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Notes And News- Summer 2009

Great Plains Quarterly

DISSERTATION AWARD IN WOMEN'S HISTORY

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VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

Title And Contents- Summer 2009

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29/ Number 3 / Summer 2009

CONTENTS

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF HOMESTEADING AS A POLICY OF PUBLIC DOMAIN DISPOSAL

A PRAIRIE PARABLE: THE 1933 BATES TRAGEDY

CULTURAL SURVIVAL AND THE OMAHA WAY: SUMMER 2009 EUNICE WOODHULL STABLER'S LEGACY OF PRESERVATION ON THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PLAINS

REVIEW ESSAY: THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF A MOVING OBJECT: EMERGING UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN METIS

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Title And Contents- Spring 2009

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29/Number 2/ Spring 2009

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: DEATH, MURDER, AND MAYHEM: STORIES OF VIOLENCE AND HEALING ON THE PLAINS

DEATHSCAPES, TOPOCIDE, DOMICIDE: THE PLAINS IN CONTEMPORARY PRINT MEDIA

OPEN TO HORROR: THE GREAT PLAINS SITUATION IN CONTEMPORARY THRILLERS BY E. E. KNIGHT AND BY DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD

CORONADO AND AESOP: FABLE AND VIOLENCE ON THE SIXTEENTH,CENTURY PLAINS

REVIEW ESSAY: NEW VIEWS ON CUSTER AND THE INDIAN WARS

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Book Notes- Spring 2009

Great Plains Quarterly

Prairies and Plains: The Reference Literature of a Region.

A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove

Fort Worth: A Personal View.

Traces of Forgotten Places: An Artist's ThirtyYear Exploration and Celebration of Texas, As It Was.

Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver.

Wind Through the Buffalo Grass: A Lakota Story Cycle.

Outrider of Empire: The Life & Adventures of Roger Pocock, 1865-1941.

Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole's Western Campaign of 1865: The Journals of Lyman G. Bennett and Other Eyewitness Accounts.

Life of a Soldier on the Western Frontier

A Remarkable Curiosity: Dispatches from a New …

"You Have To Be Involved ... To Play A Part In It" Assessing Kainai Attitudes About Voting In Canadian Elections, Yale D. Belanger

Great Plains Quarterly

Two days prior to the federal election on June 28, 2004, the Lethbridge Herald ran an article in which the renowned Cree leader and former Member of Parliament Elijah Harper (Churchill electoral district in Manitoba, 1993-97) publicly implored First Nations people in Canada to participate in the forthcoming vote. Citing the recent demographic shift showing a dramatic increase in the number of young First Nations people nationally and their potential ability to influence provincial and federal electoral results, Harper proclaimed that "Native people have a positive role to play in this process." Referring to the endemic lack of voter turnout …

Review Of "Memories Of The Branch Davidians: The Autobiography Of David Koresh's Mother," By Bonnie Haldeman, W. Michael Ashcraft

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1993 federal government agents besieged and then attacked the compound of buildings at Mount Carmel, outside of Waco, Texas, that housed members of a religious movement called the Branch Davidians (a splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventists), led by Vernon Howell, who renamed himself David Koresh. Catherine Wessinger, a noted scholar of cults or new religions, has produced much of the essential scholarship that has appeared in the wake of the Waco disaster. This book is part of her ongoing contribution to our understanding of Waco.

Wessinger interviewed Bonnie Haldeman extensively in 2004, resulting in the present volume, which …

Review Of "Picturing A Different West: Vision, Illustration, And The Tradition Of Cather And Austin," By Janis P. Stout, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Janis Stout's credentials are impeccable: as the author of biographies {of Cather and Katherine Anne Porter} and of critical studies of American women novelists, and as denizen of the West and Southwest, she knows her topic. Starting from what she terms Willa Cather's and Mary Austin's "highly visual prose," Stout builds upon an argument about gender in the West made by Cather scholar Susan Rosowski in her 1999 book, Birthing a Nation. Stout posits that Austin and Cather encountered a West already pictorially determined by the monumental imagery of white, Anglo-Saxon, adventuresome, imperialist, violent, rugged, and most of all …

Review Of "Banned In Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915-1966," By Gerald R. Butters Jr., Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

From 1915 to 1966, Kansas maintained an active film censorship board, empowered by BOOK REVIEWS 73 the legislature to review each film that might be shown in the state. The board could accept the film, remove scenes or titles (and, when pictures began to talk, objectionable language), or reject the film entirely-hence the title of Butters's book.

