Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Coacoochee's Bones: A Seminole Saga By Susan A. Miller, Alcione M. Amos

Great Plains Quarterly

In Coacoochee' s Bones Susan Miller tells the outstanding story of an outstanding leader in an outstanding manner. The repeated use of "outstanding" is necessary because Miller has produced a unique work on the history of the Seminole people, not just Coacoochee. The narrative is written from the point of view of a Seminole, with insights an outsider wouldn't have. Furthermore, she makes judicious use of primary historical Seminole, Mexican, and US sources and of published material, enhanced with knowledge garnered from anthropological studies. The result is a highly informative and readable book.

Miller does not shrink from taking stands …

Review Of Out Of Place: The Writings Of Robert Kroetsch By Simona Bertacco, Carol L. Beran

Great Plains Quarterly

The 1965 Johnny Cash rendition of E.T. Rouse's "Orange Blossom Special" includes the line, "I don't care if I do die do die do die do die do die." Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue (1986) echoes the line. In Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch, Simona Bertacco says the passage shows how Kroetsch pushes "'words out of meaning'" and "makes language abandon ... its conventional function to become intransitive and intensive." Kroetsch, however, increases the number of repetitions and ends on the wrong word in the sequence, throwing the allusion into doubly new territory as it moves from …

Review Of Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont And The Course Of American Empire By Tom Chaffin, Robert J. Chandler

Great Plains Quarterly

Who was John Charles Fremont (1813-1890)? Tom Chaffin attempts to map his mind's terrain, but Fremont reveals little. More crucial than lack of personal papers is Fremont's character: Chaffin declares his writings to be "duplicitous apologia."

Chaffin, therefore, travels well-worn paths. Ferol Egan's Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation (1977,1985) comes to mind. While lacking Egan's richness of detail, Chaffin presents a fuller life. Where Egan dotes on "the great love affair" between Fremont and wife Jessie, Chaffin details Fremont's self-destructive womanizing. By 1856, he reports, a "growing distance" between the couple quickly became "a chill."

Some events defy explanation. …

Review Of Archbishop A.-A. Tache Of St. Boniface: The "Good Fight" And The Illusive Vision By Raymond J. A. Hue!, Robert Choquette

Great Plains Quarterly

Alexandre Tache, one of the very first Canadians to join the French Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate who arrived in Canada in 1841, was sent to work in Canada's Northwest in 1845 where he became second bishop of St. Boniface in 1853, and later archbishop. He remained there until his death in 1894, a half-century during which the region was transformed from a vast hunting emporium for furs to a refuge for tens of thousands of Canadian, American, and European settlers brought into the area after 1860 on the rapidly expanding tracks of American and then Canadian railways. Tache built …

Review Of The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude To Indian Reform By Valerie Sherer Mathes And Richard Lowitt, Sidney L. Harring

Great Plains Quarterly

Standing Bear v. George Crook, an 1879 case brought in the Federal District Court in Omaha, is today little more than a footnote in United States Indian law. Yet this case, like thousands of other cases that American Indians brought to US courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an important effort by one group of Indians to define their relationship with the United States through law. The Ponca story is among the best known, but certainly no more tragic than many of the other Indian cases.

The Ponca's lands were given to the Lakota, without their …

Review Of The Bizarre Careers Of John R. Brinkley By R. Alton Lee, Bob Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly

R. Alton Lee has produced an engaging book that details the full life of John R. Brinkley. As someone interested in quackery in the US, I already knew Brinkley as an exemplar of this genre, but there is much more to him. He was a complex man who carried many labels, some contradictory: quack, caring healer; devoted family man, liar and con-man; would be Governor, community booster, and radio station entrepreneur, the latter as a way to promote mail-order sales of his medical remedies and also to draw in patients to his hospital.

Lee's biography is an informative and entertaining …

Review Of Lynching In Colorado, 1859-1919 By Stephen J. Leonard, Jesse T. Moore Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

The term lynching likely conjures up in the minds of most Americans images of robed and hooded white men in the states of the Old Confederacy taking the law into their own hands to punish black males accused of violating white womanhood. Groups known as Regulators "enforced the law" in South Carolina as early as 1790. Lynching remained a form of punishment in Southern states until well into the twentieth century, despite the fact that most residents of the region frowned upon it.

Judge Lynch's powerful ghost prowled Colorado for more than half a century, "in part because he could …

Review Of Restoring The Burnt Child: A Primer By William Kloefkom, David Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly

William Kloefkom's second book of memoirs is a blueprint for restoring lives scorched by the fires of fundamentalist Christianity, WCTU crusaders, cigarettes and whiskey, kitchen matches, sore throats, and thermonuclear explosions. The twelve chapters cover Kloefkom's life from age nine, when he torched the family kitchen, to age thirteen, when he delivered news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subscribers of the Wichita Beacon. The book fleshes out stories and personalities already familiar to readers of his poetry: parents and grandparents; life in Attica, Kansas; the slaughter of swallows and rabbits on grandfather's farm; landmarks like Turtle Rock and town marks …

Review Of Native Voices: American Indian Identity And Resistance Edited By Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, And David E. Wilkins, Beth R. Ritter

