Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Dust Bowl By Paul Bonnifield & Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains In The 1930s By Donald Worster, Thomas Saarinen

Great Plains Quarterly

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s provides an excellent case study of American reactions to a major ecological crisis. By examining carefully how the nation and the region responded to this phenomenon, we could learn valuable lessons to aid in understanding current and future ecological crises. Thus it is of more than antiquarian interest to evaluate these two recent books on the Dust Bowl and the associated events now almost half a century behind us.

Although both authors examine the same area, events, and personalities, their treatment and conclusions are decidedly different. Both focus on the southern plains and devote …

Review Of The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants And The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 By John D. Unruh, Jr., Robert G. Athearn

Great Plains Quarterly

In this somewhat less than precisely titled work John D. Unruh set out to synthesize an enormous amount of published and unpublished material concerning travel across the plains during a period of two decades. Readers will discover that to Unruh "the plains across" meant the central route to the West Coast. He refers only briefly to a southern passage (pp. 67 and 400) and to the Pike's Peak rush that admittedly brought forth miners, as opposed to emigrant settlers (p. 119). However, he does discuss the miners' rush to California in '49. It is estimated that one hundred thousand "Peakers" …

The John Evans 1796-97 Map Of The Missouri River, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the curious twists of Great Plains history is that the first accurate eyewitness map of the Missouri River in what is now North and South Dakota-the historic home of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Indians and of their nomadic neighbors-was produced by a Welshman who had come to the United States to seek evidence for something that never existed: the illusory "welsh Indians." The inquisitive welsh explorer, John Thomas Evans (1770-99), did not find what he came to discover, but he produced what was to be one of the most important maps available to Meriwether Lewis and William …

Rölvaag, Grove And Pioneering On The American And Canadian Plains, Dick Harrison

Great Plains Quarterly

Ole Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth and Frederick Philip Grove's Fruits of the Earth are not obvious choices with which to begin comparing the pioneer fiction of the American and Canadian plains. Giants, translated from the Norwegian, is about Helgelander fishermen settling in the wilds of Dakota Territory in 1873 and, with little more than their bare hands, trying to farm the alien prairie and establish rudimentary institutions of family, church, school, and local government. Fruits, written in English, is about an Anglo-Saxon farmer from Ontario who brings equipment and capital to the task of building an empire …

Title And Contents- Winter 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

WINTER 1981 VOL. 1 NO.1

Contents

AN EDITORIAL NOTE Frederick C. Luebke

CHINOOK CLIMATES AND PLAINS PEOPLE Reid A. Bryson

TOWARD A HISTORY OF PLAINS ARCHEOLOGY Waldo R. Wedel

THE JOHN EVANS 1796-97 MAP OF THE MISSOURI RIVER W. Raymond Wood

TWO AUTHORS AND A HERO: NEIHARDT, SANDOZ, AND CRAZY HORSE Helen Stauffer

BOOK REVIEWS

The Ioway Indians

The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60

Women and Men on the Overland Trail

Frederic Remington and the West: With the Eye of the Mind

The Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the …

Notes And News- Winter 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

The Center For Great Plains Studies

The Christlieb Collection Of Western Art

A New Edition Of Journals Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition

The 1981 Symposium: "American Pioneer Landscapes"

The 1982 Symposium: Call For Papers

Review Of Frederic Remington And The West: With The Eye Of The Mind By Ben Merchant Vorpahl, William H. Goetzmann

Great Plains Quarterly

This book, by the editor of the Frederic Remington-Owen Wister letters, is a strangely disappointing work on a promising subject. It is not the usual picture book of Remington paintings, nor is it really a biography. Rather it is an attempt to recreate Remington's intellectual, emotional, and artistic perceptions as they changed through his life. This is a laudable attempt. Unfortunately, the author is most often cryptic, confused, and much given to the jargon of abstraction. As a consequence any reader must bring a good deal of information to the book or it will be virtually meaningless. Possibly a good …

Review Of Western Movies Edited By William T. Pilkington And Don Graham, Michael T. Isenberg

Great Plains Quarterly

Western movies have been around so long and captured such wide audiences precisely because they reflect and comment upon some of the most enduring features of American culture. We have all grown up with the commonalities (and banalities) of the stock western: the noble hero, the comic or weakling sidekick, the schoolmarm, the villain. If these stereotypes were all there were to it, the western genre would long since have gone the route of, say, the novels of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth.

The value of westerns, like that of many other genres, is that they speak to present concerns as well …

Review Of Women And Men On The Overland Trail By John Mack Faragher, Robert L. Munkres

Great Plains Quarterly

Instead of a general treatment of life on the road west, Women and Men on the Overland Trail by John Mack Faragher is an analysis of several rather specialized aspects of interpersonal relationships within the context of the westward movement. These relationships are then further examined in connection with rural Midwestern life generally during the time period under consideration. Among the topics considered in some detail are gender roles and the division of work both on the farm and on the trail, the significance of differences in men's and women's diaries, the frequency and costs of child-bearing and rearing, and …

An Editorial Note- Winter 1981, Frederick C. Luebke

Great Plains Quarterly

The Center for Great Plains Studies has several purposes in publishing the Great Plains Quarterly. Its general purpose is to use this means to promote appreciation of the history and culture of the people of the Great Plains and to explore their contemporary social, economic, and political problems. The Center seeks further to stimulate research in the Great Plains region by providing a publishing outlet for scholars interested in the past, present, and future of the region. As an interdisciplinary agency, the Center aims to improve communication between scholars in the several fields interested in regional studies.

Regionalism has …

Chinook Climates And Plains Peoples, Reid A. Bryson

Great Plains Quarterly

Changes in climate are major factors shaping the history of human occupance in the Great Plains region. Although Americans have often acted as though climates are fixed, the record indicates that in the past the climate of the Great Plains has changed drastically over relatively short periods of time. In order to acquire some understanding of what the Great Plains climate may become in the future and how human society may prepare for it, we must first comprehend what it was at various times in the past.

CHINOOK CLIMATES

An important element in the climate of the American West is …

Two Authors And A Hero: Neihardt, Sandoz, And Crazy Horse, Helen Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

The western writers John G. Neihardt and Mari Sandoz had much in common, not the least of which was their admiration for Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala Sioux chief during the Indian wars of the last century, whom both considered the "last great Sioux." The chief was a fine tactician and warrior, fighting successfully against General Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud and General Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, but the authors found much more to admire in his personal life. Born on the Great Plains around 1841, he remained a "hostile savage" all his life; nevertheless, …

Toward A History Of Plains Archeology, Waldo R. Wedel

Great Plains Quarterly

First viewed by white men in 1541, the North American Great Plains remained little known and largely misunderstood for nearly three centuries. The newcomers from Europe were impressed by the seemingly endless grasslands, the countless wild cattle, and the picturesque tent-dwelling native people who followed the herds, subsisting on the bison and dragging their possessions about on dogs. Neither these Indians nor the grasslands nor their fauna had any counterparts in the previous experience of the Spaniards. Later Euro-American expeditions, whether seeking gold, converts, or furs, added many details of much interest, but likewise found no wealth of minerals, too …