In 1920, the Kansas Board of Review first published its official standards. These included the positive: a film should be wholesome, and should not ridicule any religious sect or race of people. But the "shall nots" quickly asserted themselves: no debasing of morals, …

Review Of "Lynching To Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence," By Cynthia Skove Nevels, Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly

From the Civil War to the early twentieth century the growing population of Brazos County, Texas included about equal numbers of white and black southerners. That division contributed to tense political campaigns between Democrats and Republicans as well as acts of political and racial violence. Among new settlers came Bohemian, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Anglos did not immediately accept them as white because of cultural differences. The immigrants sought white status in several ways, including racial violence.

In 1896 a mob seized three African Americans from jail and hanged them. Two had been accused of assaulting a white girl. The …

Review Of "Frontier Farewell: The 18705 And The End Of The Old West," By Garrett Wilson, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly

You might just want to buy two copies-one for yourself, and one for a friend. This book by a Regina lawyer turned writer tells the story of the Canadian prairie West from the arrival of the first European explorers to 1881, although most of the book deals with the period beginning in 1869, and five of the twenty-two chapters deal with the events surrounding the time that Sitting Bull and several thousand other Sioux spent in Canada. The book was obviously written with a popular audience in mind, but it makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of …

Review Of "Jazz Mavericks Of The Lone Star State." By Dave Oliphant, Jean A. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly

Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State is a collection of sixteen essays that can be read according to interest rather than order. They cover a wide range of jazz-related topics, from important jazz musicians to important jazz discographies; Dave Oliphant is emphatic throughout about the important contributions of Texas-born jazz musicians to every phase of jazz. I have the same concern now that I did when reading Oliphant's earlier book, Texan Jazz (1996), namely that he deals less with jazz in Texas than with Texas-born jazz musicians who left the state to work in top bands. Nevertheless, this collection …

Review Of "North American Indians In The Great War." By Susan Applegate Krouse, Thomas A. Britten

Great Plains Quarterly

Anthropologist Susan Applegate Krouse employs the records of Joseph Kossuth Dixon to shed light on the experiences of American Indian servicemen during the First World War. A former Baptist preacher, Dixon waged a twodecade- long campaign before and after WWI to preserve a record of Indian cultures and traditions before Native Americans "vanished" as distinctive peoples. To this end, Dixon traveled extensively to photograph and film reservation Indians, at times choreographing or staging scenes that fit his somewhat romanticized view of indigenous life. On the eve of the U.S. entry into WWI, he argued for the creation of segregated Indian …

Review Of "This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, And The New Deal." By Sarah T. Phillips, Brian C. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

In this sophisticated reinterpretation, Sarah T. Phillips traces the history and impact of New Deal conservation policy. She argues persuasively that rural conservation programs deserve a prominent place in New Deal historiography because they significantly shaped the New Deal state and because they were integral to the New Deal's campaign for economic recovery. Her work is sufficiently broad and innovative to invite criticism at multiple points on evidentiary grounds, but the book is consistently engaging.

Phillips shows that during the 1920s, eastern land use planners and politicians, along with progressives in the USDA, advocated planned and coordinated use of natural …

Review Of "The Cypress Hills: An Island By Itself." By Walter Hildebrandt And Brian Hubner, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly

The Cypress Hills, rising as outliers in the northern portion of the Missouri Coteau and dominating the mixed xeric grasslands of southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, have a vast human story of their own. They are certainly worthy of their own history book. This new edition of Hildebrandt and Hubner's 1994 book has been "rewritten and reshaped" to retell the story of the prehistory, aboriginal, early trade, and mounted police history of the region. Originally serving as historians and guides of the Fort Walsh National Historic Site, the authors were well placed to provide it. The Cypress Hills presents a …

Review Of "Landscapes Of Colorado: Mountains And Plains." By Ann Scarlett Daley And Michael Paglia, Rose Glaser Fredrick

Great Plains Quarterly

Landscapes of Colorado: Mountains and Plains, with a historical overview by Ann Scarlett Daley, the book's curator, and text by Michael Paglia, is a handsome survey of contemporary landscape painters and photographers working in the state. One could argue with a choice here and there. For example, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, European installation artists who have lived in New York since 1964 and created just one major work for Colorado in 1972, Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, with one more in the planning stages for 2011, are said to have "a long commitment to Colorado." Though their work is seminal, …

Review Of "So This Is The World & Here I Am In It," By Di Brandt, Tanis Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly

