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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 …

Far Corner Of The Strange Empire Central Alberta On The Eve Of Homestead Settlement, William C. Wonders

Great Plains Quarterly

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, what is now central Alberta was a region in transition. For centuries the area had been inhabited by native Indian peoples, but with the advance of homestead settlement, it became a marginal part of what Joseph Howard has called the "strange empire," a portion of the northern Great Plains that was marked by unrest at the end of one era and the beginning of another. The changes that affected the Red River Valley and later the Saskatchewan Valley had significant local repercussions in this far corner of the "empire," the valley of …

Notes And News- Spring 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

WILLA CATHER SEMINAR

FRIENDS OF THE CENTER

L. J. BIBLE DIES

CENTER RECEIVES STARCH PAPERS

The Origin Of Ranching In Western Canada American Diffusion Or Victorian Transplant?, Simon M. Evans

Great Plains Quarterly

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a number of factors combined to promote the rapid advance of the ranching frontier throughout the Great Plains of North America. The demands of rapidly growing urban populations in the northeastern United States and north western Europe provided an apparently insatiable market for meat. The grasslands were linked to these markets by an expanding railway network and steamships that crossed the Atlantic on regular schedules. Rumors of the huge profits to be made from investments in mines, railways, and ranges lured a flood of risk capital to the West. The interplay of …

Prairie Poetry And Metaphors Of Plain/S Space, Laurie Ricou

Great Plains Quarterly

McAlmon's Chinese Opera, the most significant prairie poem from Canada since Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue and Eli Mandel's Out of Place, concerns "understand[ ing) modern writing" more than it does "the Mid-West." Indeed, it is only by the most expansive definition a prairie poem at all. Yet it is an appropriate source of epigraph, not only because it touches on metaphor, space, and poetry, but because its emphasis is characteristic of a shift in plains poetry and in its criticism, which prompts this essay. Furthermore, as a Canadian poet's tribute to a neglected American modernist, Scobie's poem might …

Review Of The Ambidextrous Historian: Historical Writers And Writing In The American West By C. L. Sonnichsen, Ralph Mann

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a short book of essays, some published before and some not, mostly on the pleasures and problems of the amateur historian. Taken together, the essays also reflect C. L. Sonnichsen's attempt to develop a definition of good historical writing. Unfortunately, while most of the book's pages are filled with good, common-sense advice for beginning researchers and writers, the whole is burdened by the author's jaundiced view of the academic historical profession. The essays introduce the neophyte to the editors, librarians, and reviewers who populate his new world, and gently point out that librarians do not have the leisure …

Title And Contents- Spring 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY SPRING 1983

VOL. 3 NO.2

CONTENTS

RUSSIAN WOLVES IN FOLKTALES AND LITERATURE OF THE PLAINS: A QUESTION OF ORIGINS Paul Schach

THE ORIGIN OF RANCHING IN WESTERN·CANADA: AMERICAN DIFFUSION OR VICTORIAN TRANSPLANT? Simon M. Evans

FAR CORNER OF THE STRANGE EMPIRE: CENTRAL ALBERTA ON THE EVE OF HOMESTEAD SETTLEMENT William C. Wonders

PRAIRIE POETRY AND METAPHORS OF PLAIN/S SPACE Laurie Ricou

BOOK REVIEWS

Grasses and Grasslands: Systematics and Ecology

Clio's Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade

The Ambidextrous Historian: Historical Writers and Writing in the American West

Laird of the West

Mexican Emigration to …

Review Of The Collapse Of Small Towns On The Great Plains: A Bibliography By Nancy Burns, Brian W. Blouet

Great Plains Quarterly

This short essay and bibliography on small towns on the plains is a useful guide to the literature on the decline of small service centers. In the introductory essay Burns describes alterations in the settlement pattern related to social, economic, and technological change. It is a valuable summary, although the reader will encounter one or two problems. For example, the definition of the Great Plains that is given on page 5 is very broad, and it conflicts with the usage employed by many of the authors summarized later.

The bibliography has been carefully selected. It is not intended to be …

Review Of Grasses And Grasslands: Systematics And Ecology Edited By James R. Estes, Ronald J. Tyrl, And Jere N. Brunken, Robert B. Kaul

Great Plains Quarterly

The past decade has seen a revival of biologists' interests in grasslands, and the results are papers, books, and symposia on grassland plants and ecosystems. This book is the product of a symposium at the thirtieth annual meeting of the Amercan Institute of Biological Science at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, and as such will appeal mostly to biologists.

