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Notes And News- Summer 2009

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

DISSERTATION AWARD IN WOMEN'S HISTORY

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Title And Contents- Summer 2009

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Book Notes- Spring 2009

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Title And Contents- Spring 2009

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Review Of Out Of The Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, And Encounters With The Land. By Rinda West, Tom Lynch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The postmodern era of critical theory has not been kind to Carl Jung. As Rinda West suggests, many postmodern critics denigrated Jung's notions of the collective unconscious and of archetypes as "essentialist and Eurocentric." Drawing on recent ideas in ecopsychology and neurobiology, however, West seeks to rehabilitate Jung for the post-postmodern era. She proposes that, based on current understandings in such fields as the biology of cognition, these ideas of Jung serve "as a way of acknowledging the power of our biological history and of talking about powerful tendencies to respond in certain situations common in human life."

Such a …

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 (through 2013)

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 …

Review Of Keepers Of The Record: The History Of The Hudson's Bay Company Archives. By Deidre Simmons, Scott Stephen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Given the remarkable character of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives, it is a little hard to believe that this is the first comprehensive study of their history. It was worth the wait, though, as Simmons deftly weaves more than three centuries of people and paper into a narrative as captivating as the records themselves. As Simmons observes in her introduction, this book is much more than just the history of the HBCA as an institution: it is both a history of the HBC's record-keeping (and record-keepers) from its earliest days and a case study in British and Canadian archival history. …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 Myth Of The Hanging Tree: Stories Of Crime And Punishment In Territorial New Mexico By Robert J. Torrez, Mark A. Allan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

New Mexico is a state where regions and cultures collide. Partly situated in the western Great Plains, the lynchings and legal executions that have taken place in the former territory and current state illustrate tensions between the cultures residing therein. Robert J. Torrez, former New Mexico State Historian, ably captures the influence of the Anglos' "Judge Lynch" in the region formerly inhabited by Native Americans and later settled first by the Spanish and then the Anglo-Americans.

In the opening third of the book, Torrez provides an overview of hangings and capital punishment in the area. Concentrating on the territorial days, …

Review Of Russell Lee Photographs; Images From The Russell Lee Photograph Collection At The Center For American History. By Russell Lee, Connie Todd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Russell Lee, more than any of his compadres in the Farm Security Administration (FSA), created the visual history and thus our collective memory of the Great Depression; and it is fitting that the University of Texas Press in its "Focus on American History Series" has published a long-overdue book of Lee's images from the Russell Lee photography collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for American History, particularly since the Art Department at UT hired Lee in the mid-1960s to be its first professor of photography.

The late John Szarkowski, legendary director of photography at the Museum of …

Review Of One Step Over The Line: Toward A History Of Women In The North American Wests. Edited By Elizabeth Jameson And Sheila Mcmanus, Renee M. Laegreid

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ever since western women's history emerged as a distinct field of study in the 1980s, collaborative efforts have produced some of the best and most innovative works in the discipline. One Step over the Line continues this fine tradition. Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus's anthology, based on scholarship presented at the 2002 "Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women's History" conference, explores the complex role the nation-state plays in the lives of women on both sides of the politically real, physically invisible, yet historically porous u.S.-Canadian boarder. With essays from a wide array of scholars, the volume's exploration of the …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 The Death Of Raymond Yellow Thunder And Other True Stories From The Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns By Stew Magnuson, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Journalists of late have often been at the vanguard of recent history, using their particular research methodology, which is more comfortable with the elusive nature of the near past, to beat historians to the punch. This has been particularly true of American Indian history .. Part-time journalist Peter Matthiessen was among the first to tackle the history of tumult on Pine Ridge Reservation during the 1970s, including the Dick Wilson presidency, the siege of Wounded Knee, and the Leonard Peltier trials. Journalist-turned-literary-scholar Robert Allen Warrior and journalist Paul Chaat Smith were quick to examine the Red Power era more broadly, …

Review Of William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. By Robert E. Bonner, Jack R. Preston

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert Bonner's book provides wonderful insight into Cody's promotional activities outside of Madison Square Garden. The tale of his sponsorship of the Shoshone irrigation projects and the formation of the town of Cody aptly illustrates that even in the business world William Cody was still the showman promoter.

The book is very well documented, based on an abundance of correspondence found in the files of the participants of the Shoshone project. It tells how Cody, always the man in charge, badgered, cajoled, and saw things through rose-colored glasses. He used his power and "vision" on his friends and business associates …

Review Of Willie Wells: "Ei Diablo" Of The Negro Leagues, By Bob Luke, Leslie Heaphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Luke introduces readers to Willie Wells the man as well as Willie Wells the ball player. Wells's life is placed in the larger context of where he came from in Texas as well as what was happening in America during and after his baseball career ended. To tell his story Luke relies on primary sources as much as possible. Interviews and Wells's own letters are nicely woven throughout the text, giving readers an immediate feel for Wells as a person.

After presenting Wells the player and family man, Luke offers a discussion of the long road to the Hall …

Review Of How Cities Won The West: Four Centuries Of Urban Change In Western North America. By Carl Abbott, Timothy Mahoney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This impressive survey of western urban history demonstrates How Cities Won the West. Its original conceptualization and persuasive argument are supported by an impressive amount of evidence. It should be considered as the "last stand" among urban historians who still feel the need to argue for the central role of urbanization in the development of the West.

