Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Writing In Dust: Reading The Prairie Environmentally By Jenny Kerber, Aubrey Streit Krug

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When do the prairies begin in history? And are they now in danger of ending? Jenny Kerber notes that settler cultures have relied upon two narratives to understand the Great Plains of North America. The first is about how history begins on the prairie when it is recultivated as an Edenic garden; the second is about how that garden falls from grace into a barren wasteland.

Kerber opens up these Western, Christian traditions for interdisciplinary critique. By considering ecological, feminist, Indigenous, and other marginalized perspectives, she explores "how different stories might contribute to a vision of sustainable dwelling on the …

Review Of All Indians Do Not Live In Teepees (Or Casinos) By Catherine C. Robbins, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Catherine C. Robbins's highly personal tour of contemporary Indian Country begins with a moving description of 2,000 sets of human remains being returned from Harvard University "to the people of the Pecos Pueblo and their kin at Jemez" in 1999. The book then degenerates into a long rant of pet peeves that annoy its author.

Robbins's portrait of Indian casinos is not flattering (their glitziness spoils reservation vistas, she says). She doesn't think Indians dignify themselves by lecturing whites about sovereignty. In Robbins's view, Indians practicing their hunting and fishing rights under treaties bring an unwelcome din to the streams …

Review Of Women Writers Of The American West, 1833-1927 By Nina Baym, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains, particularly in pioneer times, has been described as a place that was good for men and dogs but hell on women and horses, a notion that could be extended to the American West as a whole. In other words, the West was a man's country, initially explored by men, settled by men, written about by men. Nina Baym, however, well documents the inaccuracy of this last point in Women Writers of the American West.

Following an introductory chapter, nine chapters divide the West into nine geographic regions, each of these offering brief descriptions of the hundreds of …

Review Of West Of 98: Living And Writing The New American West Edited By Lynn Stegner And Russell Rowland, Matthew J. C. Cella

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

West of 98 is an ambitious and comprehensive collection of personal essays and poems by over sixty contributors who work to define the parameters of the American West: the vast and complex region west of the 98th meridian. As Lynn Stegner explains in the collection's introduction, the goal of the book is to offer a "Greek chorus that might define, remark upon, and otherwise characterize the West as each of [the writers] grew to know it, and equally important, the West that is still becoming." The chorus of voices featured in the collection reflects a broad range of cultural and …

Review Of State Of Minds: Texas Culture And Its Discontents By Don Graham, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of Texas: one, the perception that Texas culture, if it exists at all, is inconsequential and "lowbrow"; and, two, that college students even within Texas are becoming illiterate in regards to their state's rich heritage of creative fiction and nonfiction writing and film. The book succeeds on both counts, reminding readers familiar with the canon of how much fun it is to enter the world of Texas's written and film literature and how much one can learn from it about the timeless …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 2 / Spring 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Farm Women, Solidarity, And The Suffrage Messenger Nebraska Suffrage Activism On The Plains, 1915-1917, Carmen Heider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the weeks and months following the November 3, 1914, vote on the Nebraska suffrage amendment, activists picked up the pieces after male voters for the third time defeated the proposition in their state. Thomas Coulter explains that in the days leading up to the vote, ''A feeling of impending victory suffused the hearts of pro-suffrage workers," but in the days after, "a sense of shock was widespread."¹ The vote had been close: 90,738 for the Nebraska amendment and 100,842 against it.² In fact, Attorney General Willis Reed later stated that had there been a recount, the amendment …

Review Of The Big Empty: The Great Plains In The Twentieth Century By R. Douglas Hurt, Thomas G. Andrews

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century endeavors to synthesize a history that is as almost as vast and challenging as the region itself. Not surprisingly, R. Douglas Hurt succeeds most fully when addressing his specialty, agricultural history. Less masterful but still effective are the book's sections concerning energy development, Plains Indians, Latinos, and political economy. The Big Empty has little to say, by contrast, about shifting perceptions of the Plains, the decline of railroads, and the rise of federal highways, while Hurt's insistence on the fundamental stasis of the Plains environment seems to contradict the many …

