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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 …

Review Essay:The Way West Written And Directed By Ric Burns, Martin Blythe, Mia Graeffe, Sanna Heinsalo, Ossi Heinänen, Ari Helo, Kari Hirvinen, Piia Kiviniemi, Vello Ruus, John Wright, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

The Way West, scripted and directed by Ric Burns, is advertised as the story of United States expansion into the American West from 1845 to 1893. Burns sets the series' temporal boundaries arbitrarily from a New York editor's first use of the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 address on the significance of the frontier and his announcement of its close. The documentary's episodes actually focus on the struggle for control of the Great Plains, pitting the U.S. Army against the Sioux nation and its allies. Largely forsaking the challenge of providing a sure overview of …

Review Of Nebraska: An Illustrated History By Frederick C. Luebke, Michael W. Schuyler

Great Plains Quarterly

Masterfully highlighting the contribution that individuals such as William Jennings Bryan, George Norris, and Norbert Tiemann have made to the state, Luebke is able at the same time to relate Nebraska's history to national and international developments. He also provides a sure account of the state's history during the past fifty years. The concluding essay, "Change in Contemporary Nebraska, 1970-1995," is especially helpful in understanding recent changes in population trends, agriculture, the economy, and Nebraska's relationship to the rest of the world. With the assistance of the staff of the Nebraska State Historical Society, to whom the book is dedicated, …

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 …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

IN MEMORIAM (Erwin H. Goldenstein)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

African Americans And The Great Plains An Introduction, Keith D. Parker

Great Plains Quarterly

During 23-25 February 1995 the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln sponsored its nineteenth annual interdisciplinary symposium, "African Americans and the Great Plains." The conference, attended by more than 300 people from throughout the United States and Canada, sought to highlight African Americans' role in Great Plains culture by looking at their contributions in various areas such as agriculture, anthropology, archeology, art, biology, dance, education, history, literature, medicine, music, photography, religion, sports, theater, and urban studies. The four papers in this issue of the Great Plains Quarterly were selected to illuminate the diversity of roles …

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.

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Keith D. Parker)

THE GREAT PLAINS SIT-IN MOVEMENT, 1958-60 (Ronald Walters)

PRELUDE TO BROWNSVILLE: THE TWENTY-FIFTH INFANTRY AT FORT NIOBRARA, NEBRASKA, 1902-06 (Thomas R. Buecker)

FROMPIN' IN THE GREAT PLAINS: LISTENING AND DANCING TO THE JAZZ ORCHESTRAS OF ALPHONSO TRENT, 1925-44 (Marc Rice)

"WITH ONE MIGHTY PULL": INTERRACIAL TOWN BOOSTING IN NICODEMUS, KANSAS (Claire O'Brien)

BOOK REVIEWS

Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West

Girl on a Pony

Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor from "The Lane County Bachelor" to Bob Dole

Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas

Indians and the …

Review Of Girl On A Pony By La Verne Hanners, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

This small book is written in a straightforward, unassuming, conversational style with the result that it's deceptively simple, seeming at first to be just another reminiscence of pioneer days, although in a somewhat unusual place. It's the story of La Verne Hanners's childhood and young womanhood in the Valley of the Dry Cimarron of New Mexico, only a few miles from the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle and just south of the Colorado border. Here is a landscape of grandeur, of severe drought, of sudden, fierce hail and wind and snow storms, of walls of water unexpectedly racing down dry …

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 …

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 …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

REVIEW ESSAYS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE: RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH (P. Jane Hafen)

THE FRONTIER MEDICAL COMMUNITY OF LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS (Charles R. King)

WILLIAM McKINLEY HOLT AND THE INDIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION (Francis Moul)

THE MISSOURI RIVER BASIN ON THE 1795 SOULARD MAP: A CARTOGRAPHIC LANDMARK (W. Raymond Wood)

REVIEW ESSAYS

Stephan E. Ambrose. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (John L. Allen; Clara Sue Kidwell; Donald Worster)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains

