Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Archaeology, History, And Custer's Last Battle By Richard Allen Fox, Jr., Vergil E. Noble

Great Plains Quarterly

It is important to note, however, that arechaeological knowledge is largely a product of interpretation, neither as certain nor as monolithic as Fox might have his readers believe. Indeed, some of his conclusions are sure to be disputed by fellow archaeologists with differing views, as well as by those historians he confronts directly in the book. Still, Fox deveolops a compelling argument that will serve as a point of departure for future debates on the enduring and ever-controversial subject. Accordingly, there is little doubt that his book will garner a vast audience among historians and archaeologists, students of military tactics, …

Bison Ecology, Brule And Yankton Winter Hunting, And The Starving Winter Of 1832--33, Richmond Clow

Great Plains Quarterly

On 6 February 1833, William Laidlow, the American Fur Company's leading official at Fort Pierre wrote that Brule (Sicangu) and Yankton (Ihanktonwan ) camps "have been in a state of starvation all winter, and have suffered most dreadfully." The entire winter of 1832-33 was a "starving time" on the middle Missouri River in present day south-central South Dakota because these skilled tribal hunters found no bison in a land where the herds were frequently described as "immense." Why knowledgeable and efficient professional tribal hunters, as well as post employees, were hungry that winter, in this apparent land of abundance, presents …

Index

Great Plains Quarterly

Index 279-286 (8 pages)

The 1992 Secession Movement In Southwest Kansas, Peter J. Mccormick

Great Plains Quarterly

In May of 1992 the Kansas state legislature approved and Governor Joan Finney signed into law a new school finance formula that adversely affected several southwest Kansas counties. The new bill provided for a blanket mill levy of 32 mills ($32 in taxes for every $1000 assessed valuation) to be spread across the state. It also restricted funding to a maximum of $3600 per student. The effects in the southwest were drastic. Many districts there, accustomed to setting their own tax rates and to retaining all monies collected, spent upward of $5000 per student on tax levies below 20 mills. …

Notes & News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

BOOK AWARDS (David Wishart; John Wunder)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

CANADIAN STUDIES GRANT PROGRAMS, 1996-97

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Richard Popp)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

THE PROGRESSIVE CONTEXT OF THE NEBRASKA CAPITOL: THE COLLABORATION OF GOODHUE AND TACK (Frederick C. Luebke)

THE 1992 SECESSION MOVEMENT IN SOUTHWEST KANSAS (Peter J. McCormick)

BISON ECOLOGY, BRULE AND YANKTON WINTER HUNTING, AND THE STARVING WINTER OF 1832-33 (Richmond Clow)

BOOK REVIEWS

An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians

The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners

On Turner's Trail: 100 Years of Writing Western History

The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley

Redefining the American Dream

Where the …

Review Of The Life And Legacy Of Annie Oakley By Glenda Riley, Donald Arthur Clark

Great Plains Quarterly

Riley proves an excellent writer, adeptly disclosing the personality of this private woman. Poverty ridden as a child, Oakley learned to hunt and became an expert markswoman. She married the first man she beat in a shooting competition, Frank Butler. Frank, perhaps the ideal husband, managed Annie and their engagements with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Throughout the years they maintained high moral standards; neither smoked, drank or cursed. Annie, ever the Victorian lady, always wore a dress and always rode side-saddle while proving herself a worldclass sharpshooter. She never forgot those less fortunate than herself, providing gifts to orphanages …

Review Of Redefining The American Dream: The Novels Of Willa Cather By Sally Peltier Harvey, Evelyn I. Funda

Great Plains Quarterly

Harvey's book will be of interest not only to Cather scholars, but to an audience more widely concerned with literature as an expression of culture. By citing some of Cather's contemporaries (Andrew Carnegie's exegesis of the "Gospel of Wealth" and William James's identification of success as the country's "bitch-goddess," for instance) as well as her literary peers (Howells, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck among them), then complementing this with more recent cultural studies of the early twentieth century (such as Jackson Lears's examination of intellectual transformation and Warren Sussman's study of the changing perceptions of the individual), Harvey gives us a …

Review Of Following The Indian Wars: The Story Of The Newspaper Correspondents Among The Indian Campaigners By Oliver Knight, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite these criticisms, Knight's work has value. It offers insights into the daily rigors of nineteenth-century Army life and examines the sources from which much public knowledge of Indians flowed. Fans of military history may enjoy the book and may join the correspondents' armchair generalling, but readers interested in the correspondents and the history of journalism will have to wade through a lot of extraneous material to get what they want.