When Di Brandt speaks about poetryand its political dimensions, people listen, sometimes with their mouths agape, at her audacity and at her long looping ecoerotic sentences. Brandt's literary, ecocritical, and philosophical stances are well represented in So this is the world, as are her poetics, emphasized here through her reading of the prairie as both aesthetic and consciousness, a local that has much to teach us about the global. The collection is bracketed by two luminous essays-"This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie" and the title essay, "So this is the world and here I am in …

Review Of "Buffalo Soldiers In The West: A Black Soldiers Anthology." Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud And Michael N. Searles, Dwayne Mack

Great Plains Quarterly

During the Civil War, some 180,000 African Americans served with courage in the Union Army, and more than 40,000 died. Following the war, as the United States moved to secure its Western territories, African American infantry and cavalry, whom the Cheyennes and Comanches of the Plains called "Buffalo Soldiers," helped in this endeavor. The Army Reorganization Act of 1866 approved the formation of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry. In Buffalo Soldiers in the West, Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles collect previously published essays on these intrepid servicemen. The collection describes how Buffalo …

Review Of "Forty Acres And A Fool: How To Live In The Country And Still Keep Your Sanity." By Roger Welsch, Gwendolyn K. Meister

Great Plains Quarterly

These recent books by longtime Nebraska author, folklorist, and humorist Roger Welsch examine life in the Great Plains from two quite different perspectives. Forty Acres and a Fool, ostensibly a how-to book on moving to the country, is written in a personal, conversational style from the start. In the introduction Welsch relates the story of his own physical (and mental) relocation to Dannebrog, a village of 352 in central Nebraska. Although the book offers practical advice on everything from moving buildings to fitting in with the social life of one's chosen rural community, it feels essentially like sitting down …

Review Of "Nuclear Nebraska: The Remarkable Story Of The Little County That Couldn't Be Bought." By Susan Cragin., Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly

For nearly twenty-five years after Congress passed the 1980 Federal Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, Nebraska was torn by controversy over where a waste dump should be spotted in the state. The final act came in 2005, when Nebraska sent $146 million in damages to the five-state Central Compact Commission in charge of constructing the facility. Nothing was built.

Susan Cragin's book is a highly readable, well-researched, and very one-sided look at the uproar that cost all those millions of dollars, left a small Great Plains county irredeemably split, and caused years of newspaper headlines, angry meetings and hearings, and …

Review Of "Native American Fiction: A User's Manual." By David Treuer., James Ruppert

Great Plains Quarterly

In his User's Manual, David Treuer reviews many of the works of contemporary Native American writers as well as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Asa Carter to demonstrate that "there is no such thing as Native American Literature-at least, no such thing as Native American novels anyway." For Treuer, good literature is good literature and the standards that govern the great works of Western literature govern novels by Native writers. He sees the inclusion of myth, oral tradition, and ceremony as a longing for culture and not culture itself and believes that readers and writers have misconstrued artistic structure for authenticity. …

Review Of "Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria Jr. And His Influence On American Society." Edited By Steve Pavlik And Daniel R. Wildcat, Tink Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is a fine collection of eights essays on American Indian topics by friends and former students of Vine Deloria Jr. (Dakota/Lakota), the towering figure of our era among American Indian scholars and writers. While some contributions are more about Deloria's work than others, the whole collection is intended to demonstrate his influence on the thinking of scholars writing in American Indian studies today instead of merely placarding his prominence. Rather than simply praising Deloria, the volume continues his work. Anyone interested in the state of discourse in American Indian studies would benefit greatly from reading its contents. Most of …

Review Of "Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonne." Edited By B. Byron Price., Joan Carpenter Troccoli

Great Plains Quarterly

No one painted the majestic mountains of Montana more splendidly than Charles M. Russell, but most of the action in his art, played out among the cowboys of the open range and the Native peoples of the Northern Plains, unfolds on the flat. Thanks to the comprehensive electronic catalogue of Russell's paintings, drawings, watercolors, models in mixed mediums, and illustrated letters available with this print publication, the reader can verify these assertions without tipping a single book off the library shelf.

Catalogues raisonnes have always stimulated the discovery of lost works and the reattribution and redating of others, and such …

Review Of "White Man's Paper Trail: Grand Councils And Treaty-Making On The Central Plains." By Stan Hoig, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a strange book, in part because the author does not seem to recognize the massive amount of scholarship available on the topic of Indian treaties that has accumulated in the last thirty years. Mostly limited to works published before 1970, its bibliography highlights the problems arising from minimal familiarity with recent research.

