Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Left And Labor On The Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

This issue of Great Plains Quarterly is given up to two long articles that probe different facets of the history of the Left on the Great Plains. In "Workers, Unions, and Historians on the Northern Plains," William C. Pratt surveys unions in Nebraska and the Great Plains with an eye to what historians have written about them, what stories remain to be told, and what sources are available for the telling. Certainly he finds no dearth of material, though he is disappointed not to find integrative texts in the school of the "new labor history" for the northern Plains, the …

Review Of Along Ancient Trails: The Mallet Expedition Of 1739 By Donald J. Blakeslee, James P. Ronda

Great Plains Quarterly

In the popular mind the names Pierre and Paul Mallet carry little or no weight. Coronado, de Soto, Champlain, and Lewis and Clark occupy our imaginative space, crowding out adventurers like the Mallets. Even scholars have paid scant attention to the Mallets' epic journey from the Missouri River to Santa Fe in 1739. Donald J. Blakeslee's Along Ancient Trails sets the record straight, properly noting the Mallet role in the European exploration of the southern Great Plains. In doing so, Blakeslee not only recounts one expedition but illuminates the complex history of the entire region.

Frompin' In The Great Plains Listening And Dancing To The Jazz Orchestras Of Alphonso Trent 1925~44, Marc Rice

Great Plains Quarterly

This paper focuses on one of the most popular and influential of the territory band leaders, Alphonso Trent. From 1925 to the mid 1940s, his groups were acknowledged by listeners and by other musicians as among the very best of the jazz bands performing in the Southwest and Great Plains. In the cities and towns that they visited, their performances were always a special event, particularly in the African American communities. Trent's orchestras played an important role as musicians and entertainers of African Americans in the Great Plains States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Review Of Indians And The American West In The Twentieth Century By Donald L. Parman, Leonard R. Bruguier

Great Plains Quarterly

Offering solid scholarship and impressive, fresh documentation, Parman contributes a tantalizing, sometimes scintillating overview of American Indian history as it unfolds through the twentieth century. Often rich in detail while describing Indian struggles for self-determination, the book also reveals the give and take tribes have experienced on their long trail of reasserting their place not only in the American West but on the national scene. All is not optimistic, but Indians and the American West draws a detailed map of the territory on which future disputes are likely to unfold; thoughtful citizens consulting it should be better prepared to make …

Review Of Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor From "The Lane County Bachelor" To Bob Dole By C. Robert Haywood, William Kloefkorn

Great Plains Quarterly

Haywood calls Tough Daisies "a sampler" intended to illustrate that Kansans, contrary to a long litany of misconceptions, "have always had a sense of humor." He succeeds splendidly, chiefly because he gives the reader dozens of well-selected jokes, anecdotes, poems, and cartoons, and partly because the author himself has a wry sense of humor, one that wears well and unobtrusively complements his material. I finished the book wanting more-more jokes, more stories, more history, more Haywood.

Review Of Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader On The Northern Plains By Rachel Calof, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly

Along with the original narrative this volume provides an epilogue by Jacob Calof, Rachel's youngest child, and two essays, one by J. Sanford Rikoon, the other by Elizabeth Jameson. Jacob Calof's comments confirm the strength and courage we find in his mother's words.

The essays lend significant context to the narrative. Rikoon gives a concise and informative explanation of the history of Jewish families that left Russia and eastern Europe to settle on farms in the Heartland. Jameson's analysis places Rachel's narrative in historical perspective and emphasizes the importance of recognizing diversities of ethnicity, class, and gender in the interpretation …

The Frontier Medical Community Of Leavenworth, Kansas, Charles R. King M.D.

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the important elements in the development of a North American frontier community was a system of medical care. During the nineteenth century the work of all frontier professionals was dramatically facilitated by new means of transportation and communication. Mid-century frontier communities had direct contact with urban centers via the telegraph and could acquire supplies over railroads and improved roadways. The development of a medical care system in Leavenworth, Kansas, during the second half of the nineteenth century illustrates the important role that physicians and other health providers played in community building on the western frontier, as well as …

William Mckinley Holt And The Indian Claims Commission, Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly

When the bill to create the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was signed by President Harry Truman on 13 August 1946, he said it would provide "a final settlement of all outstanding claims" by the Indians against the United States. The process would foster the policy of assimilation, he said: "Indians can take their place without special handicaps or special advantages in the economic life of our nation and share fully in its progress." These hopes were not realized, however, as tribes faced three decades of difficult litigation, narrow opinions that reduced monetary claims, and many years when termination of tribes …

The Missouri River Basin On The 1795 Soulard Map A Cartographic Landmark, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly

The publication in 1814 of Nicholas Biddle's edition of the explorations of Lewis and Clark was accompanied by a remarkable map. This chart, drafted by Samuel Lewis from an 1810 manuscript map by William Clark, synopsized the expedition's many detailed route maps across the continent, plus significant post-expeditionary information. l This landmark document was the first to portray the Missouri River valley in a realistic configuration, and it set the stage for modern conceptions of the heartland of the continent.

