Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

O Pioneers! The Problem Of Structure, Bruce P. Baker Ii

Great Plains Quarterly

In her preface to the 1922 edition of Alexander's Bridge and in the 1931 essay "My First Novels: There Were Two," Willa Cather conveyed not only her dissatisfaction with Alexander's Bridge but also her awareness that with O Pioneers! she had touched matters closer to her "deepest experience," material that was distinctly derived from the Nebraska of her childhood. She had written the book with genuine enthusiasm: "O Pioneers! interested me tremendously because it had to do with a kind of country I loved, because it was about old neighbours, once very dear, whom I had almost forgotten in …

The Childhood Worlds Of Willa Cather, Mildred R. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly

She was a good artist, and all true art is provincial in the most realistic sense: of the very time and place of its making, out of human beings who are so particularly limited by their situation, whose faces and names are real and whose lives begin each one at one individual unique center.

Katherine Anne Porter

Willa Cather, as Katherine Anne Porter realized, was a provincial or regional writer who could derive the universal from the specific, as the best artists do. For Cather, the specifics to which she returned throughout her career were the people, places, and things …

Review Of Buffalo Bill And The Wild West By Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, And Leslie A. Fiedler, William H. Goetzmann

Great Plains Quarterly

In many ways this is a most useful catalogue. It features six essays by distinguished scholars all intent upon reassessing Buffalo Bill's place in American cultural history. It also includes a cornucopia of splendid pictures, illustrating virtually every phase of Buffalo Bill's life. In addition it has a valuable chronology of events amounting to a short biography of Cody, a useful chronology of Buffalo Bill on film, and a significant bibliography. The main thrust of the essays in this volume is to resurrect Buffalo Bill and, as it were, to rescue the old scout from the damage done to him …

Review Of Beef, Leather And Grass By Edmund Randolph, Michael P. Malone

Great Plains Quarterly

Edmund Randolph is a New Yorker and a Princeton graduate who came west in the 1920s and took up ranching in southeastern Montana. In Beef, Leather and Grass, he presents an autobiographical account of his partnership venture during the 1940s and early 1950s in a big-time ranching operation on the Antler spread, which lay on the Crow Reservation in the Little Big Hom Valley. The book, as the preface tells us, "deals with this situation in a unique manner, not as a fictional account of a ranch, a would-be 'Western' or an autobiography, but from personal observation. It is …

Review Of Mister, You Got Yourself A Horse Edited By Roger L. Welsch, Howard W. Marshall

Great Plains Quarterly

This fine new book indicates a welcome direction regional scholars are taking in attending to cultural traditions in particular states. The Great Depression of the 1930s altered America and left behind some troublesome problems; but those hard times led to the serious collection of regional folklife by members of the Federal Writers' Project (an arm of the Works Progress Administration under FDR), and we are still discovering and wondering over the materials passed to us by those WP A writers and collectors. Roger Welsch's collection is the result of a modern scholar's discovery of a body of WPA materials in …

Review Of Historic Sites Along The Oregon Trail By Aubrey L. Haines, Merrill J . Mattes

Great Plains Quarterly

Of all western themes, none quickens the pulse or captures the imagination more than "the Oregon Trail." The Santa Fe Trail was more exotic. The California Gold Rush Trail had more feverish excitement and carried ten times the traffic. But the Oregon Trail remains the preeminent symbol of American pioneer virtues, evoking the image of the young family in a covered wagon braving hardships and dangers to seek a new home in the fabled Northwest. Aware of the sales value of this theme, publishers have been grinding out "Oregon Trail" books ever since Francis Parkman's classic of that name, about …

Review Of Deadwood: The Golden Years By Watson Parker, Gary D. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

Watson Parker has devoted most of his professional career to writing the history of the Black Hills of South Dakota, and those interested in that history are richer for it. In this, his latest effort, he has focused on Deadwood, the mining town of fame and fable, and examines what he calls its "golden years" of 1875 to 1920. Parker states in his preface that he has tried "to present Deadwood as a whole, a compound of people, business, technology, society, whoopee, and promotion, all intermixed and interacting to produce a small but prosperous city which to this day remains …

Review Of Populism, Progressivism, And The Transformation Of Nebraska Politics, 1885-1915 By Robert W. Cherny, David S. Trask

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert Cherny has made an important contribution to the social and political history of the Great Plains with his study, Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska Politics, 1885-1915. He not only explores the historiographic issues related to Populism and Progressivism, but also assesses changes within the Nebraska political system that were often the unintended by-products of the two movements. His approach relies on extensive statistical analysis including the use of collective biography.

