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Review Of Ethnicity On The Great Plains Edited By Frederick C. Luebke, Howard Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

Ethnicity on the Great Plains is a collection of essays based on a conference sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies. The editor has selected some of the best papers from that conference; attempting to maintain a balance among different academic disciplines, ethnic groups discussed, and various subregions of the Great Plains. The focus of the symposia was on the question of the relationship between the physical environment of the Great Plains and the persistence or accommodation of ethnic culture.

The resulting book is a satisfying and pathbreaking multidisciplinary achievement on a neglected topic. The study of rural ethnic …

David's Sabine Women In The Wild West, Rena N. Coen

Great Plains Quarterly

When one considers the body of mid-nineteenth- century paintings of the American West, one is struck by the place of women, especially white women, in them. In the large majority of cases, from George Catlin and Seth Eastman to Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, women are conspicuous by their absence. We know that many women did go west with their husbands, striving to maintain some semblance of the civilization they knew in the rough and primitive conditions of army posts and frontier settlements. But they were an anomoly in such environments; in the popular nineteenth-century view, women, at least "good" …

Review Of Stephen Long And American Frontier Exploration By Roger L. Nichols And Patrick L. Halley, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

The name of Major Stephen H. Long has been, for most western and frontier historians and geographers, linked inextricably with the "Great American Desert controversy." Fairly or unfairly, scholars have tended to see as Long's major exploratory contribution the creation of the myth of the barren interior which, it has been claimed, prevented settlement of the Great Plains for several decades. This opinion regarding his role and significance as an explorer is unfortunate. Long was by no means the first or only explorer in the West in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the Plains in negative …

Review Of Thomas Jefferson And The Stony Mountains: Exploring The West From Monticello By Donald Jackson, Robert Mccolley

Great Plains Quarterly

The Founding Fathers knew almost nothing of that huge segment of North America bounded by New Mexico, the Pacific Coast, the Arctic, and the Mississippi. It became Thomas Jefferson's task, eagerly embraced, to dispel that ignorance. Here, as in so many other fields, he moved with a major current of his age: thousands of Americans, Spaniards, Russians, Canadians, and other British were converging on the trans-Mississippi West. Jefferson's awareness of this competition grew with his knowledge of the area and increased his conviction that the United States, not Europe, should control North America.

This engaging history falls into three parts. …

Review Of The Oklahoma Petroleum Industry By Kenny A. Franks, Gerald D. Nash

Great Plains Quarterly

Anyone who undertakes to survey the economic history of the Great Plains in the twentieth century is struck by the fact that the literature on the subject is exceedingly sparse, particularly when measured against the importance of the field. Scholarly studies of agriculture, special industries, banking and credit institutions, and government regulation in these spheres at the federal and state level are still needed, even though the era of the Great Depression in the 1930s has received some special attention. This book, spawned by an increasing awareness of energy crises in the 1970s, provides a succinct survey of the petroleum …

Review Of Oklahoma Homes: Past And Present By Charles R. Goins And John W. Morris, H. Keith Sawyers

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent years rather dramatic changes have occurred in architectural historians' perspectives of the built environment in western and especially American culture. Their traditional scope of study, which heretofore focused on major historical eras and architectural monuments of national and international significance, has expanded to include a much more comprehensive range of periods, types, and values such as Victorian and vernacular architecture, regionalism, and ethnicity. As a result, long overdue recognition is being given to work that is significant at the regional, state, and local levels. Oklahoma Homes: Past and Present is a product of this phenomenon.

This large-format book …

Review Of The Poles In Oklahoma By Richard M. Bernard, Maria Starczewska- Lambasa

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard M. Bernard has undertaken the challenging task of writing a history of Polish migration to Oklahoma. As he states in the preface, "The Poles of Oklahoma have not left a very easy trail to follow. They were never more than 4,000 in number according to U.S. census counts. And most Poles who lived in the state at one time or another eventually departed, leaving behind few traces of their sojourn in the area."

The author recaptures the Polish experience in Oklahoma by utilizing bits of information scattered through archives and libraries throughout the state and by relying on oral …

The Landscape Of Ukrainian Settlement In The Canadian West, John C. Lehr

Great Plains Quarterly

To journey through parts of the western interior of Canada at the turn of the century was to experience the cultural landscapes of the peasant heartland of Europe. Nowhere was this more true than on the northerly fringes of the parkland belt and across the. southern reaches of the boreal forest pioneered by Ukrainian immigrants from the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna.