Great Plains Quarterly

From our current vantage point, the true legacy of Vine Deloria Jr.'s scholarship and activism can neither be fully measured nor overstated. We know with certainty, however, that the landscape of Native American scholarship has been permanently altered-for the best. Native Voices honors Deloria's contributions through the presentation of original Native scholarship inspired by his model. As its editors observe, "Deloria has influenced a whole generation of younger Indian scholars to be self-consciously indigenous thinkers-to reclaim an American Indian intellectual tradition, along with a political activism rooted in the oral traditions of our peoples and the wisdom of our elders …

Review Of The Native Americans Of The Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799 By Maria F. Wade, F. Todd Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Although this book promises to examine the Indians who lived in West Texas between the late sixteenth century to the end of the 1700s, most of the work-and the main original contribution the author makes-deals with two Spanish expeditions of exploration that occurred in the late seventeenth century. The author, an ethnohistorian, has provided a new translation of the 1675 expedition of Fernando del Bosque and Fr. Juan Larios, which left the northern Mexican town of Monclova in April, crossed the Rio Grande, and entered the Edwards Plateau before returning to its point of origin in June. In addition to …

Review Of Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination Edited By Susan J. Rosowski, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly

In "A Guided Tour of Ecocriticism with Excursions to Catherland," one of the many fine essays contained in this new volume of Cather Studies, Cheryl Glotfelty remarks, "If the last decade of Cather [scholarship] has been the 'gender and sexuality' period, the new millennium may well begin with a fruitful ecocritical decade." It is ironic, given this prediction, that not all of the sixteen essays presented in Cather Studies 5 fall within the emerging field of ecocriticism. Indeed, the most impressive piece in the collection, Charles Johanningsmeier's "Unmasking Willa Cather's 'Mortal Enemy,'" is a tour de force of old-fashioned …

Review Of Real Indians: Identity And The Survival Of Native America By Eva Marie Garroutte, Terry P. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Cherokee sociologist Eva Garroutte has fashioned a genuine contribution to the study of the American Indian in the United States. Herself a mixed-race person of Caucasian and Indian heritage, she focuses on the always troublesome and often controversial issue of Indian identity, one that pervades the consciousness of all Native Americans, and not a few non-Native folks. Her straightforward narrative is informed by published and unpublished sources in law, history, social science, and literature and enhanced by numerous in-depth interviews with Indian and non-Indian people. What results constitutes the single comprehensive book-length examination of "Indian-ness" in print.

Great Plains tribal …

Rangers, Mounties, And The Subjugation Of Indigenous Peoples, 1870 .. 1885, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. The rapid environmental degradation of this area had the ·effect of driving the bison to the extreme Northern and Southern Plains, where white hide-hunters slaughtered the animals.¹ By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation.²

The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, …

Canada's Campaign For Immigrants And The Images In Canada West Magazine, Laura A. Detre

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the major challenges that Canadian government officials felt they faced at the end of the nineteenth century was the development of the prairie West. By this time there were large urban centers in eastern Canada, but many Canadians worried that they had not truly ensured the future existence of their country. They hoped that filling the middle, the province of Manitoba and the region that would become the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, with prosperous, white, family farmers would support the industrialized cities of the East. To do this the government engaged in a systematic program to encourage …

"This Strange White World" Race And Place In Era Bell Thompson's American Daughter, Michael K. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly

Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography American Daughter (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: "Suddenly there was snow-miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray sky; deep banks of snow drifted against wooden snow fences .... All day long we rode through the silent fields of snow, a cold depression spreading over us." Thompson's realistic winter landscape descriptions also allegorically represent the social situation of herself and her family. The phrase "this strange white world," which …

Notes And News- Spring 2004

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Call For Papers: "Education On The Great Plains"

Homestead Heritage Center

The Prairies: Lost And Found

Title And Contents- Spring 2004

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 24/ Number 2 / Spring 2004

CONTENTS

RANGERS, MOUNTIES, AND THE SUBJUGATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, 1870-1885 Andrew R. Graybill

"THIS STRANGE WHITE WORLD": RACE AND PLACE IN ERA BELL THOMPSON'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER Michael K. Johnson

CANADA'S CAMPAIGN FOR IMMIGRANTS AND THE IMAGES IN CANADA WEST MAGAZINE Laura A. Detre

BOOK REVIEWS

Susan J. Rosowski, ed. Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination By STEVEN TROUT

Simona Bertacco Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch By CAROL L. BERAN

William Kloefkorn Restoring the Burnt Child: A Primer By DAVID PICHASKE

Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, …

Review Of Prairie Peddlers: The Syrian-Lebanese In North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Paul Whitney, And John Guerrero, Philip M. Kayal

Great Plains Quarterly

This remarkable ethnographic study of the Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota is unique. The data and information are original, never mind that the voices heard are nearly those of the early settlers, certainly those of their children. The authors use the records of the late 1930s (early 1940s) Federal Writers Projects and the Works Progress Administration to understand the reasons for Arab migration to North Dakota and the Great Plains, their employment practices, life styles (marriage patterns, culinary habits), and religious traditions, their distribution, settlements, institutions (or lack thereof), and finally their near total assimilation.