Carl Abbott demonstrates that in the nineteenth century several kinds of towns and cities-raw outposts, gateways, industrial towns, irrigation towns (seeking to be the center of an "Inland Empire"), and tourist centers-competed for central roles that they believed would tip the balance of …

Review Of To Live's To Fly: The Ballad Of The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt. By John Kruth A Deeper Blue: The Life And Music Of Townes Van Zandt By Robert Earl Hardy, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Townes Van Zandt was a founding member of the modern Texas singer-songwriter tradition and influenced or played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Norah Jones. His spare, evocative lyrics, coupled with his beautiful, articulate guitar playing, developed a particularly loyal and eclectic fan base. His songs have been covered most famously by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Emmylou Harris, but also by a host of great and lesser-known performers. He was a major influence on the "Outlaw" Country movement.

Van Zandt wrestled with inner demons. His eccentricities, mental illness, and the resulting heavy substance abuse, combined with often poorly produced …

Review Of The American Far West In The Twentieth Century. By Earl Pomeroy., Carl Abbott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After publishing his path breaking study The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada in 1965, Earl Pomeroy embarked on the even larger task of writing a history of the American West in the twentieth century. The present volume is the result, deeply researched by Pomeroy over four decades and completed after his death in 2005 by his student and friend Richard Etulain.

The book is a fascinating mix of carefully presented details and wide-ranging topical coverage. Pomeroy expanded his "Pacific Slope" vision to include Alaska, Hawaii, the rest of the Rocky Mountain states, and …

Review Of Give Me Eighty Men: Women And The Myth Of The Fetterman Fight By Shannon D. Smith, Ronald Schultz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Known as the Battle of a Hundred Slain to the Lakota and the Fetterman Massacre to most other Americans, the 1866 battle has been as mythic as the Battle of the Little Big Horn that followed it by a decade. The story is a simple one: Captain William Judd Fetterman viewed his superior, Colonel Henry B. Carrington, as a overcautious coward in dealing with Indian affairs. Seeing an opportunity to defeat a large gtoup of Lakota warriors in northern Wyoming territory, Fetterman disobeyed his orders and attacked what he thought was a small party of Lakotas in the Peno Valley. …

Review Of Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother's Life In Politics. By Beth Boosalis Davis, Jan P. Vermeer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The title of Beth Davis's final chapter in this biography of her mother encapsulates the book's main message: "Life After Is Politics" for Helen Boosalis, a former mayor of Lincoln, Nebraska. Boosalis's life story is ostensibly the story of her political life. Davis, a past local government official herself, strives to describe not just the mayor's personal side or her political work but to demonstrate the intertwining of the two.

Underpinning the story is extensive research into newspaper files from the period, buttressed by scrapbooks, clippings, and memorabilia that her family, chiefly her father, collected over the years. Interviews with …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Review Of Going West!: Quilts And Community By Roderick Kiracofe And Sandi Fox, Janneken Smucker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Located at the convergence of three major overland trails, Nebraska became the new home to many settlers and the quilts they carried westward in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generations later, some of these settlers' descendants gifted surviving quilts to local historical societies and museums. Drawing on information collected as part of the Nebraska State Quilt Guild's "Quilt Preservation Project," independent curator Sandi Fox researched the quilts tucked away in these cultural institutions. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery hosted the resulting exhibit, "Going West: Quilts and Community," from October 2007 through January 2008. The exhibit's catalog, Going …

Review Of Native America, Discovered And Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, And Manifest Destiny. By Robert J. Miller, Jenry Morsman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In recent decades, scholars have reshaped our understanding of conquest, and as a result the idea of conquest is an unsettling one. Robert J. Miller's original and important work should launch a similar transformation for the idea of discovery. Associate Professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School and Chief Justice, Court of Appeals, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde Community of Oregon, Miller persuasively argues that the principle of international law known as the Doctrine of Discovery provided the legal rationale and framework for the westward expansion of the United States. It, too, he argues, accounts for …

Review Of Historic Native Peoples Of Texas By William C. Foster, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Texas has traditionally been viewed as an expansive landscape occupied by a relatively small and widely scattered Indigenous population. Modern studies by Todd Smith, Robert Ricklis, Nancy Hickerson, Mariah Wade, MartIn Salinas, and Morris Foster have questioned this simplistic view by focusing upon the larger stories of Caddo, Wichita, Jumano, Tonkawa, Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Comanche and other groups who occupied parts of Texas for a long period of time. Now William Foster attempts to synthesize the broader picture for all Indigenous peoples who lived within the state boundaries between 1528 and 1728. This long period, beginning with Narvaez's beleaguered expedition landing …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Notes And News- Winter 2009

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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Review Of Speak Like Singing: Classics Of Native American Literature. By Kenneth Lincoln, James Ruppert

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kenneth Lincoln's most recent book follows his others in style and content. Here he is concerned with outlining the fusions of contemporary Native American literature and oral tradition. Starting with sections on song, poetry, and lyric, he suggests that he will steer a course between the extremes of imperialism and essentialism. Some readers will appreciate his imaginative, suggestive, free-flowing discussion of oral and literary impulses from Beowulf to the poetry of Sherwin Bitsui. The central chapters focus on what he calls "crossing texts" by some of the best-known Native writers, and the idea of fusion is his guiding principle. Yet …

Changing Perceptions Of Homesteading As A Policy Of Public Domain Disposal, Richard Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The inspiring story of homesteaders claiming free land and realizing their dreams became one of the enduring narratives of American history. But scholars who have studied homesteading have often been much more ambivalent, even harshly negative, about how successful it was in practice. While the public often views our history differently from scholars, in this case the disparity appears both substantial and persistent. Perhaps it is time to revisit homesteading and reassess whether homesteading really was a good idea or not.

Certainly homesteading once powerfully fired the American imagination. The promise of free land was such a startling idea that …