Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Read This Only To Yourself: The Private Writings Of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910 By Elizabeth Hampsten, Julie Roy-Jeffrey

Great Plains Quarterly

Hampsten has written a rich, provocative book on the private writings of midwestern women between 1880 and 1910. As she points out, there has been a long tradition of studying working-class male authors but little interest in working-class women writers. To recapture women's consciousness, Hampsten suggests, one must do more than approach the sources as if they were written by men. Not only the content but also the omissions, the form, and the style of women's writings are significant.

The structure and style of working-class diaries and letters bear few resemblances to what was considered "good writing" by contemporaries. Hampsten …

Review Of Indian-White Relations In The United States: A Bibliography Of Works Published 1975- 1980 By Francis Paul Prucha, Roy W. Meyer

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the shortcomings of any bibliography is that it is somewhat out-of-date by the time it is published. The more being written in its area of coverage, the sooner it needs to be updated. It is an indication of the current interest in Indian white relations that Francis Paul Prucha's compendious bibliographical guide published in 1977 has already had to be supplemented with a bibliography containing more than three thousand entries. In the single area of legal relations, for example, nearly three hundred fifty new titles have appeared in the years 1975-1980.

Users of Prucha's original guide will find …

Review Of Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist On The Oregon Trail, Joseph C. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is devoted to the life and oeuvre of the American artist, Alfred Jacob Miller. Historians, art historians, anthropologists, and geographers are indebted to Miller, who depicted the American wilderness frontier. In 1837, the flamboyant Scots nobleman and soldier, William Drummond Stewart, chose Miller as the artist who would record his odyssey to the Rocky Mountains. With forty five men and twenty carts, Miller and Stewart traveled along what became the Oregon Trail to Horse Creek in Wyoming, where the artist witnessed the 1837 rendezvous of mountain men, Indians, and traders. The rendezvous and subsequent excursions into the Wind …

Review Of The Code Of The West By Bruce A. Rosenberg, Henry Nash Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

In Custer: The Epic of Defeat (1975), Bruce A. Rosenberg analyzed more than a century of discussion of the massacre of the general and some two hundred cavalrymen under his command by Sioux Indians near the Little Bighorn River in 1876. The book demonstrates how in American popular culture this catastrophe was transformed into the heroic triumph of Custer's Last Stand. Rosenberg says that in his new book, The Code of the West, he has used the same method but expanded its "cultural implications." His table of contents does indeed present an attractive variety of topics. In addition to …

Across The 49th Thunderstorms In The Northern Great Plains, Alec H. Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

Hail, lightning, flash floods, erosion, severe gusty winds, and tornadoes produce multimillion- dollar losses to the economy of the northern plains each summer. Research into these meteorological phenomena has been fragmented by the presence of political boundaries in the Great Plains, especially the 49th parallel, which separates the United States and Canada. Perceptions of and responses to the thunderstorm hazard still differ north and south of the border. Tornadoes, for example, have only recently appeared in the weather forecasts for the Canadian prairies, and such responses to summer storms as weather modification experiments and hail insurance coverage have been made …

Index- Fall 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 1983

Index pp. 248-54 (7 pages)

Notes And News- Fall 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

GREAT PLAINS SYMPOSIA ANNOUNCED

GUIDE TO AMERICAN INDIAN RESOURCE MATERIALS PUBLISHED

NEBRASKA ARTISTS AND POETS

Review Of The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural And Social History By R. Douglas Hurt, Gilbert C. Fite

Great Plains Quarterly

This is the third book to appear recently on the Dust Bowl and the 1930s. Some readers may ask whether the subject deserves another study so closely on the heels of Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, and Paul Bonnifield's The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression, both published in 1979. But the fact is that scholars have been too long in filling this important historical void.