The two parts of the book are integrated by the theme of evolution, the first part dealing with the taxonomy and evolution of grasses themselves and the second part with the evolutionary ecology of grasslands as systems. While taxonomy is one of …

Russian Wolves In Folktales And Literature Of The Plains A Question Of Origins, Paul Schach

Great Plains Quarterly

F or the past several years, my research associate, Robert Buchheit, and I have collected recordings of German dialects spoken by people advanced in years who immigrated to the United States and settled in the Great Plains region decades ago. Our purpose has been to acquire aural records of folk languages, to study the linguistic transformations that have occurred in them, and to preserve permanently languages that will soon disappear. In the course of our research, we have encouraged our informants to speak freely of their personal experiences, family histories, customs, and culture. The numerous recordings that we have made …

Review Of Mexican Emigration To The United States, 1897- 1931: Socio-Economic Patterns By Lawrence A. Cardoso, Felix D. Almaraz Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

In this book Lawrence A. Cardoso focuses attention on the flow of unskilled, low-paid Mexican workers who migrated north across the border between Mexico and the United States from 1897 to 1931. He traces the origins of the northward movement, beginning with the rapid changes in the land and labor systems of rural Mexico in the closing decade of the nineteenth century.

During Porfrrio Draz's long tenure in the presidency, Mexico's national policies favored foreign capital investment, the impact of which transformed the pastoral countryside. Prior to the inauguration of public-sponsored programs for economic development, rural inhabitants lived on communally …

Review Of Laird Of The West By John W. Chalmers, John H. Archer

Great Plains Quarterly

David Laird was born in 1883 in Prince Edward Island, a descendant of colonists settled by the fifth Earl of Selkirk. The young Laird was well educated, brought up in a Presbyterian family, and interested in public affairs. As publisher of the Protestant, he was in the thick of the fight for land reform. He married Laura Owen in 1864 and this union was blessed with six children.

Laird entered active politics as a Liberal and was elected to the Island Assembly. When Prince Edward Island entered confederation on 1 July 1873, he stood successfully as a candidate for …

Review Of The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 By Arnoldo De Leon, Richard L. Nostrand

Great Plains Quarterly

Persons of Spanish-Indian or Mexican descent who were incorporated into the United States in the nineteenth century belonged to one of three major subcultures: the Californio, the manito (Hispanos of New Mexico and Colorado), or the Tejano. Leonard Pitt has written a comprehensive social history of the Californio (1966), and now Arnoldo De Leon gives us a counterpart volume on the Tejano. De Leon's purpose is to capture the essence of the "ordinary" Tejano in Central, South, and West Texas between Texas Independence (1836) and the turn of the century, and he develops the theme that in …

Review Of Clio's Cowboys: Studies In The Historiography Of The Cattle Trade By Don D. Walker, Jimmy M. Skaggs

Great Plains Quarterly

Clio's Cowboys is an important book, the first truly analytical historiography of the glory days of the cattle trade. It will probably also be controversial, because it chastises three generations of western historians for mindlessly repeating sweeping generalizations about cowboys and cattlemen, for relying on questionable sources, and, worst of all, for disembodying the most colorful of the nation's epics with impersonalized economic and business histories.

Don D. Walker says that historians-for all their pretense of accuracy-do no better in capturing the essence of the American cowboy than do novelists, whom they superciliously dismiss as naive. Suggestive examples of Walker's …

Notes & News- Winter 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

1983 GREAT PLAINS SYMPOSIUM: MAPPING THE AMERICAN PLAINS

JOSLYN MUSEUM OPENS CENTER FOR WESTERN STUDIES

AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY

PLAINS AQUATIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE

Review Of Professors, Presidents, And Politicians By George Lynn Cross, James C. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the major success stories of American higher education has been the development of a positive relationship between universities and the people who support them. That relationship protects the right of professors to teach and students to learn without undue political interference and at the same time provides for the exercise of a reasonable amount of public authority over the institutions. In Professors, Presidents, and Politicians, George Lynn Cross, who served as president of the University of Oklahoma from 1943 to 1968, traces the sometimes stormy relationship between state government and higher education in Oklahoma in a discussion …

