Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life And Times Of A Career Army Officer By Wayne R. Kime, Charles Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Irving Dodge was a soldier and author whose diaries and published works on the Great Plains have served as primary sources for many years. Four of Dodge's Great Plains journals were edited for publication by Wayne R. Kime, who now caps that achievement with a long-awaited biography.

As Kime notes in his introduction, reprints of Dodge's works during the twentieth century maintained his reputation as an author, "but the facts of his military career were all but forgotten." In Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life and Times of a Career Army Officer, he has successfully resurrected Dodge's military career. …

Review Of Railwayman's Son: A Plains Family Memoir By Hugh Hawkins, Carlos A. Schwantes

Great Plains Quarterly

Railwayman's Son is a lovingly crafted memoir of growing up in small-town Kansas and Oklahoma during the 1930s and 1940s. For this reviewer, who grew up in small-town Indiana during the 1940s and 1950s, Hugh Hawkins's evocative recollection inspired a flood of memories. The author is professor emeritus of history and American studies at Amherst College. Though we have never met, and though the particulars of Hawkins family life differ noticeably from mine, the process of coming of age in a Midwestern town in the years that bracket World War II would seem to offer us considerable common ground to …

Review Of The World We Used To Live In: Remembering The Powers Of The Medicine Men By Vine Deloria Jr., Tink Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly

This potent volume was Deloria's final gift to his readers. He completed the final editing during a stay in the hospital a few days before his passing into the spirit world of his ancestors. He had made a career out of demonstrating the greater plausibility of Indian traditions and historical memories over against the usually dismissive explanations offered by colonial white academics, missionaries, and government officials. This volume carries on that work with aplomb.

Here Deloria has collecled stories from a wide variety of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographies, stories of the wonderful accomplishments of Indian medicine men from …

Review Of An Opportunity Lost: The Truman Administration And The Farm Policy Debate By Virgil W. Dean, Kristin L. Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly

America's second "agricultural revolution" had unintended consequences as a result of postwar prosperity. Virgil Dean offers a clear and straightforward examination of the Truman administration's attempts to devise a new farm policy and situate it within the larger context of the Fair Deal, analyzing the extent to which these attempts often complemented and challenged solutions proposed by Congress and agricultural organizations. Federal officials possessed a limited time frame during the postwar era within which to institute an agricultural program that secured fairer prices for producers, protected natural resources, minimized rural and urban conflict, and avoided the scourge of surpluses. Partisan …

Review Of Jay Cooke's Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, The Sioux, And The Panic Of 1873 By M. John Lubetkin, Carroll Engelhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

Jay Cooke's Gamble engagingly chronicles the banker's failure in financing a transcontinental railroad built through northern forests and Plains largely unsettled by Europeans. The book details how negative publicity constricted bond sales at a critical juncture. News of construction difficulties, cost overruns, and suspected chicanery spread after 1870 as the Northern Pacific edged westward from Duluth, Minnesota, to Bismarck, Dakota Territory. Survey expeditions into the Yellowstone Valley, escorted by the United States Army, sparked Lakota Sioux resistance. George Armstrong Custer's exaggerated press accounts of these skirmishes further eroded investor confidence and frightened Cooke's partners. They forced the closure of Jay …

Review Of In The Shadow Of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story Of The Indian Wars By Roger L. Di Silvestro, Bruce Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly

The U.S. Army excused the killing of one of its officers, Lt. Edward W. Casey, by Plenty Horses, an Oglala Lakota, to maintain its official position that the "incident" at Wounded Knee was a battle, not a massacre. Roger Di Silvestro's In the Shadow of Wounded Knee is the first full-dress history of this coda to the event at Wounded Knee during which between two hundred and three hundred and fifty Native peoples died, as well as forty-nine soldiers, many of whom were killed by friendly fire.

Casey, ironically, was himself something of an Indian rights defender. He recruited scouts, …

Review Of Governor Lady: The Life And Times Of Nellie Tayloe Ross By Teva J. Scheer, Jennifer Pierce

Great Plains Quarterly

Nellie Tayloe Ross, governor of Wyoming from January 5, 1925-January 3, 1927, was sworn into office fifteen days before Miriam Ferguson in Texas, a precedence that earned the former a lasting legacy as the nation's first woman governor. The novelty of her status and her elegant charm won Ross the attention of her contemporaries. A series of autobiographical essays titled "Governor Lady," published in 1927 by Good Housekeeping, fed the interests of an admiring public. A more recent tribute is Teva Scheer's Governor Lady: The Life of Times of Nellie Tayloe Ross. "How should history evaluate the nation's …