Review Of The Way To The West: Essays On The Central Plains By Elliott West, A. Yvette Huginnie

Great Plains Quarterly

In one delightful volume, Elliott West offers four engaging, far-ranging essays on the Central Plains. Originally presented in 1993 as the ninth annual Calvin Horn Lectures on Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico, these expanded essays are now available to a wider audience. The Horn lectures enabled West, a distinguished social historian, to explore some new aspects of western American history, specifically environmental and Native American studies. Interweaving secondary materials from a multiplicity of disciplines-anthropology, ecology and environmental studies, history, literature, sociology-with ample primary materials, West 'presents engrossing essays from which we can all benefit. He …

Review Of Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France And The American Northeast By Gary Brienzo, Richard Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly

Using a fine-tuned blend of textual criticism, biography, and primary research, Gary Brienzo sheds light on the importance of the American Northeast and New France on Willa Cather's life and art.

Brienzo sees Cather's artistic life as a search for a "quiet center," a unified, comforting vision, given focus by an appreciation she developed for the "domestic qualities that enhanced life." He credits Sarah Orne Jewett for providing Cather this "alternative literary tradition," which celebrated woman-centered communities and the power of domestic ritual. Brienzo details Cather's discovery of Quebec and the appeal of its French traditions, for there she recognized …

Review Of The Limits Of Agrarian Radicalism: Western Populism And American Politics By Peter H. Argersinger, David F. Prindle

Great Plains Quarterly

The book consists mainly of a collection of reworked articles that appeared in various journals from 1967 to 1992. At the level of analysis, the author's meta-argument is that the Populists were ultimately unsuccessful because they failed politically. That is, they both failed to manage the ideological tensions within their movement, and failed to overcome various structural impediments placed in their path by the established parties. He elaborates this argument with a series of case studies, following in close detail a number of state conventions and elections. The documentation in these studies is impressive, and the studies themselves are convincingly …

Recasting Epic Tradition The Dispossessed As Hero In Sandoz's Crazy Horse And Cheyenne Autumn, Lisa R. Lindell

Great Plains Quarterly

Although Mari Sandoz is perhaps best known for the biography of her Nebraska pioneer father, Old Jules (1935), her two other biographies, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942) and Cheyenne Autumn (1953), equally convey her distinctive historical vision of the American West. In these two works, Sandoz rewrites traditional epic formula, taking the perspective of the dispossessed Lakotas and Cheyennes and recounting not the growth and expansion of a culture, but its conquest. In spite of material defeat at the hands of dominant white society, her Native American leaders assume heroic stature, striving against all odds to …

Marl Sandoz's Slogum House Greed As Woman, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly

In her 1937 novel, Slogum House, Mari Sandoz turned the usual stereotype of greed and cupidity on its head. Instead of presenting a voracious male rancher aggrandizing his land holdings to the detriment of hard-working homesteaders, Sandoz created Regula Haber Slogum, a grasping woman who eventually owns nearly an entire county, which she has managed to have named after her family. Although Gulla, as she is known, controls most of Slogum County, she continues brutally to foreclose mortgages and force sheriffs' sales, even during the depression years of the 1930s.

Despite this depiction of what Katharine Mason has called …

Review Of A Dose Of Frontier Soldiering: The Memoirs Of Corporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877-1882 Edited By Thomas T. Smith, Markku Henriksson

Great Plains Quarterly

For anyone interested in the "big picture" of what happened in the American West ten or fifteen years after the Civil War, Bode's memoirs will prove disappointing: he was not involved in any of the major campaigns in any meaningful way and reveals nothing not already known. If one is interested in a soldier's-although an exceptional one'sviews of some of his superior officers, or Indians, or mostly about the daily duties of an infantryman, Bode offers a good dose of "frontier soldiering." There is also useful primary material here on the 1870s and the social history of the military. Although …

Review Of Dangerous Passage: The Santa Fe Trail And The Mexican War By William Y. Chalfant, Duane A. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

William Chalfant, long time western historian and Hutchinson, Kansas, attorney, focuses on one period in the trail's history, the Mexican War phase of American "Manifest Destiny." His is the story of the military as it protects the trail and uses it as the invasion corridor to march to Santa Fe. The main story details the "troubled and often violent IndianWhite relations that plagued the trail during the war years" (p.xiii). Marc Simmons's foreword sets the scene and takes the reader into the narrative.