In The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History, R. Douglas Hurt has written a brief, clear, straightforward account of life and times on the southern plains …

Review Of The Red River In Southwestern History By Carl Newton Tyson, Forrest D. Monahan

Great Plains Quarterly

In this book Carl Newton Tyson recounts the role of the Red River in southwestern history from the time that Spanish explorers discovered the stream to the modern era. Flowing some twelve hundred miles from its origin on the Texas high plains, it drains about one-tenth of the continent before emptying its waters into the Mississippi. Claimed by Spain as a result of Coronado's marching across its upper reaches in 1541, it became a river in dispute from about 1700, when Frenchmen appeared along its lower reaches. In fact, it became a conduit for expanding the French empire westward. The …

Review Of Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978: Symbols In Crisis Of Authority By Loretta Fowler, William K. Powers

Great Plains Quarterly

The thesis of this book is that the Arapahoe, who share the Wind River reservation of Wyoming with the Shoshoni, have somehow adapted better than other tribes to white domination through the creation and use of effective political symbols, particularly those values associated with traditional age grades, a distinctive feature of early Arapahoe society. Fred Eggan, in the Introduction, states that it is clear from the author's account "that the Arapahoe have made the most successful adjustment to white culture of any Plains tribe" (xv, italics added). It is a wonder why this intolerable statement was included. For many …

Review Of Magic Images: Contemporary Native American Art By Edwin L. Wade And Rennard Strickland, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the attractions of American Indian art is that it offers something of interest to practically everyone. For the romantic there are paintings that depict past tribal life-ways. For the realist there are contemporary paintings that present current social issues and depict Indians as citizens of a complex society. For collectors there are avant-garde pieces of individual vision that will influence the direction of American Indian art. For scholars, there is the opportunity to study, evaluate, and debate the origins and relative merits of styles and techniques. Magic Images: Contemporary Native American Art reflects this diversity of interest in …

Review Of The West As Romantic Horizon By William H. Goetzmann, Joseph C. Porter, And David C. Hunt, Robert Spence

Great Plains Quarterly

This book, the first major publication of the Center for Western Studies at Omaha's Joslyn Art Museum, serves as "an introduction to the Inter North collections" housed at the museum. The three collections are the Maximilian Bodmer cache of 427 sketches and watercolors, the Alfred Jacob Miller collection of more than one hundred paintings, and the Artists of the Western Frontier collection (eighty-six works by thirty-seven artists, including Catlin, Eastman, Bierstadt, Remington, and Russell).

From this bountiful feast we are served only thirty-six color plates-fourteen Bodmers, thirteen Millers, nine of the Western Frontier group-and arguably too many of these are …

Review Of Custom Combining On The Great Plains: A History By Thomas D. Isern, Thomas R. Wessel

Great Plains Quarterly

Probably one of the most often observed but least known institutions on the Great Plains is custom harvesting. Although the practice probably dates from the Hrst itinerate laborer who bought a grain craddle, Thomas Isern's book is about the men who traveled from Texas to Canada seeking employment for their expensive combining machines. For the most part, Isern's custom harvesters entered the business during World War II and survived the long period of low prices and high costs that characterized American agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s.

Custom harvesting reached maturity during world War II, when farmers received high prices …

Willa Cather And The Populists, Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite the wealth of critical and analytical treatments of the life and work of Willa Cather, few have noted the relationship between her writing and the Populist movement of the early 1890s. Some have specifically described Cather as nonpolitical or even antipolitical. The two exceptions, John H. Randall III and Evelyn J. Hinz, base their conclusions on sources other than the Populist movement in Nebraska. Cather's writings, nonetheless, exhibit clear evidence of the impact of both Populism and its ideological successor, Bryanism. Cather did not like either variant of agrarian radicalism, and she expressed her distaste both explicitly and implicitly. …

Escape From The Great Plains The Icelanders In North Dakota And Alberta, Howard Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

Immigration historians in Canada and the United States are becoming aware of the need to look at immigration history within the larger context of North American history. Canadian immigration patterns have been affected, indirectly, almost as much by American immigration policy as by Canadian policy. Within many ethnic groups in North America, there has been a significant exchange of people and cultural patterns between Canada and the United States. Marcus Lee Hansen and John Brebner first looked at the interchange of people between Canada and the United States in their pioneering work, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples …

Title And Contents- Fall 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1983 VOL. 3 NO.4

CONTENTS

ACROSS THE 49TH: THUNDERSTORMS IN THE NORTHERN GREAT PLAINS Alec H. Paul

WILLA CATHER AND THE POPULISTS Robert W. Cherny

ESCAPE FROM THE GREAT PLAINS: THE ICELANDERS IN NORTH DAKOTA AND ALBERTA Howard Palmer

BOOK REVIEWS

The Code of the West

The West as Romantic Horizon

Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist On the Oregon Trail

Magic Images: Contemporary Native American Art

Indian-White Relations in the United States: A Bibliography of Works Published 1975-1980