Review Of An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession Of The Nebraska Indians By David J. Wishart, Francis Paul Prucha

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a well-written and authoritative book, but it is not a pleasant book to read, for it is a story of unremitting sadness. It traces the nineteenth-century history of four Indian tribes whose homelands in 1800 covered what is now the eastern two-thirds of the state of Nebraska-the Omahas and the Otoe-Missourias along the Missouri River, the Pone as north of the Niobrara River near its mouth, and the Pawnees (in four bands) in the central area of the state.

Review Of On Turner's Trail: 100 Years Of Writing Western History By Wilbur R. Jacobs, Mary Young

Great Plains Quarterly

When Frederick Jackson Turner retired, he took up residence at the Huntington Library in California. Turner left his papers to the Huntington, thus assuring that the Turner industry would flourish there. Wilbur Jacobs is among the resident senior scholars who have tended the flame. Jacobs is a long-time critic of Turner's imperialist celebrations of progress, dichotomous views of savagism and civilization, and anti-environmentalism. Turner ignored much of the development of social science in his own time and confused ruling theory with multiple working hypotheses. Jacobs repeats these criticisms in several contexts in the present volume, but champions Turner as a …

Breaking The Silence Hymns And Folk Songs In O. E. Rølvaag's Immigrant Trilogy, Phillip R. Coleman-Hull

Great Plains Quarterly

In an essay written in 1933 Einar Haugen briefly mentions that "RØlvaag's most delicate observations take the form of music, and rhythmic sound becomes to him the highest form of beauty." Haugen refers merely to the sonorous qualities of the prairie and never delves into the songs-both Norwegian folk songs and hymns-that surface through O. E. RØlvaag's immigrant trilogy. Since 1933, critics have explored a multitude of themes related to Giants in the Earth, Peder Victorious, and Their Father's God, and much attention has been given to the issue of cultural integrity as espoused by RØlvaag. Language, religion, and folklore …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (David Murphy; Don D. Walker; Doreen Barrie; Howard R. Lamar; David Wishart)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

JOINT CONFERENCE

"Same Horse, New Wagon" Tradition And Assimilation Among The Jews Of Wichita, 1865,1930, Hal Rothman

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite the emphasis on ethnicity and crosscultural contact that permeates the New Western History, western historians have neglected the Jews of the American West. Often mislabeled as German ethnics because of their surnames or ignored altogether, Jews of the interior West in particular have been left out of the intellectual revolution sweeping the field. Their modern demographic distribution in coastal and urban areas has been mistaken for their historic presence, and their contribution to local and regional culture has been overlooked. As a result, the Jews of large urban areas in the West have received the vast majority of scholarly …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

"SAME HORSE, NEW WAGON": TRADITION AND ASSIMILATION AMONG THE JEWS OF WICHITA, 1865-1930 (Hal Rothman)

BREAKING THE SILENCE: HYMNS AND FOLK SONGS IN O. E. RØLVAAG'S IMMIGRANT TRILOGY (Philip R. Coleman-Hull)

SENSE OF PLACE IN THE PRAIRIE ENVIRONMENT: SETTLEMENT AND ECOLOGY IN RURAL GEARY COUNTY, KANSAS (Nina Veregge)

HUNT, CAPTURE, RAISE, INCREASE: THE PEOPLE WHO SAVED THE BISON (Ken Zontek)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture

Soils in Archaeology: Landscape Evolution and Human Occupation

The Loner: Three Sketches of the Personal Life and Ideas of R. B. Bennett, 1870-1947

The Sioux and Other Native …

Sense Of Place In The Prairie Environment Settlement And Ecology In Rural Geary County, Kansas, Nina Veregge

