Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Scenes Of Visionary Enchantment: Refiections On Lewis And Clark, Carolyn Gilman

Great Plains Quarterly

Historians all across the West have looked agog on the paroxysm of popular devotion that has erupted into the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, whispering to each other in quiet moments, "What is it about Lewis and Clark?"

This is the book that will answer their question.

Book Review: Feasting And Fasting With Lewis & Clark: A Food And Social History Of The Early 1800s, Barbara G. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is an intriguing combination of narrative and reference material. A first section sets the historical context for the famous voyage of discovery by discussing such topics as contemporary food preservation, outdoor cooking, and knowledge about nutrition and food safety. Then a longer second section chronologically details the food events of the journey, beginning with shopping in Philadelphia. Here the author gives attention not only to obvious topics such as food and beverage provisioning, indigenous flora and fauna food sources, and the diplomatic aspects of eating together with Native Americans, but also much about illness, starvation, and shortage of …

Book Review: Louis Owens: Literary Reflections On His Life And Work, Kimberly Roppolo

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning with poet Neil Harrison's outstanding "5 Canadas," this volume is a tribute to the late Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish novelist and theorist. Kilpatrick's introduction stresses Owens's academic accomplishments - which, though cut short by his suicide in July 2002, are impressive - and situates Owens's creative and critical work, positioning him with those mixed-blood critics, who, like Gerald Vizenor, work in a nexus of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and hybrid identity on the cultural "frontier." The volume also includes the last interview with Owens, "Outside Shadow: A Conversation with Louis Owens," the first in a series he had agreed to do with author A. …

Book Review: Indian Views Of The Custer Fight: A Source Book, Herman J. Viola

Great Plains Quarterly

The Battle of the Little Big Horn, popularly known as Custer's Last Stand, retains its fascination for Custer buffs, historians, and scholars who continue to seek a satisfactory explanation of why Sioux and Cheyenne warriors were able to overwhelm the Seventh Cavalry on that fateful June day in 1876. Although the story has been told and retold with inexhaustible fascination focused on Custer and his doomed command, the Indian side of that story has been largely neglected. As Hardorff points out, scholars frequently discounted Indian testimony because of its apparent conflict with known facts and accepted theories about the battle. …

Review Of Going Native Or Going Naive? White Shamanism And The Neo-Noble Savage By Dagmar Wernitznig, S. Elizabeth Bird

Great Plains Quarterly

In this slim volume, Wernitznig addresses the New Age phenomenon of "white shamanism"- the appropriation of Native American traditions by white self-help gurus who draw heavily on Plains Indian lore, with a sprinkling of everything from Buddhism to Celtic mythology for good measure.

Wernitznig distinguishes between "white shamans" and "plastic medicine men." Unlike the latter, white shamans do not claim Indian identity. Instead, popular writers like Lynn Andrews, Marie Herbert, and Michael Bromley claim to have been instructed by Indian mentors. They advocate "easy-fix" enlightenment through painless, pleasant initiations, such as Herbert's Healing Quest, which involved "spending three days …

Review Of What's The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America By Thomas Frank, Donald Haider-Markel

Great Plains Quarterly

In his latest book, Thomas Frank takes a sweeping look at the current state of American politics by using the conservative revolution in Kansas as a microcosm of what conservative Republicans have done nationally. Frank directs our attention to the highly effective myths, language, and tactics developed by conservatives over the past forty years that have convinced many citizens apparently to vote against their own economic interests.

Frank's central thesis is that conservatives have remade the American political landscape and captured the hearts and minds of middle America by focusing their rhetoric and (mostly unattainable) policy goals on culture war …

Review Of Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty In The Civil War Era By Nicole Etcheson, Gunja Sengupta

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars have debated the meaning of "Bleeding Kansas" for generations. What impulses shaped the mid-1850s mayhem in Kansas Territory that came to be thought of as a "rehearsal" for the Civil War? Did the Kansas wars signify irreconcilable sectional differences over slavery? Or were the parties to the conflict driven chiefly by economic competition over claims, railroads, and towns? Neither, Nicole Etcheson argues, in her wide-ranging study of politics and personalities in Civil War era Kansas. Rather, "Bleeding Kansas" must be understood as a contest over the "political liberties of whites." While other historians of sectional conflict have dealt with …

Some Thoughts On The 25th Anniversary Of The Great Plains Quarterly, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly

In the Winter of 1981, Frederick C. Luebke sent out a letter to accompany the first issue of the Great Plains Quarterly. In the letter, he stated that the purpose of the new journal was to publish new discoveries and understandings about the Great Plains, and to do so in a language that would appeal to the general reader. For these reasons, Luebke felt that "persons with a lively interest in the Great Plains region will find much to attract them to the Quarterly." Twenty-four volumes later, and after publishing three-hundred and sixty-one original essays, it is safe …

Child Labor In The Early Sugar Beet Industry In The Great Plains, 1890-1920, Mary Lyons-Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly

Children working in agriculture have always been a part of the rural culture and work ethos of the United States, especially on the Great Plains. Many teenagers still detassel corn or walk the beans in the summer months to earn spending money or money for college. But what about the children who work as migrant laborers in commercialized agriculture? These children, even today, typically go untracked by governmental agencies. The children may lag behind in school because of their family's migrations and their frequent absences from school to work in the crops. Unlike the child who works during the summer …

A Tribute To Sue Rosowski, Charles Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly

Susan J. Rosowski, Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, died November 2, 2004. Sue has been an important voice in the Great Plains Quarterly since the beginning. In addition to publishing a half-dozen essays in the Quarterly, Sue reviewed manuscripts, wrote book reviews, and served as a guest editor on multiple occasions.

As one of the foremost scholars on Willa Cather, Sue served as General Editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, University of Nebraska Press, and was the founding editor of the Willa Cather Archive. Additional examples of her contribution …

Title And Contents- Winter 2005

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 25 / Number 1 / Winter 2005

Contents

Some Thoughts on The 25th Anniversary Of The Great Plains Quarterly

Deep Mapping the Biome: The Biology Of Place In Don Gayton's The Wheatgrass Mechanism And John Janovy Jr.' S Dunwoody Pond

Child Labor in The Early Sugar Beet Industry In The Great Plains, 1890-1920

A Tribute to Sue Rosowski

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of Gone To Texas: A History Of The Lone Star State By Randolph B. Campbell, Eugene Atkinson

Great Plains Quarterly

In Gone to Texas, Randolph B. Campbell has combined the best recent scholarship with thirty years of his own prodigious efforts to produce the best narrative account of Texas yet. Authoritative and engaging, a chronicle that is equal parts Spanish colonial period, revolution and republic, Civil War and Reconstruction, and twentieth-century politics, the work includes the usual cast of explorers, generals, ranchers, governors, and businessmen. It treats the standard controversies, the climactic battles, and the diverse populations that have created a complex state, if one not so unique as Texans would like to believe. It does all of this …

Review Of American Indians In U.S. History By Roger L. Nichols, William Bauer

Great Plains Quarterly

Writing a survey of United States history is a difficult task. Writing a survey of American Indian history-which dates to either 40,000 BCE or when Earth Initiate descended a rope of feathers, depending on your preference poses an even more daunting task (more formidable than reviewing it). Roger Nichols undertakes this imposing venture, nonetheless, and in American Indians in U.S. History successfully offers a concise, readable, and affordable text.

Nichols divides his book into three sections: the frontier period, reservation life, and integration. Throughout, he addresses the gamut of issues facing American Indians, from the contentious debate about their origins …

Review Of Kansas Charley: The Story Of A Nineteenth-Century Boy Murderer By Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Sarah Bohl

Great Plains Quarterly

In Kansas Charley: The Story of a Nineteenth Century Boy Murderer, Joan Jacobs Brumberg analyzes the issues involved in capital punishment of juvenile offenders through the case study of Charley Miller, a teenager who committed a double murder and was executed in Wyoming in 1892. Brumberg portrays Miller as the pitiable product of a consumerist society that drew harsh distinctions between haves and have-nots. The media, fascinated by violence resulting from the abuse of alcohol and weapons, helped shape public perceptions of how to punish youthful offenders. While Miller's case was far from typical, it still reflects problems with …

Review Of Frederic Remington: The Color Of Night By Nancy K. Anderson, Suzan Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, organized by Nancy K. Anderson, is a handsome volume. More important, this trailblazing study amply fulfills Anderson's ambition to provide a primary "reference source" for scholars and others interested in Remington's late career, particularly his night paintings. Notable are essays by three esteemed scholars at their best: William C. Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College; Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Yale; and Anderson, associate curator of American and British painting at the National Gallery of Art. Sharpe places Remington's nocturnes in the context of nineteenth-century night painting, while Anderson speculates …

Review Of Gambling And Survival In Native North America By Paul Pasquaretta, James Fenelon