Yuwipi: Vision and Experience in Oglala Ritual

Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978: Symbols in Crisis of Authority

Slim Buttes, 1876: An …

Review Of Yuwipi: Vision And Experience In Oglala Ritual By William K. Powers, Raymond J. De Mallie

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume provides an introduction to contemporary Lakota religious life among the Oglalas of Pine Ridge Reservation. It focuses on three basic rituals that form the core of traditional religion as individuals face the problems and challenges of day-to-day life: the sweat lodge, vision quest, and yuwipi meeting. Although written from an anthropological viewpoint, with an anthropologist's concern for ritual detail, this is a literary treatment, more descriptive than analytical. It paints a vivid picture of these contemporary rituals, recreating in novelistic detail an actual family crisis that prompted a young Oglala man to carry his concerns to a medicine …

Review Of Soils Of The Great Plains: Land Use, Crops, And Grasses By Andrew R. Aandahl, James V. Drew

Great Plains Quarterly

Andrew R. Aandahl provides a visual and descriptive overview of the soils of the Great Plains, a region that accounts for approximately one-third of the cropland and one-half of the grassland pasture in the United States. Its soils are a basic resource for the region's productivity.

Aandahl examines this soil resource in seventy high-quality color photographs of soil profiles and associated landscapes, accompanied by a text that thoroughly describes and classifies the soils. In addition, the soils of the Great Plains are delineated on a map that accompanies the book. The 195 mapping units are color coded in order to …

Review Of Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode Of The Great Sioux War By Jerome A. Greene, Thomas William Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly

Books on the Sioux War of 1876 tend to concentrate on the defeat of George A. Custer at the Little Bighorn and either slight or ignore the months of campaigning that followed that disaster. Both buffs and scholars should therefore welcome Jerome Greene's study of the operations of General George Crook in August and September 1876. Although especially arduous and frustrating, the campaign and its climactic battle at Slim Buttes, South Dakota, were far more typical of the wars on the plains than Custer's spectacular downfall.

The campaign became known as the "Horsemeat March," because the failure of supplies forced …

Review Of Elliott Coues: Naturalist And Frontier Historian By Paul Russell Cutright And Michael J. Brodhead, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly

Vain, petty, vengeful, arrogant, and austere would be appropriate words to describe Elliott Coues. Yet, on occasion, he unselfishly aided a promising career and took up unpopular causes such as women's rights. Trained as a physician and employed as an army surgeon during much of his career, Coues nevertheless used much of his time to observe, study, read, and write about birds. Indeed, Coues (pronounced "cows") was one of America's outstanding ornithologists. He was also a prolific writer with more than six hundred titles to his credit, including a seminal work of taxonomic organization, Key to North American Birds (1872). …

Review Of Over The Chihuahua And Santa Fe Trails, 1847- 1848: George Rutledge Gibson's Journal Edited And Annotated By Robert W. Frazer, Raymond Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Born in Virginia in about 1810, George Rutledge Gibson studied law and later opened a law office in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1834. During the early 1840s he moved his practice to Weston, Missouri. Gibson also dabbled unsuccessfully as a journalist, but his two newspapers proved to be financial failures.

When the Mexican War started, Gibson volunteered and was elected a second lieutenant. He was part of Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West, which left Fort Leavenworth for the occupation of New Mexico in 1846. He later became assistant quartermaster and commissary and accompanied Colonel Alexander Doniphan's forces to …

Notes & News- Summer 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

LUEBKE APPOINTED CENTER DIRECTOR

BERNICE SLOTE DIES

NON-RESIDENT FELLOWS OF THE CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES

WEBB-SMITH ESSAY COMPETITION

Review Of Chief Left Hand: Southern Arapaho By Margaret Coel, Robert C. Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly

For more than two decades, since Alvin Josephy, Jr., wrote Patriot Chiefs (1961), biography has been a useful way to present American Indian history. In its most successful form, up to a dozen Native Americans are examined in a book of chapter-length studies. In a less successful format, whole books are devoted to the life of a single great tribesman. There can be value in these full-length profiles, but the hazards are many. Chief Left Hand falls into the latter grouping.