Intersections Studies In The Canadian And American Great Plains, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

In March of 1982, the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sponsored the symposium Intersections: Studies in the Canadian and American Great Plains. This was the sixth in a series of annual Great Plains symposia, each focusing on a different aspect of the region. Intersections was also a direct response to the Crossing Frontiers conference on the literature and history of the Canadian and American Wests, held in Banff, Alberta, Canada, in 1978. The four essays in this Great Plains Quarterly represent a cross section of the twenty-nine papers in nine disciplines presented at Intersections …

Social Scientists And Farm Poverty On The North American Plains, 1933-1940, Harry C. Mcdean

Great Plains Quarterly

Chronic farm poverty in the Great Plains during the Great Depression of the 1930s provoked sharply differing responses from the governments of the United States and Canada. Among the many features of American and Canadian life that helped shape those different responses, the most significant was the status of the social sciences in agriculture. In nearly every category one might employ to assess their comparative status, from funding to publication record to political influence, social scientists in the United States enjoyed an impressive advantage over those in Canada by 1930. A historical appraisal of one element in this disparity-the research …

Review Of The Forgotten Frontier: Urban Planning In The American West Before 1890 By John W. Reps, Charles S. Sargent

Great Plains Quarterly

The title of this book is misleading. If the work carries one persistent message, it is that the cities of the American West were not planned at all. Conceived as speculations in land, yes; almost always designed in the form of a repetitive gridiron, yes; but planned in any twentieth-century sense of the word, definitely not. Only the southwestern Spanish towns and the Mormon towns of Deseret come close to being examples of "urban planning." City planning, after all, only came along early in the twentieth century, and Reps clearly illustrates that few towns were established after 1890. The term …

Review Of The Life And Death Of Jerome Tiger: War To Peace, Death To Life By Peggy Tiger And Molly Babcock, Joseph Stuart

Great Plains Quarterly

Jerome Tiger, a Creek-Seminole painter of Muskogee, Oklahoma, produced what amounts to a visual history of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) during the 1960s. Under the guidance of Muskogee entrepreneur Nettie Wheeler, he rose to prominence in the highly circumscribed world of Native American painting. In 1967, when Tiger was twenty-six years old and on the eve of commercial success, he died from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot on the parking lot of a Muskogee cafe.

His widow, Peggy, and cousin, Molly Babcock, pay him tribute in this lavishly illustrated book. A high-school dropout, Tiger served …

Diplomatic Racism Canadian Government And Black Migration From Oklahoma, 1905-1912, R. Bruce Shepard

Great Plains Quarterly

From the turn of the century until World War I, hundreds of thousands of American farmers migrated to western Canada. Not all of them were welcomed. Between 1905 and 1912, more than one thousand black men, women, and children joined the trek. They came mainly from Oklahoma, and they settled in Saskatchewan and Alberta. While their numbers were small in comparison to the total American migration, the appearance of these black settlers aroused bitter race prejudice among western Canadians, many of whom demanded that the Canadian government stop more blacks from coming. How the government went about this task is …

Competition For Settlers The Canadian Viewpoint, James M. Richtik

Great Plains Quarterly

Many aspects of Canada's relationship with the United States were summed up by Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau when he told an American audience in Washington, D.C., "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even tempered is the beast ... one is affected by every twitch and grunt." Canada has always lived next to this generally friendly elephant and Canadian policy makers have never been able to shake off the need to consider what has happened or may happen south of the border. Although the context was different …

Title & Contents- Winter 1983

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1983 VOL. 3 NO.1

CONTENTS

INTERSECTIONS: STUDIES IN THE CANADIAN AND AMERICAN GREAT PLAINS Frances W. Kaye

DIPLOMATIC RACISM: CANADIAN GOVERNMENT AND BLACK MIGRATION FROM OKLAHOMA, 1905-1912 R. Bruce Shepard

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS AND FARM POVERTY ON THE NORTH AMERICAN PLAINS, 1933-1940 Harry C. McDean AMERICAN LITERARY IMAGES OF THE CANADIAN PRAIRIES, 1860-1910 James Doyle

COMPETITION FOR SETTLERS: THE CANADIAN VIEWPOINT James M. Richtik

BOOK REVIEWS

Town and City: Aspects of Western Canadian Urban Development

The Prairies and Plains: Prospects for the 80s

The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared

Ceremonies of the Pawnee, …

Review Of Saving The Prairies: The Life Cycle Of The Founding School Of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955 By Ronald C. Tobey, Royce E. Ballinger

Great Plains Quarterly

Saving the Prairies is an analysis of the growth, development, and decline of a major school of ecologists centered mostly at the University of Nebraska from the 1890s to the early 1950s. The title stems from Ronald Tobey's conclusion that the demise of the grassland ecologists resulted in part from their involvement in practical problems of range management during and following the devastation of the prairies by the great drought of the 1930s.