Between 1892, when the fIrst small group of seven Ukrainian families settled in Alberta, and 1914, when the outbreak of war in Europe terminated immigration from Austria-Hungary, more than 120,000 Ukrainians settled in Canada.1 Almost all of …

The Arikara Indians And The Missouri River Trade: A Quest For Survival, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

By the time the United States acquired most of the Great plains through the Louisiana Purchase, many Indians of the upper Missouri River valley had encountered French, British, and Anglo-American fur traders in their homeland. Most Native Americans in that region seem to have welcomed the manufactured goods these intruders brought, but at the same time some objected to the whites' disruption of earlier trade patterns. Nearly all of the Missouri Valley tribes appear to have disliked some aspects of the fur and hide trade, and many violent incidents occurred. As a village dwelling tribe located along the Missouri River …

Passion And Denial In Marl Sandoz's "Peachstone Basket", Fritz Oehlschlaeger

Great Plains Quarterly

The future reputation of Mari Sandoz will undoubtedly rest primarily on her nonfiction, especially Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, and Old Jules. Although Sandoz published a considerable body of fiction, it has not generally received critical acclaim. Moreover, she consistently expressed doubts about the quality of her fiction and thought her own strongest achievement was in nonfiction. As Scott Greenwell has noted, Sandoz "viewed herself primarily as a historian who only aspired to be a literary artist, and was struck again and again by the inadequacy of much of her fiction." When Virginia Faulkner, the editor of Hostiles and Friendlies, …

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 …

Review Of The Indians In Oklahoma By Rennard Strickland, Arrell Morgan Gibson

Great Plains Quarterly

The Indians of Oklahoma, a survey of the sixty-seven tribes residing in the state, explains the colonizing process that populated Indian Territory (the future Oklahoma) with Native Americans from all parts of the United States during the nineteenth century and interprets the striking cultural diversity of the Indian communities thus formed. The author separates the Native American experience in Oklahoma into four periods: "The Bright Autumn of Indian Nationhood"; "The Dark Winter of Settlement and Statehood"; "The Long Spring of Tribal Renewal"; and "The Spirit of a Modern Indian Summer." The point is made that in each period Indians have …

Review Of Frontierswomen: The. Iowa Experience By Glenda Riley, Barbara Howard-Meldrum

Great Plains Quarterly

Glenda Riley's book offers the reader an absorbing account of the life-styles of Iowa frontierswomen (1830-70). Drawing upon whatever sources are available (personal papers, official records, the work of other scholars), Riley' begins with the assumption that the history of women's experience is important and worth the trouble to search out, although earlier neglect has made the job difficult and in some instances impossible. Beyond this assumption, her account is as nearly nonsexist, nonjudgmental, and nonsentimental as one could ask for. She describes the women in the public eye: those few professional women and suffragists who were branded "strongminded." But …

Review Of Pioneer Women: Voices From The Kansas Frontier By Joanna L. Stratton, Darlis A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

The history of this book is as remarkable as the lives of the women it chronicles. While rummaging through her grandmother's attic, Joanna L. Stratton discovered in yellowing folders the personal memoirs of eight hundred Kansas pioneer women, some describing events that had occurred as early as 1854. Lilla Day Monroe, Stratton's great-grandmother, who was also the first woman to practice law before the Kansas Supreme Court, collected these narratives in the 1920s, asking women to write about their daily lives and experiences as early settlers. Monroe planned to publish their accounts in an anthology as a tribute to the …

Review Of Trails To Texas: Southern Roots Of Western Cattle Ranching By Terry G. Jordan, Sandra L. Myres

Great Plains Quarterly

Historians and social scientists have long been fascinated by the open-range cattle industry, its origins, spread, practices, economic significance, and eventual demise. Cultural geographer Terry Jordan's .volume is a significant addition to the growing body of literature on this subject.

Jordan begins with a cogent summary and critique of the major theories regarding the origins and diffusion of the "precursor of present-day livestock ranching" (p. 1) and then develops his own hypothesis of a southern Anglo origin. Jordan posits a "Carolina Hearth" or source for "large-scale Anglo-American cattle herding" (p. 38) and a diffusion via two routes -one along the …

Review Of The Chisholm Trail: High Road Of The Cattle Kingdom By Don Worcester, Joe A. Stout Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

For two decades after the Civil War, Texas cowboys drove herds of wild longhorns up the Chisholm and other cattle trails from central Texas to Kansas railroads. This book is about the boring work of the trail drovers, the release of their energies at trail's end, and the successes and failures of the great ranches of Texas and other western regions. Don Worcester notes that the cowboys referred indiscriminately to all cattle trails north out of Texas as the Chisholm trail; he sees no reason to change this. Although he has titled this work The Chisholm Trail, it is …

Review Of Anthropology On The Great Plains Edited By W. Raymond Wood And Margot Liberty, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

This useful collection of review essays issues from the 34th Plains Conference, entitled "Anthropology on the Great Plains: The State of the Art," which took place in Minneapolis in 1976. The contributors were asked to summarize the past and present achievements and the future challenges of Plains anthropological research in the four traditional sub fields of the discipline (physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archeology, and linguistics) and in a number of specialized topics, including Indian art, music and dance, and education. In their lively introduction, the editors, Raymond Wood and Margot Liberty, express their hopes that this inventory will serve to …

Review Of A Harvest Yet To Reap: A History Of Prairie Women Researched And Compiled By Linda Rasmussen, Lorna Rasmussen, Candace Savage, And Anne Wheeler, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly

This striking collection of quotes by and pictures of Canadian prairie women resulted from several years of research by two of the authors for their film on pioneer women, Great Grand Mother. When that project successfully terminated, Anne wheeler and Lorna Rasmussen faced the prospect of seeing a myriad of unused photographs, diaries, and other documents return to oblivion. Instead, they joined with Linda Rasmussen and Candace Savage to arrange a selection of these sources in one volume.