Great Plains Quarterly

Many people who drive across Kansas on the Interstate or on Route 50 see the state as a single, unchanging stretch of treeless plain. A more perceptive observer witnesses the gradual transition from the east to the west: from rolling hills and wooded vales to wide open grassland and sage plain; from corn to winter wheat; from farms to ranches and feedlots; from running streams to dry washes; from humidity on a summer day that is relieved only by constant wind to dry heat blown across grassland untempered by stream valley microclimates. It appears a seamless transition where distinctions are …

Hunt, Capture, Raise, Increase The People Who Saved The Bison, Ken Zontek

Great Plains Quarterly

Charles and Mollie Goodnight, C. J. "Buffalo" Jones, Frederick and Mary Dupuis, and Samuel Walking Coyote and his wife Sabine saved the bison. They hunted, caught, and raised bison calves that increased buffalo numbers at a time when the Great Plains monarchs clung desperately to a tenuous existence. Their remarkable stories, deserving of reiteration, cast light on four themes of Western history: proper recognition for front-line conservationists, the role of women, hunters as conservationists, and the profitability of species preservation.

Western bison conservation was not a matter of eastern politicians and scientists, such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Hornaday, legislating …

Review Of The End Of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety From The Old West To The New Deal By David M. Wrobel, Kathleen A. Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly

More than a decade before the 1890 Census, some Americans began to perceive that the frontier was disappearing; they worried that, with the closing of the frontier, the country might lose its tough and resourceful individualism, its ability to assimilate foreigners and forge democratic institutions, its safety valve and its future hopes-in short, its uniqueness. Soon this "frontier anxiety" pervaded American writing, speech, and thought. David M. Wrobel traces the theme of frontier anxiety and its variations in American journalism, political rhetoric and policy, literature and popular culture, and academic discussions from the 1880s to the 1930s. He shows that …

Review Of Owning Western History: A Guide To Collecting Rare Documents, Historical Letters, And Valuable Photographs From The Old West By Warren B. Anderson, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

As the reader will have surmised, this volume is about collecting. It might well have been titled, "Western History: Via Waste Paper, Photographs and Other Ephemera." Be warned, it is not concerned with literary debris, but rather the remains of defunct stock companies, failed businesses, "wanted posters," and seemingly an infinity of other secular paper.

There is little to review here. The book is unabashedly descriptive, anecdotal, and largely non-critical. None the less, it has the virtue of directing the scholar to many documents of "western" society that otherwise might be neglected, and the pay-off can be interesting.

Review Of The Orphan Trains: Placing Out In America By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Fred Erisman

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the most haunting stories of the American West is the legend of the "orphan trains." Relating the practice of taking homeless children from the teeming cities and resettling them in the nation's heartland where they could grow and prosper as youngsters should, the story tacitly invokes some of the most potent of American myths-the Turner safety-valve theory, the Horatio Alger tale of the self-made person, and, more darkly, the lingering traces of Social Darwinism. The Orphan Trains strives to set the record straightnot to debunk the legend, but to give it its proper niche in western history. Emphasizing …

Review Of Chasing Rainbows: A Recollection Of The Great Plains, 1921-1975 By Gladys Leffler Gist, Deborah Fink

Great Plains Quarterly

Chasing Rainbows is the first-person story of Gladys Leffler Gist, a farm woman who was born in Iowa in 1898 and moved to South Dakota five years after her 1921 marriage. Although Gladys and her husband Ray had hard times in their first twenty years of farming and remained tenant farmers almost all their lives, the story is a happy one of a family well integrated into the dominant religious, social and political milieu of rural South Dakota and Iowa. James Marten, whose wife Linda is a granddaughter of the couple, has lovingly but conscientiously edited the work, providing context …

Review Of The Cowboy: Representations Of Labor In An American Work Culture By Blake Allmendinger, Matt Hokom

Great Plains Quarterly

Of all the mythologies Americans have constructed for themselves, that surrounding the cowboy is among the most influential and persistent. Blake Allmendinger's book attempts to correct this popularized myth by examining how cowboys represented themselves. The Cowboy argues that authentic cowboy culture is best defined as an expression of labor and its self-representation in art. While this is an interesting direction to take in itself, what especially recommends it is Allmendinger's interdisciplinary method. He skillfully combines traditional historical and literary approaches with an examination of folkloric and pop culture sources to create a complex picture of an evolving culture.