Great Plains Quarterly

Indian gaming throughout the United States has become a forum in which much of America reveals and works out its perspectives on American Indians, historical struggle, cultural survival, gambling, reciprocity, and the matter of choice. California is in the throes of an advertising war over more, or possibly less, gambling in the state, even as new casinos are going up in New York, Florida, and many other states. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation runs Foxwoods in Connecticut, the Shakopee Mdewakanton (Dakota) Sioux Community runs Mystic Lake in Minnesota, and there are many other extremely successful Indian gaming enterprises, such as …

Review Of Native North American Armor, Shields, And Fortifications By David E. Jones, Robert Fields

Great Plains Quarterly

David Jones's purpose is to fill the curious gap in studies of the armor used in raids and warfare by the Native peoples of North America. Lacking iron and steel technology, Native Americans constructed their armor of "wood and bone (hard armor), leather (soft armor), and combinations of hard and soft materials."

The need for armor, Jones states in his introduction, preceded European contact, since "warfare was endemic among the North American Indians." He goes on to maintain that the superiority of European technology made Indian defeat inevitable, despite whatever improvements in armor production Indians might have made. "If Native …

Review Of Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West Edited By Gary J. Hausladen, Frances Flavin

Great Plains Quarterly

Western Places, American Myths is a collection of twelve essays covering a broad range of topics dealing with the myths, images, and perceptions associated with the American West and the region's historical geographyincluding ranches, national parks, Native American lands, the Spanish and Mexican Southwest, women in the West, Utah's Latter Day Saints, ghost towns, gambling, and the geography of Western films.

As in many essay collections, the quality is uneven. In his acknowledgments, editor Hausladen states that "the art of editing is to ask really good writers to contribute and then let them do what they do best." That may …

Review Of Epic Wanderer: David Thompson And The Mapping Of The Canadian West By D'Arcy Jenish, Derek Hayes

Great Plains Quarterly

David Thompson, often known as "the great mapmaker," spent twenty-five years traveling the entire West and Northwest of North America, covering 75,000 miles by canoe, horseback, and foot, and in the process produced the first comprehensive map of this vast region of about 1.2 million square miles. He then spent many years surveying the new 49th parallel boundary between the United States and Canada.

D'Arcy Jenish has produced, according to his publisher, the first full-length biography of Thompson-in that previous works have not given much consideration to his early and declining years-and has done a creditable job of following and …

Review Of Great Lonely Places Of The Texas Plains Poems By Walt Mcdonald, James Hoggard

Great Plains Quarterly

Both of them winners of major awards, poet Walt McDonald and photographer Wyman Meinzer link their work in a volume that can be read profitably three ways: studying the brilliantly lighted color photographs; reading the moving, story-directed poems; or experiencing the ways both sets of works engage each other. The book's production is beautiful, and the consistent high quality of poems and photographs makes one revisit their memorably precise images and phrases. In places the land of the Plains is seen as sparsely fertile, even parched, and its people, we see, have lived close to grief; but what emerges in …

Review Of A Vast And Open Plain: The Writings Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition In North Dakota, 1804- 1806 Edited And With An Introduction By Clay S. Jenkinson, Douglas Munski

Great Plains Quarterly

Definitely not to be overlooked in the evergrowing mass of publications concerning the Lewis and Clark Expedition during its bicentennial commemorations is this crucial reference work produced under the auspices of the State Historical Society of North Dakota and the North Dakota Humanities Council. Jenkinson's edition is a special contribution to Corps of Discovery literature because it highlights the 215 days the expedition spent in North Dakota's Missouri River region in the words of the voyage's major and minor journal keepers, superbly annotated by Jenkinson and richly illustrated. A Vast and Open Plain also includes the Mandan Miscellany document of …

Review Of Circle Of Fire: The Indian War Of 1865 By John D. Mcdermott, Charles Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly

The Indian War of 1865 marks the last time Plains Indians actually took the offensive against white intrusions into their territory. Besides the basic disruption of their hunting grounds by thousands of outsiders en route to the gold fields of Montana, the immediate cause was the massacre of Black Kettle's band of Cheyennes at Sand Creek by Colorado Territorial Volunteers in 1864. Throughout Circle of Fire, John D. McDermott refers to the hostile tribes as "the avengers," and rightfully so. Although in subsequent campaigns the Indians were largely on the defensive, the war of 1865 set the tone for …

Review Of Window On The West: Chicago And The Art Of The New Frontier, 1890~1940 By Judith A. Barter, Sascha Scott

Great Plains Quarterly

This catalogue, published in conjunction with a 2003 exhibition at the Art Institute, aims to demonstrate that Chicago artists and patrons fostered a unique way of understanding and representing the great American West. Judith A. Barter, field-McCormick Curator of American Art at the Institute, offers insights into Chicago's artistic ties to America's "new frontier." This refreshingly multifaceted catalogue provides readers with a nuanced discussion of the exhibition's objects while contextualizing them in the social, political, and cultural environment of Chicago, and America at large, from 1890 to 1940.