Review Of New Perspectives On Native North America: Cultures, Histories, And Representations Edited And With An Introduction By Sergei A. Kan And Pauline T Umer Strong, Ralph Salisbury

Great Plains Quarterly

Justice writes well, and I recall someone's observing once that Sigmund Freud became influential not only for his theories but for the passionate, compelling prose with which he delivered them. Justice's passages about Nanye'hi (Nancy Ward) and Tsiyu Gansini (Dragging Canoe) are good examples of this. In terms of Justice's articulating the dichotomy between the Chicamaugua (War Chief) tradition and the Beloved Path (Peace Chief) tradition, the portraits of Tsiyu Gansini and Nanye'hi are crucial. The stories of these two important Cherokee historical figures are compelling, and Justice's prose brings the stories to life.

Justice divides Cherokee literature into that …

Review Of Voices Of The American West, Volume 1: The Indian Interviews Of Eli. S. Ricker, 1903-1919 By Eli Ricker & Voices Of The American West, Volume 2: The Settler And Soldier Interviews Of Eli. S. Ricker, 1903-1919 By Eli Ricker, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

The ending decades of the nineteenth century brought many Americans to the realization that the people who had witnessed the creation of a new country were passing on. Historical societies, newspapers, and enthusiastic individuals began recording their own experiences and collecting biographical information and reminiscences of others. Some of these were published, others archived for posterity. The interviews conducted by Eli S. Ricker are a classic example of the process.

Ricker moved to Chadron, Nebraska, in 1885. He had various careers, but it was probably his editorship of the Chadron Times that developed his interest in Indians. By 1903 he …

Review Of The Ambivalent Art Of Katherine Anne Porter By Mary Titus, James T.F. Tanner

Great Plains Quarterly

Mary Titus's The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter is an original, serious, feminist study of Porter's ever-shifting and problematic self-analysis respecting the proper roles of women in modern culture. According to Titus, Porter rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, unbecoming in view of the conventional notion of woman as child bearer. Yet Titus is certain that Porter overcame such notions, or at least ambivalently tempered them, to create her· memorable fiction.

In her fiction, Katherine Anne Porter (1890- 1980) provides varied treatments of the Great Plains areas …

Review Of Our Fire Survives The Storm: A Cherokee Literary History By Daniel Heath Justice, Paul D. Travis

Great Plains Quarterly

"American history is false for the most part, because historians prosper by presenting a positive view. The true history of the U.S.A. is in its literature." Thus spoke an American historian, some years ago, at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Daniel Heath Justice's book brings to mind the historian's words. Justice focuses on the historical Significance of Cherokee writing, past and present. Literature and its context, that is the dualism which his book unites. This unification involves reference to historians and anthropologists of the past and reference to contemporary scholars. The recapitulation of information and theories articulated by others …

Review Of The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, And The Making Of The Alberta-Montana Borderlands. By Sheila Mcmanus, Lissa Wadewitz

Great Plains Quarterly

Drawing upon the writings of post-structuralists, cultural geographers, and feminist post-colonial scholars, Sheila McManus illustrates that although the West was critical to American and Canadian nation building, the late nineteenth-century Alberta-Montana border remained tenuous and challenged national consolidation on both sides of the line. Three pairs of chapters outline how Canada and the United States tried to incorporate their respective Wests into larger visions of nationhood and make the forty-ninth parallel a meaningful marker for regional residents.

The first two chapters illustrate how both governments sought to know and manage their western regions through surveys, maps and land policies. The …

Imagining Kansas Place, Promotion, And Western Stereotypes In The Art Of Henry Worrall (1825-1902), Karen De Bres

Great Plains Quarterly

In May of 1876 three men took a private Santa Fe railroad car from Topeka, Kansas, ro the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. One was the Santa Fe land commissioner and the director of the railroad's exhibit, another was secretary of state for the Kansas Board of Agriculture. The third was a self-trained artist in the railroad's employ, and the designer of both the Kansas and Santa Fe exhibits. Fifty-one year old Henry Worrall lifted himself from a boyhood in the back streets of Liverpool to a comfortable life, and this journey in a company car, through artistic endeavors that helped support …

How William F. Cody Helped Save The Buffalo Without Really Trying, David Nesheim

Great Plains Quarterly

Although Leopold's aphorism refers to the common response to human suffering, it also reflects the way many historical accounts of the restoration of the American bison omit an important piece of that phenomenon. Most historians have focused their attention on two elements: western ranchers who started the earliest private herds and eastern conservationists who raised funds and lobbied for the creation of the first national preserves. However, the perpetuation of the image of buffalo in the hearts and minds of Americans was equally important in the eventual recovery of the species. No one was a more effective popularize than William …