A wide variety of people will enjoy this study-those interested in military, Indian, transportation, and southwestern history …

Review Of Cowgirls Of The Rodeo: Professional Athletes By Mary Lou Lecompte, Joan Wells

Great Plains Quarterly

This book sets out to describe the lives and achievements of women wild west show and rodeo contestants from 1896 to 1992. Offspring of their culture, these cowgirls exhibited athleticism, ranching skills, competitive spirit, and perseverance. Historical chapters relate the quest of rodeo women to compete as equals in the exhibition of their athletic ability.

Early promoters recognized and supported the appearance of women in the sport of rodeo, admitting that their glamour, costuming, and skilled performances were necessary in selling rodeo as family entertainment. Cowgirls like Tad Lucas, Alice and Maggie Greenough, Lucille Mulhall, Florence Randolph, Mabel Strickland, Ruth …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

THE LEFT AND LABOR ON THE PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Frances W. Kaye)

WORKERS, UNIONS, AND HISTORIANS ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS (William C. Pratt)

"WHO'S GOING TO DANCE WITH SOMEBODY WHO CALLS YOU A MAIN STREETER": COMMUNISM, CULTURE AND COMMUNITY IN SHERIDAN COUNTY, MONTANA, 1918-1934 (Gerald Zahavi)

REVIEW ESSAY

Ric Burns. The Way West: Episode I, Westward, the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1845-1864; Episode II, The Approach of Civilization, 1865-1869; Episode III, The War for the Black Hills, 1870-1876; Episode IV, Ghost Dance, 1877-1893. (Martin Blythe; Mia Graeffe; Sanna Heinsalo; Ossi Heinanen; Ari Helo; Kari Hirvinen; Piia Kiviniemi; Vello …

Workers, Unions, And Historians On The Northern Plains, William C. Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly

Labor history has corne of age over the past three decades. Today two national journals, Labor History and Labor's Heritage, focus on this subject in the United States, and many others, including the Journal of American History, publish articles in the field. In fact, much of what is called new social history often treats labor history topics, and many western historians have had an extended interest in labor history. Numerous recent examples, including the work of Carlos Schwantes, Michael Kazin, Vicki Ruiz, and others have been well received.

Prelude To Brownsville The Twenty~Fifth Infantry At Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, 1902~06, Thomas R. Buecker

Great Plains Quarterly

Around midnight on 13 August 1906, gunshots suddenly rang out on the deserted streets of Brownsville, Texas. Unknown parties indiscriminately fired at a number of private residences, severely wounding a police officer, and into a nearby saloon, killing a bartender and slightly wounding a patron. Apparently all victims were Hispanics. When the ten-minute fusillade was over, witnesses claimed black soldiers from the Twenty-fifth Infantry stationed at adjacent Fort Brown were responsible for the outrage. Substantiation for their accusations seemingly came when civil and military authorities discovered expended military cartridges at the scene.

The Brownsville citizenry had not been happy when …

Review Essay: Environmental History, Donald Worster

Great Plains Quarterly

A summer ago I canoed down the Missouri River, along the wild pristine White Cliffs of Montana, with the Lewis and Clark journals in hand (the De Voto abridged edition). Like many others, I have felt strongly the pull of that famous expedition, the nostalgia for a lost West without cities, dams, or overgrazed pastures, when Indians still defined the place. But I was not prepared to like this retelling of the story, with its hagiographical and militaristic title spliced to its Wallace Stegner-ish subtitle. Was this to be Meriwether Lewis as the Colin Powell of another day? Or as …

Review Of Go West Young Man! Horace Greeley's Vision For America By Coy Cross Ii, Michael Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

Coy Cross's book is a well-written, focused, solidly documented study of an absorbing and important topic. Unlike some of the "new" western historians, Cross analyzes manifest destiny and expansionism in historical context; he avoids the pitfalls of ideological polemics through evenhanded, analytical narrative prose. Moreover, he provides an important assessment and qualification of Greeley's (and Turner's) safety valve theory, concluding that while New York City's poor may not have heeded Greeley's call to "Go West!" millions of others in fact did. "And the Homestead Act, the absence of slavery, the information on the latest developments in agriculture, and the transcontinental …

Review Of Vision Quest: Men, Women And Sacred Sites Of The Sioux Nation Photographs By Don Doll, S.J. Introduction By Vine Deloria, Jr., John E. Carter