The most optimistic Populists, according to Cherny, sought to establish a cooperative commonwealth in which the government owned the railroads and other corporations. Although they failed …

Review Of The Modem Cowboy By John R. Erickson, Nellie Snyder Yost

Great Plains Quarterly

John R. Erickson researched The Modem Cowboy in a working laboratory that extended from horizon to horizon in his particular section of the Great Plains, the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. He writes from personal experience, gained in years of working as a cowboy on modern ranches. He makes plain the fact that the cowboy of today must master many skills unknown to the cowboy of the colorful open range before the era of tractors, vaccination, controlled breeding, and "calfpullers." The modern cowboy should be a mechanic and something of a veterinarian and horticulturist as well. Although he still rides horses …

Index- Fall 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

Index-

Great Plains Quarterly- Fall 1982

Pages 255-261 (7 pages)

Willa Cather And Nebraska: An Introduction, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

The essays in this issue were presented at the seminar "Willa Cather and Nebraska" held at Hastings College and Red Cloud, Nebraska, June 14-20, 1981. The week-long program involved one hundred registered participants from twenty-five states and Canada in a series of discussions, lectures, films, and performances on the topic of Willa Cather's Nebraska fiction. Both the attendance and the reactions to the program were highly encouraging and indicate that Cather is a writer with universal appeal. Although I did not attempt to direct the lecturers except to indicate the general topics to be treated, their essays are complementary in …

One Of Ours As American Naturalism, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

I n a comment to Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway ridiculed the war scenes in Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922) and implied the general inferiority of her effort: "Look at One of Ours," he wrote, complaining about the frivolity of the American reading public. "[Pulitzer] Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously. You were in the war weren't you? Wasn't that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere." …

Willa Cather's A Lost Lady: Art Versus The Closing Frontier, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

When A Lost Lady appeared in 1923, readers immediately recognized Willa Cather's achiever ment. T. K. Whipple wrote, "with A Lost Lady, Miss Cather arrived at what can only be called perfection in her art'; Joseph Wood Krutch termed it "nearly perfect." Later readers continued the praise, calling it "perfectly modulated" and "a flawless classic" and generally judging it the finest of Cather's novels. While acknowledging its art, however, critics have stressed its themes in their interpretations, reading it as telling of the frontier's downfall, of the noble pioneer's passing, of materialism's onslaught, of woman's plight in a patriarchal …

An Exploration Of Cather's Early Writing, Bernice Slote

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather has been fairly well studied as a novelist of the Nebraska pioneer, a writer whose books have a lyric nostalgia for other times that were nicer than ours. This maybe an oversimplification. One might say, for example, that she wrote about Nebraska no more than she wrote about Rome; that it was not man's retreat that concerned her so much as man's extension into other planes, other powers; that she may belong not with Sinclair Lewis and Edith Wharton but with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. I suggest these possibilities after several years of fortunate exploration …

Marriage And Friendship In My Antonia, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly

Three events or circumstances in Willa Cather's life seem directly related to the writing of My Àntonia. In 1916, the year the novel was begun, Isabelle McClung married, and the great friendship of Cather's life was profoundly altered. Second, by 1916 Cather was in her forty-third year and had written five books; she was no longer enjoying youth and first success but entering middle age, with its attendant disillusionments and disaffections. Third, she spent much of that year at home in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she visited many of the people and places of her childhood. I think these …

The Uses Of Biography: The Case Of Willa Cather, James Woodress

Great Plains Quarterly

In the first of his series of lectures on biography at the University of Toronto, Leon Edel observed that "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Edel was generalizing about the life of Henry James when he made that statement, for he was deep in the writing of the James biography to which he devoted about twenty years of his life. For a writer such as James this view of biography …

Title And Contents- Fall 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1982 VOL. 2 NO.4