Left Hand was nearly thirty years of age when he became chief of the Southern Arapaho tribe. His frequent …

Review Of The West And Reconstruction By Eugene H. Berwanger, James A. Rawley

Great Plains Quarterly

Since 1967, historians of the Reconstruction era have turned away from the Confederate states and Washington to focus their attention on the Northern states. David Montgomery, Felice A. Bonadio, James C. Mohr, and others have studied labor, Ohio, New York, and the border states during Reconstruction. The present book adds to that body of literature a broad-gauged examination of the trans-Mississippi West during the years from 1865 to 1870, omitting the former slave states and Iowa, which are considered more middle western than western. The author of a previous work, The Frontier Against Slavery, Berwanger brings a distinguished background …

Review Of Indian Policy In The United States: Historical Essays By Francis Paul Prucha, Ronald N. Satz

Great Plains Quarterly

For two decades, Francis Paul Prucha of Marquette University has produced a steady stream of scholarly publications on nineteenth century American Indian policy. Sixteen of Prucha's lectures and articles, including some never before published, are gathered together in this volume with brief head notes that indicate the circumstances under which they were written and some reactions to them.

The first two essays concern the study and writing of the history of Indian policy. Prucha warns that the historian's task is neither activism nor special pleading, urges scholars to be more fully conscious of the historical context in which the events …

Pioneer Landscape Paintings In Australia And The United States, R. Leslie Heathcote

Great Plains Quarterly

The European invasion of Australia and the American West in the nineteenth century brought a massive transformation of landscapes in the two continents through conflict with the indigenous populations and by the introduction of new and more intensive systems of resource use. As historians and historical geographers have acknowledged, the invasion was generally well documented, not only by the more literate pioneers and contemporaries but also, more importantly for any statistical analysis, by the emerging bureaucracies that administered the transfers of lands and collected the facts of land settlement, which the new societies saw as evidence of the success of …

Nineteenth-Century Patterns Of Railroad Development On The Great Plains, Russell S. Kirby

Great Plains Quarterly

The North American Great Plains experienced rapid settlement and economic growth from 1870 to 1914. The advance of settlement and the development of local economy, while generally contiguous, were by no means uniform. Soil conditions, underground water supplies, the network of rivers and streams, rainfall, and growing season are all attributes of the physical environment that vary across the plains both longitudinally and latitudinally. In addition, the extent of effective settlement in the Mississippi River valley, the natural starting point for westward expansion onto the plains, varied considerably in 1865. Given these economic and environmental preconditions, it is not surprising …

Transportation And Transformation The Hudson's Bay Company, 1857-1885, A. A. Den Otter

Great Plains Quarterly

Transportation was a prime consideration in the business policies of the Hudson's Bay Company from its inception. Although the company legally enjoyed the position of monopoly by virtue of the Royal Charter of 1670, which granted to the Hudson's Bay Company the Canadian territory called Rupert's Land, this privilege had to be defended from commercial intruders. From the earliest days the company developed its own transportation network in order to maintain a competitive edge over its opponents. During its first century, when business ventured hardly beyond the shores of the Hudson Bay, the company perfected its transatlantic shipping. Later, when …

Title And Contents- Summer 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SUMMER 1983 VOL. 3 NO.3

CONTENTS

PIONEER LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS IN AUSTRALIA AND THE UNITED STATES R. Leslie Heathcote

WESTERN MYTH AND NORTHERN HISTORY: THE PLAINS INDIANS OF BERGER AND WIEBE Sherrill E. Grace

NINETEENTH-CENTUR Y PATTERNS OF RAILROAD DEVELOPMENT ON THE GREAT PLAINS Russell S. Kirby

TRANSPORTATION AND TRANSFORMATION: THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, 1857-1885 A. A. den Otter

BOOK REVIEWS

Indian Policy in the United States: Historical Essays

Chief Left Hand: Southern Arapaho

The Gift of the Sacred Pipe

Over the Chihuahua and Santa Fe Trails, 1847-1848: George Rutledge Gibson's Journal

The West and Reconstruction

NOTES & …

Review Of The Gift Of The Sacred Pipe By Black Elk, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a beautiful coffee-table book. One wonders why a university press chose to publish it. Though the illustrations to the book are lovely and in the spirit of Black Elk's account of the major ceremonies of the Lakota people, they do not add to our scholarly understanding of those rituals. Furthermore, in editing Joseph Epes Brown's original text, Drysdale removed all footnotes and much of the technical detail concerning Lakota iconology that was included by Brown and Black Elk in the original Sacred Pipe (1953). As a consequence, this account of the ceremonies is readable but lacks the density, …