The result of their labors is a valuable, graphic view of the experiences of white women on the Canadian prairies between …

American Pioneer Landscapes: An Introduction, Brian W. Blouet

Great Plains Quarterly

The concept of landscape is inseparable from the history and life of the Great Plains region. The idea encompasses the character of the physical environment in relation to the social, economic, and cultural changes mankind has wrought upon the land.

In the past twenty-five years, and in several apparently disparate disciplines, there has been a convergence of interest in the concept of landscape as geographers, historians, art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists have worked to produce a much broader understanding of how landscapes are imagined, represented, created, and viewed by different cultures. Geographers in particular have studied the ways …

The Cultural Landscape Of. The Pawnees, Richard White

Great Plains Quarterly

In June of 1871, at the Pawnee village on the Loup River, the chiefs and soldiers of the four tribes of the Pawnee Nation met in council with their Quaker agent and superintendent. The council convened in the midst of the spring ceremonies; the women had already planted the fields and the priests had performed the Young Mother Corn ritual that ended the planting cycle. As it had for centuries, the attention of the Pawnees shifted to the mixed-grass plains hundreds of miles to the west where, in the first of their semiannual hunts, they would soon seek simultaneously to …

Towns Of The Western Railroads, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly

From Chicago it is more than twenty-two hundred miles overland to any of the great cities of the Pacific Coast. For almost a century those who made this crossing traveled by train. If they chose to watch, and most did, they saw a three-day pageant of plain, mountain, and desert as it unfolded, hour after hour, across their view from the train window. The high point of the drama might have been an early evening view of Glacier Park, a crossing of the Great salt Lake at dawn, or a midday climb over Glorieta, but the thousands who saw the …

The Pioneer Landscape: An American Dream, David Lowenthal

Great Plains Quarterly

To speak of pioneers, of the pioneer character, of the pioneer spirit, instantly brings vivid impressi~ns to mind. But what and where is the pioneer landscape? No more elusive or evanescent place exists. The pioneer landscape appears here, there, almost everywhere, for only a moment early in the chronicle of any locale; then it vanishes, never to return. Only once in its history is a place a pioneer country. Other pioneering efforts may follow-the extraction of some hitherto unknown or unusable resource, the creation of some new social orderbut these efforts do not occur in pioneer landscapes or circumstances. Lindbergh …

Plains Landscapes And Changing Visions, John Milton

Great Plains Quarterly

The plains landscape has always been a dominant factor in the lives of those people who confront it daily. Our recognition of pioneer nineteenth-century landscapes is a fusion in the mind of what we remember from early reports and visual images and our own personal vision of the land as it looks today. That concept of the pioneer landscape remains in our minds even as we respond to the contemporary landscape or through the imagination create our own. One reason, then, that pioneer landscapes are still important to us is that they have influenced our perceptions of the plains in …

Learning To Read The Pioneer Landscape: Braudel, Eliade, Turner, And Benton, John Opie

Great Plains Quarterly

Looking at different viewpoints about the landscape of middle America is like seeing the Japanese movie Rashomon: it all depends on who is telling the story. We tend to forget, for example, that American origins are intertwined with an agricultural world view. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the United States was predominantly a nation of farmers, and to all appearances it would continue so indefinitely. (It was not until the early twentieth century that more Americans lived in cities than on farms.) The future successful course of America seemed to depend upon vast and open tracts of good …

Title And Contents- Winter 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1982 VOL. 2 NO.1

CONTENTS

AMERICAN PIONEER LANDSCAPES: AN INTRODUCTION

THE PIONEER LANDSCAPE: AN AMERICAN DREAM David Lowenthal

LEARNING TO READ THE PIONEER LANDSCAPE: BRAUDEL, ELIADE, TURNER, AND BENTON John Opie

THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF THE PAWNEES Richard White

TOWNS OF THE WESTERN RAILROADS John C. Hudson

PLAINS LANDSCAPES AND CHANGING VISIONS John Milton

NOTES & NEWS

Notes And News- Winter 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

1982 SYMPOSIUM: "INTERSECTIONS"

DONOR OF WESTERN ART COLLECTION DIES

COLLECTION RECEIVES ADDITIONAL GIFTS