The book centers on the ideas, principally plant community succession, developed by Frederic Clements, colleagues such as Roscoe Pound, and a network of students whose research concerned …

Review Of Heck Thomas: Frontier Marshal By Glenn Shirley, David J. Bodenhamer

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is a reprint of the 1962 edition by the same title. As such, it is subject to the same criticism that greeted its initial publication. The author does not provide citations, he invents dialogue, and he exaggerates Thomas's record and reputation. For a more detailed and reliable account of western lawmen, this reviewer advises readers to consult Frank Prassel, The Western Peace Officer (1972 ) or Larry Ball, The United States Marshals of New Mexico and Arizona Territories, 1846-1912 (1978).

Review Of The Frontier In History: North America And Southern Africa Compared Edited By Howard Lamar And Leonard Thompson., Leslie C. Duly

Great Plains Quarterly

Taking an attractive approach to a study heretofore reviewed in only superficial terms, Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson provide a fascinating and at times profound basis for comparing processes within the American and South African frontiers. Especially pertinent is their jointly authored introduction in which, after reviewing the literature, they provide a definition of a frontier as a zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies. Their definition is made usable in the subsequent four sets of paired essays, with each set focusing upon a broad historical process associated with the two frontiers.

In the first and best pair, Robert …

Review Of The Prairies And Plains: Prospects For The 80s Edited By John R. Rogge, R. Leslie Heathcote

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume contains the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Prairie Division of the Canadian Association of Geographers, held at Delta Marsh, Manitoba, in September 1980: six invited papers and two "student papers," the latter included for their "interest and because of their Prairie orientation."

The invited papers provide several viewpoints on a core of overlapping themes: the future of agriculture in an environment where climatic and market uncertainties together with economic costs and price-squeeze pressures have thinned out the farming communities over the last sixty years; the environmental transformations resulting from the imposition of agricultural production systems upon …

Review Of Town And City: Aspects Of Western Canadian Urban Development Edited By Alan F. J. Artibise, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly

Western Canada's settlement is neatly divided at the Rocky Mountain front. West of there, the population is urban and the scattered clusters of people are separated from one another by miles of wilderness; on the prairies to the east there is a network of farms, small towns, and cities dominated, in turn, by a handful of metropolises. This valuable collection of papers by sixteen Canadian urban historians and geographers treats urbanization in both of these western Canadian realms, providing a balanced geographical coverage and giving the reader a consistent view of town formation, ranging from the smallest of places to …

American Literary Images Of The Canadian Prairies, 1860-1910, James Doyle

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1879, the prolific dime novelist Edward L. Wheeler produced a narrative entitled Canada Chet, The Counterfeiter Chief, set in "a location as hitherto quite neglected by the pen of the novelist and veracious historian-i.e., in the British possessions to the North-west of Minnesota." If, as Wheeler suggests, American writers were indifferent to the Canadian West in the nineteenth century, this lack of attention can be related to a number of considerations, the most obvious of which is the fact that Americans were sufficiently occupied by the undeveloped regions within their own border. The westward experience in the United …

Review Of Ceremonies Of The Pawnee. Part I, The Skiri. Part Ii, The South Bands By James R. Murie, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

After sixty years the Smithsonian Institution has finally published James R. Murie's work on Pawnee ceremonies in a handsome set of two volumes, impeccably edited by Douglas R. Parks. Murie, part Pawnee and somewhat trained in the techniques of anthropological investigation, began serious study of his own tribe in the 1890s and completed it in 1921 shortly before his death. Through much of his career he worked with white anthropologists such as Alice Fletcher, George Grinnell, Owen Dorsey, and Clark Wissler, some of whom gave him scant credit for his assistance in their research and publications. These volumes were begun …