Barter's narrative begins with Chicago's World Columbian Exposition (1893), which coincided with …

Review Of Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite The American West Edited By Linda M. Hasselstrom, Douglas Werden

Great Plains Quarterly

This wonderful collection of prose and poetry rewrites the West first by focusing on community, not on the individual, and second by using the works of one hundred and fifty-three women writers. These short pieces-all under five pages-are primarily positive snapshots with an emotional core and devotional quality demanding reflection, which makes them best read intermittently.

The diverse communities evoked are what will keep you reading: a group of Quaker women who make a quilt for a PhD student wrestling with her dissertation; Hutterite women and their cooperative life in a malecentered society; the sheriff who stapled notices for a …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

CALL FOR PAPERS: GREAT PLAINS SYMPOSIUM 2005

NEIHARDT AND JOURNALISM

POW WOW SCHEDULE FOR NEBRASKA

COWBOY SONGS & RANGE BALLADS: PAINTING THE WEST WITH WORDS

NATIVE RANCHING AND RODEO LIFE ON THE PLAINS

"Men Alone Cannot Settle A Country": Domesticating Nature In The Kansas-Nebraska Grasslands, Chad Montrie

Great Plains Quarterly

W h e n she traveled to Kansas from New York in November 1875 to join a husband who had gone west six months earlier, Sarah Anthony faced bitter disappointment. Her daughter, who made the journey as well, remembered that her mother often cried during the first few months. "[T]hese pioneer women [were] so suddenly transplanted from homes of comfort in the eastern states," wrote the daughter, "to these bare, treeless, wind swept, sun scorched prairies - with no conveniences - no comforts, not even a familiar face. Everything was so strange and so different from the life they had …

Book Review: Finding Lewis And Clark: Old Trails, New Directions, David Bernstein

Great Plains Quarterly

In the introduction to Finding Lewis and Clark, co-editor James Rhonda articulates four questions that drive this collection of essays: what is the story of the legendary expedition from 1803-1806 all about?; who were the actors in this drama?; which moments shaped the journey?; and what were the consequences of Lewis and Clark's march across the continent? While aspects of the first three questions inspire such varied pieces as William Foley's biography of William Clark and a description of Joseph Mussulman's online "hyperhistory" of the expedition, it is in responding to the final question that this collection finds the …

Book Review: Austin, Cleared For Takeoff: Aviators, Businessmen, And The Growth Of An American City, Roger Bilstein

Great Plains Quarterly

At its widest point, Texas measures some 850 miles across. EI Paso, in the extreme west, is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Texarkana, sited near the state's eastern boundary. Given the distances its citizens have to travel, Texas has always been attuned to transport technology. And people living in the capital, Austin, near the state's center, have always been interested in finding rapid forms of travel to the far-flung cities and counties of the rest of the state. Thus, Ragsdale's book touches on a highly relevant aspect of urban as well as regional history. Moreover, as national …

Book Review: Red Earth: Race And Agriculture In Oklahoma Territory, Jere W. Roberson

Great Plains Quarterly

"Of all the ways in which history can be written and remembered, human based environmental change is often a 'winner's' history told by the people who remain." The essence of Bonnie Lynn-Sherow's thesis is probably captured in this quote from Red Earth. Her mission, it seems, is to raise our consciousness and issue a call for historians and ecologists to begin building a new history and a less disturbing relationship with the environment.

Book Review: The Food Journal Of Lewis And Clark: Recipes For An Expedition, Mary Wallace Kelsey

Great Plains Quarterly

This well-designed and appealing book, combining history with usable recipes reminiscent of the times and places the expedition traveled, looks as though it might have been published early in the nineteenth century. Gunderson uses the term "paleocusineology," which she defines as bringing history alive through cooking. If one merely thumbs through the volume, finding recipes for ice cream and lemon meringue pie can be a bit startling. Obviously, these foods could not have been prepared in the wilderness. Reading, however, tells us that the story begins with the employment of Meriwether Lewis as President Thomas Jefferson's private secretary in 1801 …