Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Open To Horror The Great Plains Situation In Contemporary Thrillers By E. E. Knight And By Douglas Preston And Lincoln Child, A. B. Emrys

Great Plains Quarterly

From the agoraphobic prairie where the father of Willa Cather's Antonia kills himself, to the claustrophobic North Dakota town of Argus devastated by storm in Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," to Lightning Flat, the grim home of Jack Twist in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," much Great Plains literature is situational, placing human drama in the context of historicalor contemporary setting. Isolation, fierce weather, and inherent pressures on survival remain primary, and the Plains is a character in itself that appears as a presence, whether foregrounded or ghostly, in works that cannot help but evoke the Great Plains then and now. The Plains' …

Coronado And Aesop Fable And Violence On The Sixteenth-Century Plains, Daryl W. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an entrada from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where, among other activities, they strangled their principal Indian guide, a man they called El Turco. In the pages that follow, I focus on the events leading up to and including the execution of this Indian guide. Although Coronado, his chroniclers, and modern historians have …

Naming A Place Nicodemus, Rosamond C. Rodman

Great Plains Quarterly

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town derives from a legendary slave rather than the biblical character.

This essay challenges that consensus, contending the name Nicodemus indeed refers to the biblical character, and in doing so exemplifies the way that the dominated disguise their speech, making it …

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 …

Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution The Afro-American Council’S Struggle Against Racial Violence, Shawn Leigh Alexander

Great Plains Quarterly

wr 1 he Negro's friend has dwindled to a Smith & Wesson pistol, a Repeating Rifle, 50 rounds of ammunition for each, a good, strong nerve, a lesson in good marksmanship, and then use." That was the call from the editors of the Wichita Searchlight on January 19, 1901, just one week after the streets of Leavenworth, Kansas, witnessed the burning of Fred Alexander, a twenty-two-year-old black Spanish-American war veteran. The brutal murder of Alexander horrified many African Americans throughout the region, who decided that it was time to stand up and let their grievances be heard by argument and …

Relief For Wanderers: The Transient Service In Kansas, 1933-35, Peter Fearon

Great Plains Quarterly

Located at the crossroads of America, Kansas had long experience of interstate migrants. For many decades armies of workers had entered the state to pursue the harvest of a number of crops, or to pick up whatever work was available on their way west in pursuit of a more rewarding life. The U.S. population was highly mobile and migration played an essential role in a vigorously expanding economy. Ailing transients, especially tubercular cases, had as their destination the pure, dry air of the Southwest. To these we can add indeterminate numbers of seasonal workers, ex-veterans, homeless boys, peddlers, beggars, and …

"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 …

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.

Come To The "Champagne Air" Changing Promotional Images Of The Kansas Climate, 1854 -1900, Karen De Bres

Great Plains Quarterly

Euro-American settlers poured into Kansas during the second half of the nineteenth century, and there they encountered a hostile and unpredictable climate. Rainfall patterns were erratic, and the extremes of temperature were both demanding and daunting. Countering these conditions, or at least tempering them, became a task for a variety of individuals and organizations. The work was straightforward: to transform the image of Kansas in order to attract prospective immigrants. As historian Carl Becker wrote, this was not easy: Until 1895 the whole history of the state was a series of disasters, and always something new, extreme, bizarre, until the …

A Slave To Yellow Peril The 1886 Chinese Ouster Attempt In Wichita, Kansas, Julie Courtwright

Great Plains Quarterly

Wichita's war on the Chinese began in 1886. Although a small war in comparison to other anti-Chinese outbursts in the American West, the persecution and violence against the city's small Asian population was nonetheless terrifying and significant to those who were the focus of the racist demonstrations. In an attempt to follow the national anti-Chinese trend of the late nineteenth century, which the Chinese called the "driving out time,"¹ groups such as the local assemblies of the Knights of Labor and the Women's Industrial League in Wichita, Kansas, organized a boycott against Chinese businesses. Citizens attacked the "yellow peril" …

The Making Of Little Sweden, Usa, Steven M. Schnell

Great Plains Quarterly

Ethnic tourism in the United States has become big business. An estimated six billion dollars were spent on various forms of "heritage tourism" (including ethnic tourism) in the US in 1995 alone.¹ At first glance, this desire for roots and tradition within an American public more often noted for its worship of progress and individualism may seem surprising. Yet as Americans have become increasingly mobile, wired, and rootless,² many have become disillusioned with the growing urbanization and industrialization of their society³ and have begun efforts to recapture a sense of what they perceive as traditional rural community. …

The Earth Says Have A Place William Stafford And A Place Of Language, Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1986, my daughter was almost four years old and my wife and I were to have poet William Stafford to dinner during a visit he made to Washburn University. I searched for a short Stafford poem our daughter might memorize as a welcome and a tribute. We came across this simple gem, and she spoke it to him at the table.

Later in his visit, Stafford told a story about "Note." He traveled extensively all over the world. Once, in Pakistan, he opened his bags for a customs official. "Books," the man observed. "I am a …