CONTENTS

WILLA CATHER AND NEBRASKA: AN INTRODUCTION

THE USES OF BIOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF WILLA CATHER James Woodress

THE CHILDHOOD WORLDS OF WILLA CATHER Mildred R. Bennett

AN EXPLORATION OF CATHER'S EARLY WRITING Bernice Slote

o PIONEERS! THE PROBLEM OF STRUCTURE Bruce P. Baker II

MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIP IN MY ANTONIA David Stouck

ONE OF OURS AS AMERICAN NATURALISM JohnJ. Murphy

WILLA CATHER'S A LOST LADY: ART VERSUS THE CLOSING FRONTIER Susan J. Rosowski

BOOK REVIEWS

Historic Sites along the Oregon Trail

Army Letters from an Officer's Wife

Deadwood: The Golden Years …

Review Of Army Letters From An Officer's Wife By Frances M. A. Roe, Robert M. Utley

Great Plains Quarterly

Reminiscences of army wives constitute a distinct genre of the literature of the American West. About a dozen-among them Mrs. Custer, Mrs. Carrington, Mrs. Lane, Mrs. Summerhayes, Mrs. Viele, and Mrs. Boyd-offer perceptive, literate, and often graphic firsthand commentary on frontier army life and the people and conditions of the nineteenth-century American West. Near the top of the list-indeed, at the very top, in the opinion of this reviewer-stands Frances M. A. Roe's Army Letters from an Officer's Wife.

In 1871 Frances Mack married Fayette W. Roe, an infantry lieutenant newly graduated from West Point. During the next two decades …

Title And Contents- Summer 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN PLAINS INDIAN PAINTING Mary Jane Schneider

THE PLAINS LANDSCAPE AND DESCRIPTIVE TECHNIQUE Robert Thacker

NOSTALGIC REACTION AND THE CANADIAN PRAIRIE LANDSCAPE Ronald Rees

CITIZENS AND STRANGERS: GEOGRAPHIC MOBILITY IN THE SIOUX CITY REGION, 1860-1900 William Silag

BOOK REVIEWS

The Great Plains: Perspectives and Prospects

Red Crow, Warrior Chief

The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, and Comparative Study

The North Dakota Political Tradition

The Ranchers: A Book of Generations

NOTES & NEWS

Notes And News- Summer 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

MAPPING THE NORTH AMERICAN PLAINS

RECENT APPOINTMENTS

OTHER CONFERENCES

Review Of The Great Plains: Perspectives And Prospects Edited By Merlin P. Lawson And Maurice E. Baker, Martin Bender

Great Plains Quarterly

Most policies and institutions that seem to be successful in the humid eastern United States have been and often still are inadequate for the Great Plains in dealing with the unpredictable changes in the rigorous environment and the external demands from outside the regions. These inadequacies were analyzed at the third annual symposium of the Center for ~reat plains Studies, held on March 2 and 3, 1979. In the papers that make up this book, participants identified available resources in the Great Plains and provided information that might assist policy-makers in anticipating future conditions. The papers treat the impact of …

Review Of The North Dakota Political Tradition Edited By Thomas W. Howard, Edward C. Blackorby

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is primarily designed to help North Dakotans understand their political institutions and traditions. Seven chapters by as many historians are readable summaries on basic themes of the state's history.

Robert Wilkins's study of Alexander McKenzie, reputedly the political boss of Dakota Territory and North Dakota, is the most thorough summation available. Wilkins points out that McKenzie's power was not absolute. In a desire to achieve fairness, Wilkins at times leans toward the position that ends justify means. However, McKenzie's record is provided in detail.