The book itself claims to be a unique narrative about the treaty councils of the Central Plains. In reality, it is not unique, and its coverage spans an area from Texas to Montana. The Southern Plains are a particular emphasis and fit the author's expertise. The …

Jim, Antonia, And The Wolves Displacement In Cather's My Antonia, Robin Cohen

Great Plains Quarterly

In one of the most frequently noted incidents in Willa Cather's My Antonia, Russian immigrant Pavel reveals on his deathbed that, when driving his friend's wedding party sledge, he saved his own life and companion Peter's by throwing the bride and groom to the attacking wolves. Antonia and Jim are fascinated by this story, and readers are haunted and intrigued by it. The tale holds the obvious appeal (both for the children and Cather's reader) of the drama of the incident, the color of its remote foreign setting, and the morbid satisfaction of learning the mysterious past of the …

Review Of "The Choctaws In Oklahoma: From Tribe To Nation, 1855-1970." By Clara Sue Kidwell, Robert Keith Collins

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars of anthropology (particularly historical anthropology), history, and Native American studies interested in Choctaw history, cultural changes, everyday life choices, and contributions to American culture should find The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 and How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World important new contributions to the historical literature articulated by strong Choctaw voices. And readers interested in the complexities of Choctaw life in the Southern Plains, how Choctaws interacted with the region's other Indigenous groups (e.g., Kiowas and Comanches), and the inconsistencies between federal policies and Choctaw lived realities over time will be …

The Methodists' Great 1869 Camp Meeting And Aboriginal Conservation Strategies In The North Saskatchewan River Valley, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly

George McDougall, chairman of the Methodist Missions to the Indians of the Northwest Territories, kept a large, black book in which he jotted sermon notes, references to classical and biblical literature and sometimes simply his itineraries by horseback from Victoria, the primary Methodist mission in the far British northwest. Under the "s" tab and labeled "Saskatchewan," he noted repeatedly in the 1860s the food crisis facing North Saskatchewan residents. In sum: ''A time of starvation. No buffalo."

In this article I analyze a buffalo hunt which occurred in 1869. That spring, many hundreds of Cree, Assiniboine, Stoney, and Metis hunters …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29 / Number 1 / Winter 2009

THE METHODISTS' GREAT 1869 CAMP MEETING AND ABORIGINAL CONSERVATION STRATEGIES IN THE NORTH SASKATCHEWAN RIVER VALLEY

"YOU HAVE TO BE INVOLVED ... TO PLAY A PART IN IT": ASSESSING KAINAI ATTITUDES ABOUT VOTING IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

JIM, ANTONIA, AND THE WOLVES: DISPLACEMENT IN CATHER'S MY ANTONIA

REVIEW ESSAY: WHAT'S CHOCTAW HISTORY-AND WHO GETS TO SAY?

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "William Clark: Indian Diplomat." By Jay H. Buckley., University Of California, Los Angeles And Autry Institute For The Study Of The American West

Great Plains Quarterly

For decades, radio commentator Paul Harvey broadcast a program called "The Rest of the Story." Six times a week, Harvey recounted stories that put a surprising twist on familiar episodes. Often the rest of the story involved constructing epilogues that followed the careers of well-known persons after they had left the spotlight. In some ways Jay Buckley's study of William Clark can be seen as a contribution to Harvey's series. Although the book includes chapters on Clark's earlier life and his cocaptaincy of the Corps of Discovery, threequarters of it involves what Clark did after he came back from that …

Review Of "Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space." Edited By Susan Kollin, Donna Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Postwestern Cultures addresses "the highly charged and continually shifting meanings" of a space that occupies an outsized, even mythic place in the national imaginary: the American West. The essays in this collection do not focus on this myth or its deconstruction in recent history, criticism, and media; rather, they set out to question, through approaches ranging from ecocriticism and critical regionalism through theories of space and gender, the viability, potency, and destructive power of its iconography. By calling into question the fixed positioning of the West in the national imagination-its history, its material culture, and its status as a "pre-lapsarian, …

Review Of "Choctaw Nation: A Story Of American Indian Resurgence." By Valerie Lambert, James Taylor Carson

Great Plains Quarterly

Choctaw Nation fits nicely into two recent trends in the development of Native American history. First, Valerie Lambert draws interpretive threads into the twenty-first century explored for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Circe Sturm's Blood Politics (2002), Donna L. Akers's Living in the Land of Death (2004), and Fay A. Yarbrough's Race and the Cherokee Nation (2008). For Lambert the past thirty years or so have comprised a renewal of the Choctaw Nation that is at the same time part of a larger "cycle of rupture and rebirth" that reaches back at least to the 1500s. Second, Lambert is …