Great Plains Quarterly

Don Doll is not the first person of Euro-American ancestry to point the lens of a camera at American Indians. In fact, there is a long tradition of that dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. And neither is he the first person to produce a book of such photographs. That, too, is old hat. But Doll's work is quite different from that of his fellows, and his recent volume, Vision Quest, an assemblage of photographs of Sioux people (inclusive of all three major bands) and the lands that are sacred to them, is proof of that. It …

Review Of Education For Extinction: American Indians And The Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 By David Wallace Adams, Rebecca Dobkins

Great Plains Quarterly

Adams makes a number of important contributions, including raising several significant topics deserving further investigation: the local consequences of tension between centralization and decentralization in the boarding school system, the connections between the movement for compulsory education for Indians and for the U.S. school-age public at large, and the relationship between the schools' project of Indian assimilation and American nationalism of the time, particularly the drive to make citizens out of the immigrant "melting pot." In addition, Adams's research, building upon that of many other scholars, demonstrates that the Indian boarding school experience offers rich ethnographic and historical material for …

Review Of Father Peter John Desmet: Jesuit In The West By Robert C. Carriker, Robert H. Keller

Great Plains Quarterly

Although DeSmet loved native people, believed in their innate goodness-even idealized them in the case of the Flatheads-and tolerated their cultures, he did not fully understand their life ways and failed to grasp how they perceived the easy Christianity he offered them. A belief that Indians could shed their culture and become fully "civilized" in twenty years proved exceptionally naive. Most of all, with the evidence right before his eyes, DeSmet seemed to miss the greatest irony in his life: that in attempting to save the Potawatomie, Osage, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Kalispel, Flatheads, Blackfeet, Crow, and Spokane he himself unwittingly …

Review Of Black Elk's Religion: The Sun Dance And Lakota Catholicism By Clyde Holler, John R. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

Regrettably, Holler's own most original theoretical constructions suffer from what seems, anyway, the too-rigid (although unstated) metaphysics of the professional philosopher he once was. Black Elk Speaks gives John Neihardt's perspective, he judges, not Black Elk's. The reason? It is a work of art and therefore creative rather than faithful to Black Elk's message. The logic suggests that Holler has no available category or place for narrative realism as a means of being both creative and truthful. And at the end, he explains Black Elk's paired religious convictions by attributing to him an apparent non-cognitivist model of religious language. But …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration is an excellent narrative of early nineteenth- century expeditions. It is enjoyable reading, and its information is particularly valuable for those interested in early westward expansion. The volume is also of importance to scholars studying other members of Long's expeditions, including Titian Peale, since it gives the historical context in which their work was done.

"She Does Not Write Like A Historian" Marl Sandoz And The Old And New Western History, Betsy Downey

Great Plains Quarterly

When Mari Sandoz's The Cattlemen was published in 1958 a reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor commented that Sandoz "does not write like a woman." He admitted that his observation was "not all compliment." Reviewer Horace Reynolds might well have said "Sandoz does not write like a historian." Such re-phrasing, with its implications of both compliment and criticism, is a good place to begin examining Sandoz as historian. Mari Sandoz called herself a historian by training and vocation. She is best remembered for her historical works, particularly her Great Plains series: Old Jules (1935), Crazy Horse (1942), Cheyenne Autumn (1953), …

Marl Sandoz Nebraska Sandhills Author A Centennial Recognition, Barbara Rippey, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

1996 marks the centennial year of Mari Susette Sandoz's birth to Swiss immigrant parents, Mary and Jules Sandoz, on a homestead in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Mari, the oldest of the six children in the Sandoz family, was shaped and hardened by her father's temper and by bearing the brunt of hard physical work both outdoors on the homestead and as her mother's helper. The people of her neighborhood were the kind of people who not only witnessed but made history, the kind of people whose lives and stories could be transformed into literature. Red Cloud, Robert Henri, Crazy Horse, "Gulla …

Review Of "That Man Partridge": E. A. Partridge, His Thoughts And Times By Murray Knuttila, Mary Higginbotham

Great Plains Quarterly

Effectively demonstrating the interconnections between biography and history, Murray Knuttila introduces readers to E. A. Partridge, who played a pivotal role in the development of agrarian society, economy, and politics in Canada's prairie provinces during the early twentieth century. Edward Alexander Partridge, writes Knuttila, "was part of an historic transformation of an entire region through settlement and then what might be called 'unsettlement'" (p. 85). Knuttila focuses on Partridge's life during the tumultuous decades between 1900 and 1930, exploring how Partridge both affected and was affected by his historical context.