If it were homesteading that attracted …

Review Of Children Of The Western Plains: The Nineteenth Century Experience By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Rosemary G. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

The small but growing collection of literature on children in the nineteenth-century American West has been expanded with Marilyn Holt's book about youngsters who migrated to the Great Plains during the 1800s. Children of the Western Plains examines the attention adults paid to young settlers as well as these youngsters' own sense of involvement in the Plains experience. Recognizing the diversity of residents, Holt considers the lives of native-born white, European immigrant, and African American children who contributed to the settlement process. Included in these numbers are military, missionary, and government employee dependents. The author examines young settlers' experiences within …

Review Of Invisible Natives: Myth And Identity In The American Western By Armando Jose Prats, Peter N. Peregrine

Great Plains Quarterly

The relationship between the Great Plains and the Hollywood Western has always been a strange one. The "classic" era of the Hollywood Western, the period between roughly 1864 and 1887, is also the "classic" era of the Great Plains-the era of the pioneer, the gunslinger, the cattleman, and, of course, the Indian fighter. Oddly, the Great Plains are rarely featured prominently in Hollywood Westerns; rather, it is the desert Southwest that is most often depicted. The flowing grasslands and wooded river valleys upon which the events of the "classic" era of the Western unfolded are often shown as rocky wastelands. …

Book Review: Margaret Laurence: Critical Reflections, Sheryl Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

David Staines's collection of essays by twelve distinguished scholars, critics, and writers illuminates the accomplishments of one of Canada's most acclaimed and beloved authors. like the volume's cover photo of a young and attractive Margaret Laurence, an image unfamiliar to readers accustomed to the round face and over-sized glasses of her later years, the essays themselves, and the editor's introduction, offer fresh perspectives on Laurence's work, challenging us to view it in new ways.

Book Review: Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly

At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, "[each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I'd found it all-the work, the love, and the ideal way to live-something brought change to me." Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence's Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America. The many changes in her life reflect the changeable decades from the 1920s to the 1970s in which …

Native American Photography At The Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue, Elizabeth Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly

This excellent volume is an illustrated reconstruction of what was probably the first exhibition of photographs at the Smithsonian. The subject matter was not the great politicians or celebrities of the times but Native Americans. Most of the photographs were of delegations that visited Washington - including numerous men from the Plains, especially representatives of the Souian peoples photographed in 1858, 1867, and 1868 - and reflected the turbulent inter-cultural politics of the period.

Book Review: On Teaching And Writing Fiction, Jackson J. Benson

Great Plains Quarterly

There have been several collections of essays by and about Wallace Stegner, but this one takes in new territory, his ideas about the teaching of creative writing and about the art of fiction . He was a teacher of writing for most of his life, first at Utah, at Wisconsin, and then at Harvard. He went to Stanford in 1945 where he founded and directed the Writing Program, a workshop format modeled after his student experience at Iowa (the only graduate writing program in the country at that time) and his summers teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Book Review: One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis And Clark, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly

This is the first of a projected six-volume "History of the American West" to be published by the University of Nebraska Press and edited by Richard W. Etulain, a specialist in the history and literature of the west.

Pieced In The Plains: Kansas Amish Quilts And Cultural Adaptation, Janneken L. Smucker

Great Plains Quarterly

While the Old Order Amish are often thought of as the plain-dressing religious sect that attracts millions of tourists annually to Pennsylvania Dutch country, this Anabaptist group also has a significant history in the Great Plains.

Book Review: Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, And The Creation Of The American West, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

Powerful mythologies have always blocked people's understanding of the American West. This book provides important insights into this issue by juxtaposing the literatures of boosterism and reminiscence. The author reminds us that both sentiments were central to the creation of regional identity. One looked to a future where sophisticated cities and irrigated fields would replace alkali and coyotes. The other reshaped the past through stories of how hardship and sacrifice underlaid modern luxury.

Book Review: Reading "The Virginian" In The New West, Forrest G. Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly

The Virginian is here to stay. For most of the first century of its life, critics gave their attention to what they found on the novel's face: the rugged hero, conquest, a reinvigorated national identity, the triumph of patriarchal law and of good over evil. It was a tale out of Turner. This timely new volume confirms and elaborates recent, revisionist moves to overturn the consensus reading and replace it with interrogations of the novel's competing, even contradictory perspectives in matters of race, class, and gender. Once the embodiment of a faith in the American character and mission, The Virginian …

Book Review: Red Cloud: Photographs Of A Lakota Chief, Joel Minor

Great Plains Quarterly

In the latter half of the nineteenth century a deadly clash of cultures swept across the Great Plains of this continent. Perhaps no tribe resisted the Euro-American invasion more fiercely than the Lakota bands of Sioux, and perhaps no one embodied this resistance for the Euro-American public more than Red Cloud.

Book Review: Rodeo Queens And The American Dream, Lawrence R. Borne

Great Plains Quarterly

Joan Burbick discusses the young women who promoted rodeos from the early 1920s until the 1990s. In the early years the person who sold the most tickets was picked as Queen. Other methods were later used to create an image of the perfect western woman.