Title And Contents- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 3 / Summer 2007

Contents

How William F. Cody Helped Save The Buffalo Without Really Trying

Imagining Kansas: Place, Promotion, And Western Stereotypes In The Art Of Henry Worrall (1825-1902)

"Young Poets Write What They Know": William Reed Dunroy, Poet Of The Plains'

Review Essay: Ghost Dancing Anew

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Book Notes- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Nebraska 1875: Its Advantages, Resources, and Drawbacks. By Edwin A. Curley

From Lead Mines to Gold Fields: Memories of an Incredibly Long Life. By Henry Taylor

Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Joseph Gossage of Dakota Territory. Edited by Paula M. Nelson

New Mexico Past and Future. By Thomas E. Chavez

Marc Simmons of New Mexico: Maverick Historian. By Phyllis S. Morgan

A Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures. Edited by George Horse Capture and Emil Her Many Horses

A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise …

Review Of The Broidered Garment: The Love Story Of Mona Martinsen Andlohn G. Neihardt By Hilda Martinsen Neihardt, Timothy G. Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1907, John G. Neihardt published A Bundle of Myrrh, his first volume of lyric poetry, thirty-three poems of often frank sexuality and longing. Reviewers found the book daring-the New York Times noted its "riotous joy of the flesh"-and occasionally crude. But it won Neihardt the ultimate rave review when it was read by a young American sculptress then studying with Auguste Rodin in Paris. When twenty-three-year-old Mona Martinsen read the poems, she was moved to write to the twenty-six-year-old Nebraska poet, beginning a correspondence that would culminate in a marriage proposal. In November 1908, when Mona Martinsen stepped …

Review Of Riding For The Brand: 150 Years Of Cowden Ranching By Michael Pettit, D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark

Great Plains Quarterly

As a family of ranchers, there is little doubt that the Cowdens have contributed to 150 years of the history of the western fringe of the Great Plains in Texas and New Mexico. As descendent and author Michael Pettit suggests, the Cowdens arrived in Texas approximately five years after the state was admitted to the Union. To add an additional perspective, Quanah Parker's band of Comanches were twenty-five years away from accepting reservation life at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory as William Hamby Cowden settled in Palo Pinto County, Texas. He clashed with bands of Comanches, . but in the …

Review Of American Outback: The Oklahoma Panhandle In The Twentieth Century By Richard Lowitt, Debbie Colson

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Lowitt's look at the Oklahoma Panhandle in American Outback is one of the first books documenting the area's recent history. Authors usually focus on the cattle operations prior to 1900 or solely on the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Ironically, not much is written in Oklahoma history books that specifically focuses on the Panhandle's history, so Lowitt's attention to its contemporary history is rewarding. He includes details about significant subjects such as the Dust Bowl; agricultural, oil and gas development; and the Optima Dam. In referencing farmer and magazine contributor Caroline Henderson, Lowitt recognizes her role in drawing …

Review Of Between Heaven And Texas Photographs By Wyman Meinzer, Roy Flukinger

Great Plains Quarterly

Colors, textures, lines, shapes, and forms are all rich visual elements-and, perhaps, no more honestly open to discovery than in the seeming infinity of the heavens above. But if one stares at the sky uninterruptedly for a long time, things may seem to start to come unbuttoned. No matter what riches nature provides for the human eye or the camera lens, it is always important to recognize the human perspective in the process. By paying heed to the horizon line and constantly referencing the fact that one's feet (or the camera's tripod) are planted firmly upon the earth, Wyman Meinzer …

Review Of Captain Lack And The Dalton Gang: The Life And Times Of A Railroad Detective By John J. Kinney, Paul T. Hietter

Great Plains Quarterly

The evening of July 14, 1892, a train carrying a heavily-armed posse passed slowly through Adair, Indian Territory. Also on board was John J. "Captain Jack" Kinney Jr, who headed the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas {"Katy"} Railroad detectives. Their presence resulted from a tip that the Dalton gang planned to rob the Katy near Pryor Creek. Perhaps as a result of this apparent false alarm, the posse was unprepared as the train passed through Adair. It was here that the gang successfully robbed the Katy. It was also here that Kinney became "a part of history-a parenthetical person, a human …

Review Of Hostiles?: The Lakota Ghost Dance And Buffalo Bill's Wild West By Sam A. Maddra & Ghost Dances And Identity: Prophetic Religion And American Indian Ethnogenesis In The Nineteenth Century By Gregory E. Smoak, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly

GHOST DANCING ANEW

The history and significance of the Ghost Dance received renewed scholarly attention in 2006, as these two fine but very different works attest. Sam A. Maddra's study adds new material to the significant literature about the bestknown incarnation of the Ghost Dance, which flourished among the Lakotas and gained infamy by association with 1890's tragedy at Wounded Knee. Gregory E. Smoak's book proceeds in a much different direction by examining Ghost Dances among the Shoshones and Bannocks, along with those groups' changing identities during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Together they not only enrich our understanding …

Notes And News- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Conference Announcement

Travel Fellowships For Teachers

Call For Papers

Theodore Roosevelt Symposium

"Young Poets Write What They Know" William Reed Dun Roy, Poet Of The Plains, Carrie Shipers

Great Plains Quarterly

In a column for the Lincoln Courier, a newspaper that actively covered the city's political and artistic scenes in the mid-1890s, William Reed Dunroy writes, "Young poets write what they know; what life has taught them." If his own poetry and imaginative prose are any indication, what Dunroy himself knew best, and cared about most deeply, is the Great Plains region-its weather, landscape, and the lives of its people. Dunroy's career as a poet and a reporter began in Nebraska, and his work is most remarkable when he is writing about the place he loved.

Dunroy has not been overlooked …

Review Of With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian And Aboriginal Relations In Colonial Canada Edited By Celia Haig-Brown And David A. Nock, C. L. Higham

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of essays focuses on a specific group of Euro-Canadians: those who "recognized injustices" and "allied themselves with Aboriginal people who also saw the injustices and were actively resisting them, and worked in a variety of ways to address them." Yet the authors approach their subjects with a critical eye, realizing many of these efforts were concentrated on aboriginal peoples who missionaries thought adopted "appropriate and/or useful aspects of Christianity, European dress, and settlement into farming villages or business ventures." Additionally, the authors realize some of the actors in the book "struggle[d] to reconcile their Christian morality with their …

Review Of From Dominance To Disappearance: The Indians Of Texas And The Near Southwest, 1786-1859 By F. Todd Smith, William Meadows

Great Plains Quarterly

F. Todd Smith's work provides the first detailed history of the Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, an area encompassing parts of present day Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma over a seventy-four year period.

Foremost, it highlights the competing efforts of the Spanish, French, American, and later Texan governments to control and maintain boundaries in the region, much of which depended on the ability of colonial powers to provide trade goods to tribes, and to supply assistance in the form of protection against then-existing enemy tribes. The Spanish inability consistently to provide trade goods and the growing intercession of …

Review Of A History Of Migration From Germany To Canada, 1850-1939 By Jonathan Wagner, Hans Werner

Great Plains Quarterly

German speakers have been important migrants to the Great Plains, but in Canada most came not from Germany, but from Eastern Europe. Given the low numbers that came to Canada from the Reich itself, Jonathan Wagner's study is more about explaining the country's failure to attract Germans than about their actual migration. According to Wagner, this failure can be explained by Canada's later and less complete industrialization, which meant that its "perceived needs could not win converts in the more industrialized Germany." While Canada was seeking immigrants to farm the wide-open spaces of the Canadian prairies, Germany was already an …

Review Of The Women There Don't Treat You Mean: Abilene In Song By Joe W. Specht, John Wheat

Great Plains Quarterly

What's in a name? If that name is "Abilene" and it rhymes easily with other poetic phrases and occupies a mystic landscape in the popular imagination, then there's quite a bit. That is the basic message of this modest but surprisingly complex essay in cultural geography that traces the presence of Abilene, Texas, in some sixty popular songs over the past century. Author Joe Specht, librarian and music historian at McMurry University in Abilene, has collected music and files on this subject for many years and finally brought it all together with recent interviews with many of the songwriters themselves. …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 2 / Spring 2007

Contents

The Militarization Of The Prairie: Scrap Drives, Metaphors, And The Omaha World-Herald's 1942 "Nebraska Plan"

The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored: Immigrants In Willa Cather's 0 Pioneers!

Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution: The Afro-American Council's Struggle Against Racial Violence

Review Essay: Centennial Saskatchewan

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of The Encyclopedia Of Saskatchewan: A Living Legacy, Patrick Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly

Saskatchewan celebrated its centennial as a Canadian province in 2005, and the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan resulted from the admirable desire to make a lasting commemoration of that milestone. When one considers that the project had a tortured history of chronic underfunding, and, as a result, failed to engage many in the scholarly community, the final product, flawed though it might be, is still a remarkable success.

The goal of the Encyclopedia, publisher David Gauthier informs readers in an introductory preamble, was to create "a substantial memorial to the people of Saskatchewan that highlights their achievements and provide a comprehensive …