The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories

Stephen Long and American Frontier …

Review Essay: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, And The Opening Of The American West By Stephen E. Ambrose, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

From time to time, a serious book excites the imaginations of a vaster public than the audience of scholarly journals. Because the Center for Great Plains Studies has, over the past sixteen years, sponsored the reediting and publication of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, we could not help but notice the enormous popular success of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. To provide a focus on some of the scholarly concerns raised by this new text, we invited three prominent scholars to review the book from …

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 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 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 …

Review Of Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence And Janet Frame By Lorna M. Irvine, Robert L. Ross

Great Plains Quarterly

In Critical Spaces, Lorna M. Irvine presents a complex body of material in clear prose and organizes that material in an accessible manner. Irvine not only examines the critical reaction to the fiction of Canadian Margaret Laurence and New Zealander Janet Frame but also reflects on the ways the writers' work and the response to it mirror the growing nationalism in the two countries.

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 …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (Frederick C. Luebke)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IN MEMORIAM (James Sinclair Ross)

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 The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities In The Modern West By Carl Abbott, Robert B. Fairbanks

Great Plains Quarterly

This important book initiates a new series on The Modern American West edited by Gerald D. Nash. In it the author not only documents the critical role cities have played in the development of the West since World War II, but claims that those cities really personify the three mythic images of the West as locus of democracy, opportunity, and individual fulfillment. Defining the West as all of the Great Plains and Pacific States, Carl Abbott examines mid-size cities as well as large, but concentrates on the impact of metropolises like Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston …

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.

Review Of Dry Farming In The Northern Great Plains: Years Of Readjustment, 1920-1990 By Mary W. M. Hargreaves, David C. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly

There can be few quibbles with this masterwork. Perhaps the maps might be crisper; perhaps a few pictures might enhance the presentation, and a few more graphs might lay out complex and often serpentine trends. Possibly a few more farmers might speak so that in the end one knows that certainly behind the statistics dwell real people with real dreams. Generally, the more pleasing the presentation, the wider the audience-and this scholarship deserves a wide audience. Dry Farming is a superlative history of farm policy on the northern Plains by one of the most meticulous students of the phenomenon in …

Review Of Prairie University: A History Of The University Of Nebraska By Robert E. Knoll, Paul F. Sharp

Great Plains Quarterly

Institutional histories are often dull and lifeless- but not this one. From its preface to its final chapter celebrating the university's 125th year, this impressive history of the University of Nebraska entertains with colorful vignettes of its facuity, staff, and administrative leaders. With candor, curmudgeons are called curmudgeons, the less than able are identified, and the irascible remain irascible in the story's able telling.

Students of higher education will find this a rich study. Nebraska alumni will respond to its anecdotes with vivid memories, and many readers will enjoy the lively, sometimes opinionated analyses. All will find it a detailed …

Review Of Lone Wolf V. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights And Indian Law At The End Of The Nineteenth Century By Blue Clark, Ramona Skinner

Great Plains Quarterly

Clark's unique approach in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock allows him to go beyond the initial examination oflegal precedent to reveal a story of human dignity and a people's survival. The book presents an authoritative account of Kiowa band chief Lone Wolf's relentless attempts, through various legal channels, to halt the selection and assignment of his own allotment. In the end, he joined the Elk Creek Baptist church and lived on his allotment with his family. What Lone Wolf and his tribe hoped to gain from the lawsuit, how the Court bestowed on Congress unlimited power over Indian affairs, and the …

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 We Are A People In This World: The Lakota Sioux And The Massacre At Wounded Knee By Conger Beasley, Jr, Joe Starita

Great Plains Quarterly

To tell the group's story, Beasley has employed a kind of literary double helix-juxtaposing chapters which alternately flash back to summarize the massacre of 1890, then flash forward to chronicle the memorial ride of 1990. Occasionally tedious, the device fulfills one vital function: it provides a superb context while poignantly illuminating similarities between two events separated by a century. Beasley, a poet, is often at his best describing the almost unimaginable cold (temperatures of 40 below, wind chills approaching 80 below) endured by the group.