Not Your Family Farm Apiculture In South,Central Montana, Miles Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The rolling prairies and sheltering mountain ranges of the Upper Musselshell Valley in Montana are nearly perfect for cattle and sheep grazing. Some areas, more topographically similar to the Great Plains than to the mountainous West, are (at least in wet years) highly conducive to growing alfalfa or wheat. Overall, the pastoral setting calls to mind images of weathered cowboys, grizzled sheepherders, and stoic farmers. However, closer inquiry into the region's agriculture reveals that cattle and wheat are by no means the only product being harvested from the land. Found buzzing around flowering foliage or swarming the rearing hindquarters of …

Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, And The Little Bighorn, Ron Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the summer of 1876, the United States government launched the Great Sioux War, a sharp instrument intended to force the last nonagency Lakotas onto reservations. In doing so, it precipitated a series of events that proved disastrous for its forces in the short run and calamitous for the Lakotas in the much longer scheme of things.

On June 17, Lakotas and Cheyennes crippled General George Crook's l,300-man force at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana. Eight days later and thirty miles to the west, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the "Boy General" of Civil War fame, led …

Leading The "Father" The Pawnee Homeland, Coureurs De Bois, And The Villasur Expedition Of 1720, Christopher Steinke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l'Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota.¹ Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l'Arc if he "knew the white people of the seacoast." When the chief replied that "'[tlhe French who are on the seacoast are numerous'" and have "'many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer,'" Louis-Joseph believed he had at …

Review Of Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions In Theory, Politics, And Literature Edited By Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, And Scott Lauria Morgensen, Margaret Noori

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A colleague and I were asked recently to speak at the Midwest regional conference for LGBTQ and ally-identified college students. We teach an Indigenous language (Anishinaabemowin), one of us has lived in a same-sex relationship, both of us are allies, but the politics and theory of the community are daunting. As we looked across a sea of young faces, empowered by proximity, we saw hope and we said, "gego bigidnike aanji'igwa." This phrase, "don't let them change you," has long served us teaching about identity, freedom, and survival in Native communities and was perfect for the gathering of young LGBTQ …

Review Of Rich Indians: Native People And The Problem Of Wealth In American History By Alexandra Harmon, Kathleen Pickering Sherman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Across American history, Native American tribes were impoverished through land and natural resource appropriations accomplished through a wide variety of well-documented political, military, and cultural means. Alexandra Harmon, in her book, provocatively titled Rich Indians, focuses on a handful of exceptions to this statistical pattern to explore American discourses about wealth accumulation by Native Americans. Armed with an impressive collection of primary sources, as well as literature from history and anthropology, Harmon also uncovers parallel discourses by Native Americans themselves about wealth accumulation among their own peoples. The result is a complex, multilayered, and fascinating melange of contradictory attitudes and …

Review Of Hill Country Deco: Modernistic Architecture Of Central Texas By David Bush And Jim Parsons, Richard Cleary

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 2008, Jim Parsons and David Bush, staff members of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, published Houston Deco: Modernistic Architecture of the Texas Coast, a photographic sampling intended to draw attention to the region's surviving examples of buildings erected between the 1920s and the late 1940s in the modernistic styles popularly known as Art Deco and Art Moderne. Hill Country Deco applies this model to Central Texas, covering an area considerably beyond the geographical Hill Country to include San Antonio and Austin as well as towns in the prairie lands to the east. Like its predecessor, Hill Country Deco …

Review Of Rightful Place By Amy Hale Auker Review Of Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories By David Mogen, Nick Bascom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Much contemporary western writing, including memoirs such as Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (2003), abandons the mythic character of early western narratives, striving instead for realism. These two collections of essays do one better offering a satisfying blend of stark realism and wistful nostalgia for heroic western archetypes. With contrasting educational backgrounds and biographies, their authors show us the West from widely different perspectives: Mogen has taught English at Colorado State University for many years; Auker married at nineteen and has worked on ranches ever since. Yet both strike a similar balance, capturing the harsh truths of western living while describing …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 1 / Winter 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Myth, Memory, And Massacre: The Pease River Capture Of Cynthia Ann Parker By Paul H. Carlson And Tom Crum, Joaquin Rivaya-Martinez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The so-called "Battle of Pease River," in which the Comanche Indians purportedly suffered a crucial defeat, has become a recurrent topic in the literature on the Indian wars of the Southern Plains, as well as in the collective memory of Anglo-Texans. In this extraordinary book, Carlson and Crum scrutinize numerous accounts of the event to unveil one of the most blatant fabrications in the history of Texas. The authors' painstaking meticulousness has permitted them to discriminate numerous falsehoods and forgeries from the following few discernable facts: a massacre occurred on the banks of Mule Creek, a tributary of the Pease …