Review Of The Loner: Three Sketches Of The Personal Life And Ideas Of R. B. Bennett, 1870-1947 By P. B. Waite, Dale Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly

The task of rehabilitating the reputation of former Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett is a formidable one. Nevertheless, that is P. B. Waite's goal in The Loner, a set of three "sketches" of Bennett's life. Originally given as the Joanne Goodman Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 1991, these sketches encompass Bennett's earliest years at Hopewell Cape and the Miramichi, his years as a lawyer and rising politician in Calgary, and his years in Ottawa. The Loner is not, however, another biography of R. B. Bennett, according to Waite, but an attempt to explain "the personal …

Review Of The Sioux And Other Native American Cultures Of The Dakotas: An Annotated Bibliography Compiled By Herbert T. Hoover And Karen P. Zimmerman, Steve Potts

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is an excellent supplement to Hoover and Jack Marken's 1980 Bibliography of the Sioux, and the two volumes can be used together for a thorough treatment of the Sioux. The title of this volume, however, is somewhat misleading. Material related to Sioux origins in Minnesota is included and recent materials on the Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Ojibway are omitted; after the first chapter, most annotations are on the Sioux. The authors note in their introduction that this volume complements South Dakota History, a 1993 bibliography of the state's history, and the two volumes share a common …

Bluestem And Tussock Fire And Pastoralism In The Flint Hills Of Kansas And The Tussock Grasslands Of New Zealand, James F. Hoy, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

The ghost of Lady Barker haunts public discourse on the question of burning tussock grassland in New Zealand. The image of this gentle English woman, author of the Canterbury classic Station Life in New Zealand, transformed into a pastoral pyromaniac professing "the exceeding joy of 'burning,'" is compelling. She contests with friends over who can set the most magnificent blaze, exults at solitary cabbage trees exploding into flame, and regrets that she was not there to see the first blaze rage across the plains. Of this ritual, she says, she and her friends "never were allowed to have half …

Not So Plain Art Of The American Prairies, Joni L. Kinsey

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the first European encounters with the grasslands of central North America, beginning with Coronado in the mid-sixteenth century, prairies have alternately confused, dismayed, overwhelmed, depressed, and inspired those who would contend with their contradictions. They have been described as being both nothing and everything, empty as well as vast, monotonous and endlessly varied. For those who saw them in their pristine state, prairies were often disorienting, a place to be lost, whereas today they have become the "heartland" where Americans look to find their truest identity. While such disparities have frustrated many writers who have attempted to convey something …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

CHEROKEE NATION PAPERS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

JOINT CONFERENCE

Review Of Pioneer Woman Educator: The Progressive Spirit Of Annie Webb Blanton By Debbie Mauldin, Claudine Barnes

Great Plains Quarterly

Debbie Mauldin Cottrell has written a meticulously researched biography of the first woman to hold statewide office in Texas. Serving as state superintendent of public instruction from 1918-22, as well as President of the Texas State Teachers Association, Vice-president of the National Education Association, and a professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin, Annie Webb Blanton focused her life's work on the reform of rural education. She also labored tirelessly to promote the advancement and equality of women throughout professional education. By building on their traditional role as teachers, she opened new opportunities for women.

Review Of The Flag In American Indian Art By Toby Herbst And Joel Kopp, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly

The public appetite for American Indian crafts and artistic motifs can be traced back to the early part of this century, the same period of American cultural nativism that inspired the Arts and Crafts movement in midwestern industrial cities and a flight of young painters and sculptors to fledgling artists' colonies in the American Southwest. Before the Depression put an end to this bonanza for nativeborn talent, American Indians had been able to stake a large claim in media as diverse as miniature totem poles, beadwork, and basketry. While museums scoured the countryside for medicine bundles, pipes, and headdresses, the …

Review Of What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology At A Wahpeton Dakota Village By Janet D. Spector, Jennifer S. H. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

Spector provides the basic information needed to help general readers understand the site and its people. She also does more, offering thoughtful reflections on issues that she has faced as a professional archaeologist and on the ethical problems that confront the field, given its past lack of communication and dialogue with the peoples whose histories it has excavated and appropriated.

This book may break the trail for a new genre of archaeological site report. Reading it, I was led to reflect on my own first summer field school experience, and on the report that our director ultimately published. I recall …