Charles Glaab definitively describes the career of John Burke, the Democratic governor whose 1906 …

Review Of Red Crow, Warrior Chief By Hugh A. Dempsey, John C. Ewers

Great Plains Quarterly

At a time when Plains Indians are eagerly seeking to learn more of the history of their own tribes, Hugh A. Dempsey, curator of history at the Glenbow-Alberta Institute in Calgary, has effectively interpreted the nineteenth- century history of the nearby Blackfoot and Blood tribes through careful study of the lives and policies of their greatest leaders. In 1976 he gave us Crowfoot, Chief of the Blackfeet. Now he offers Red Crow, Warrior Chief, who was the recognized head chief of the Blood tribe during the late years of the nineteenth century. Both books have been solidly grounded …

Review Of The Ranchers: A Book Of Generations By Stan Steiner, Roger L. Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly

There is a story in the Wyoming WP A files (for which I thank James Dow of Iowa State University) about some cowboys who collapsed in various sections of a country cemetery after a full-blown drunk. One of the celebrants had fallen into a two-foot depression of a collapsed grave and there slept off his condition. He woke up at the crack of dawn, sat up in the grave, surveyed his situation, and shouted, "Hurray! It's Halleluja Morning and I'm the first one here!"

In The Ranchers Steiner presents us with a long, fragmented, maudlin obituary for a culture just …

Regional Differences In Plains Indian Painting, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

It may seem but a short leap from the earliest red, white, and black markings on rock walls to the sophisticated abstract expressionism of contemporary Native American art, and only a small· step from geometric designs painted on hides to hard-edge geometric forms on canvas, but the development of Plains Indian painting from prehistoric times to the twentieth century is a journey from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, from tribal to urban society. Plains Indian painting reflects the historical and geographical diversity of the region as well as the pluralistic culture of modern Native Americans. It is an …

Nostalgic Reaction And The Canadian Prairie Landscape, Ronald Rees

Great Plains Quarterly

In psychology and psychoanalysis, nostalgic reaction refers to the behavior of people separated from familiar places and familiar pasts. Used professionally, the expression encompasses the entire range of behavior exhibited by the uprooted. It is used here in a limited sense to describe the efforts, both physical and imaginative, made by migrants from Europe and eastern North America to adjust t~ a difficult and unfamiliar landscape. Cut off from their homelands, migrants to the Canadian prairies and to the northern plains in general were forced to make a home of a new and, as one of them put it, "naked …

The Plains Landscape And Descriptive Technique, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly

The first European who traveled on the Great Plains was Alvar Nuiiez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spaniard who lost his way as he wandered through the southern plains about 1534. Culturally conditioned to value a varied landscape, he later complained, "We nowhere saw mountains." Several years later another Spaniard, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, traveled into the plains looking for gold but found only grass and bison. What is now Kansas was like nowhere else he had ever been. He was vexed to find that the only way he could keep his party together was by marking the way with piles …

Review Of The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, And Comparative Study By David G. Mandelbaum, Warren C. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

The Canadian Plains Research Center has provj.ded a new and amended version of the Plains Cree, a classic of plains anthropology first published more than forty years ago. The earlier volume, available under the imprint of the American Museum of Natural History (Anthropological Papers 37, Part II, 1940), is a portion of a much more extensive work completed by Mandelbaum as a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University during 1936. The complete document is published here for the first time.

The earlier version is essentially a description of the "buffalo-hunting way of life ... of the Plains Cree" (xiii). It …

Citizens And Strangers: Geographic Mobility In The Sioux City Region, 1860--1900, William Silag

Great Plains Quarterly

An American literary and scholarly tradition upholds the Midwestern town as a bastion of social stability. In novels by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and a host of nineteenth century authors, comforting images of small town tranquility provide sharp contrast to scenes of urban turmoil in the age of industrialism. Even the town's critics, from Edgar Watson Howe to Sherwood Anderson, pay tribute to popular views of small-town folk as more sedentary and self-contented than the ambitious urbanites who crowded the streets of nineteenth-century New York and Boston and Chicago. These images were not restricted to works of fiction. America's …

Title And Contents- Spring 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Spring 1982 Vol. 2 Number 2

CONTENTS

DAVID'S SABINE WOMEN IN THE WILD WEST Rena N. Coen

THE ARIKARA INDIANS AND THE MISSOURI RIVER TRADE: A QUEST FOR SURVIVAL Roger L. Nichols

THE LANDSCAPE OF UKRAINIAN SETTLEMENT IN THE CANADIAN WEST John C. Lehr

PASSION AND DENIAL IN MARl SANDOZ'S "PEACHSTONE BASKET" Fritz Oehlschlaeger

BOOK REVIEWS

Anthropology on the Great Plains

Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello

Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration

Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching

The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom

A …