Review Of My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back To Kansas By Tracy Seeley., Sarah Smarsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kansas-born playwright William Inge said, "It wasn't until I got to New York that I became a Kansan." For English professor Tracy Seeley, it was San Francisco that did the trick. For years she lived a life of pleasure there grading papers in hip coffee joints, cycling through the cool fog, reveling in the progressive political climate. Her nomadic Kansas childhood was behind her, even beneath her, she thought. Then, an emotional earthquake- triggered by a cancer diagnosis and the deaths of both parents, in quick succession forces a reckoning with mortality and sends her looking for home. But for …

Review Of Assault On The Deadwood Stage: Road Agents And Shotgun Messengers By Robert K. Dearment, David A. Walker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert DeArment, a prolific historian depicting outlaws, gamblers, and lawmen throughout the American West, focuses on individuals associated with the stagecoach network centered in the boomtown of Deadwood, Dakota Territory. This network stretched across the Northern Plains from presentday Bismarck, North Dakota, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and on to Sidney, Nebraska, and in each case was linked to a transcontinental railroad.

DeArment introduces his readers to the Texas Gang, the Hat Creek Gang, the Joel Collins Gang, and the Tom Price Gang, as well as to a wide variety of characters with such colorful nicknames as "Big Nose George" Parrott, "Laughing …

Review Of Bird Cloud: A Memoir By Annie Proulx, Alex Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Annie Proulx's latest is nonfiction, recounting her attempt to inhabit a section of land in south-central Wyoming. While tough winters and unmaintained roads make year-round residence too difficult, Proulx glories in the wild isolation of a place that inspires her to research and write as well as to build fence and monitor eagles. Bird Cloud is a book that Proulx's regulars will find both enjoyable and revealing; however, its self-indulgence and lack of polish leave us with a feeling akin to Proulx's own house high in the mountain valley-it remains raw and isolated.

This is not entirely a negative. Proulx's …

Review Of Llano Estacada: An Island In The Sky Edited By Stephen Bogener And William Tydeman, George Lubick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Island in the Sky" aptly describes the Llano Estacado, the southern extension of the Great Plains that rises some 800 feet above the surrounding terrain in northwestern Texas and northeastern New Mexico. It is this expansive landscape that William Tydeman and Stephen Bogener have placed in the forefront of an excellent collection of essays and photographs that explore the connections between the region's geography and culture. The plateau's flat terrain-"horizontal yellow," as historian Dan Flores has described it-invariably defines the Llano, but Stephen Bogener reminds us also that "85 percent of what the human eye registers on the Llano Estacado …

Review Of Great Sioux War Orders Of Battle: How The United States Army Waged War On The Northern Plains, 1876-1877 By Paul L. Hedren, Charles M. Robinson Iii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Sioux War of 1876-77 was the greatest Indian war ever fought by the United States government. That, together with the continued fascination of the Little Bighorn, has generated enough books and articles to fill a small library. Most follow a common thread of narration or analysis, but Paul L. Hedren's Great Sioux War Orders of Battle takes a different approach. Divided into three parts, it covers the 1876 army, its mission and strategy in the Plains, deployment and tactics, and analysis.

On the surface, this would seem like a book for the specialist. However, the body of text …

Review Of Valentine T. Mcgillycuddy: Army Surgeon, Agent To The Sioux By Candy Moulton, Jason Pierce

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Valentine T. McGillycuddy is not famous, but he should be. His presence at many critical events in the 1870s and '80s compelled Candy Moulton to write this engaging biography. McGillycuddy worked as a doctor and surveyor on the Northern Boundary Survey and the 1875 Newton-Jenney Expedition into the Black Hills. He tended wounded soldiers as an army surgeon during the war with the Lakotas and Cheyennes in 1876 and served as an Indian agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1879-86. He brushed shoulders with such iconic western figures as Calamity Jane, William F. Cody, Marcus Reno, Red Cloud, and …

Review Of William Clark's World: Describing America In An Age Of Unknowns By Peter J. Kastor, Thomas P. Slaughter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book, though not a biography, is biographical. It considers William Clark's attempts to describe the American West within the context of other descriptions during his lifetime (1770-1838). Peter J. Kastor explores the conscious agendas of writers and mapmakers that supported their particular political and cultural goals. He addresses problems that grew from describing the unknown and the ambivalence that inspired many of the attempts. He aims for a subtle and less valedictory analysis than is traditional, while avoiding a flip of that view into a simple indictment of empire-building and ethnic cleansing on the American frontier.

