles about the African American experience in the Central Plains. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite have incorporated these articles into a single anthology that should become required reading in college history courses throughout the region. Unfortunately for readers of this journal, however, the book offers little in the way of new information about this important topic.

The editors provide a brief historiographical introduction that details the important scholarly contributions to Great Plains African American history. Although the editors' definition of the region …

Review Of A Nation In Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston And The Chickasaws, 1898-1939 By Michael W. Lovegrove, Lisa K. Neuman

Great Plains Quarterly

What happens when a Native American nation is gradually and purposefully dismantled in order to make way for a new state government? How do tribal leaders meet the challenges of an impending dissolution of their own government and simultaneously fight against the erosion of their tribal sovereignty? These compelling questions inform A Nation in Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston and the Chickasaws, 1898-1939, a new history of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and its leadership under Governor Douglas Henry Johnston (1898-1902; 1904-1939), whose tenure, according to author Michael W. Lovegrove, was longer than that of any other American Indian executive. …

Review Of Meriwether Lewis By Thomas C. Danisi And John C. Jackson, J. I. Merritt

Great Plains Quarterly

With the possible exception of Aaron Burr, perhaps no figure from the early history of the Republic remains more enigmatic than Meriwether Lewis, who with fellow Army officer William Clark led one of the most celebrated expeditions in the history of exploration. Lewis and Clark's twenty-eight-month "tour," which took them to the Pacific Ocean and back via the Missouri and Columbia drainages, gave the young nation a wealth of knowledge about the Louisiana Territory and Pacific Northwest. Lewis was just thirty-two years old when the Corps of Discovery banked its canoes in St. Louis in September 1806. Yet the young …

Review Of Wallace Stegner And The American West By Philip L. Fradkin, Bonney Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly

Philip L. Fradkin's biography constitutes a balanced and well-researched addition to the biographical scholarship currently available on a treasured and enduring American and western American author, environmentalist, and teacher. Adding to previous work by Forrest and Margaret Robinson (1977), as well as by Jackson Benson (1996), Fradkin supplements these portraits of Wallace Stegner with his own emphases-in particular Stegner's continuing commitment to thinking about the American West, about water and aridity, and about public intellectuals' obligations to conservation and environmental responsibility.