Review Of The Philosophy Of The Western Edited By Jennifer L. Mcmahon And B. Steve Csaki, Robert B. Pippin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The topic of this collection immediately raises a number of questions. In what sense do artworks have, or express, a "philosophy"? If they can be said to imply or assert propositional claims, why not just make the claims and argue for them? Do the films just serve as examples of philosophical ideas? (The majority of these essays seem to take this approach.) If so, how important is it that the examples are artworks? Would complex and imaginative thought experiments do? Are commercial Hollywood films and television shows artworks at all, and if so, in what sense? Is an artwork a …

Review Of Montana Moments: History On The Go By Ellen Baumler, Amy L. Mckinney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ellen Baumler, interpretive historian and coordinator of Montana's National Register Sign Program at the Montana Historical Society, once again delights readers with her excellent Montana Moments: History on the Go. The book is the result of years of research she conducted while writing sign texts for the National Register of Historic Places and her popular History Half-Note radio vignettes for KCAP in Helena. She selected about 250 of her favorite snippets for this collection.

Baumler does a fine job offering readers short, well-researched, and entertaining stories on a variety of topics including animals, buildings, people, events, and nature that …

Review Of America's School For War: Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education, And Victory In World War Ii By Peter J. Schifferle, Donald J. Mrozek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In America's School for War, Peter J. Schifferle examines the role of professional military education at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, notably through the Command and General Staff College (CGSC), in preparing officers for likely responsibilities as staff officers and leaders in future wars. Focusing on the period between the two world wars, he emphasizes continuity in thinking and doctrine and, related to both, in the rationale for the curriculum at CGSc. Whatever the number of students (which expanded as U.S. involvement in World War II loomed) or the structure of the curriculum (which went from two years to one in …

Review Of Shot In Oklahoma: A Century Of Sooner State Cinema By John Wooley, Joseph A. Kestner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Wooley's Shot in Oklahoma is pioneering in every sense of the word. Not only is it the first book to engage the entirety of cinema in the state of Oklahoma; it will also serve as an archive for future researchers in the field. Wooley has used massive amounts of materials, including interviews with principal figures, but he has especially researched the files of the Tulsa World, the now-defunct Tulsa Tribune, and the Daily Oklahoman for newspaper reactions to all the cinematic activity in the state.

Small though the state of Oklahoma may be, its engagement with cinema began almost …

Review Of Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine Of Discovery In The English Colonies By Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, And Tracey Lindberg, Blake A. Watson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Doctrine of Discovery provides that colonizing European nations automatically acquired certain property, governmental, and commercial rights over Indigenous inhabitants. In recent years, Indigenous peoples, legal scholars, religious institutions, and nongovernmental organizations have pressed for official repudiation of the Doctrine. In 2007, the United Nations voted (over the initial opposition of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which contains several provisions that acknowledge the rights of Indigenous peoples to their lands. In 2012, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples will devote its Eleventh Session to a …

Converting The Rosebud Sicangu Lakota Catholicism In The Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Harvey Markowitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Following the Civil War, the United States government undertook a massive reform of its Indian policy, replacing the antebellum goal of permanently segregating Indian and white populations with that of "civilizing and Christianizing" (i.e., assimilating) Native peoples. To aid in this reform, the federal Indian Bureau successfully petitioned leaders of mainline denominations, including members of America's Catholic Church hierarchy, to enlist personnel to educate Indians in the manners and customs of "Christian citizenship."

In 1886 priests and brothers belonging to the Jesuit's Buffalo Mission and Franciscan sisters of Penance and Christian Charity from Stella-Niagara, New York, arrived on the Rosebud …