Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of El Llano Estacada: Exploration And Imagination On The High Plains Of Texas And New Mexico, 1536-1860 By John Miller Morris, Valerie M. Mendoza

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

El Llano Estacado is located on the High Plains of eastern New Mexico and western Texas covering over 50,000 square miles of land, and may be, according to Morris, the "largest isolated non-mountainous area in North America." It is the creation of this landscape in the European mind that Morris proposes to study. In his words, "the landscape itself is the hero" of the story.

In this respect Morris succeeds. Through his use of Spanish and American exploration texts (letters, journals, official reports, reminiscences), he conveys the mental representations of this region. In addition to textual analysis, he also uses …

Review Of Tejano Legacy: Rancheros And Settlers In South Texas, 1734-1900 By Armando Alonzo, Arnoldo De Leon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Tejano Legacy depicts Mexican Americans in Texas-the subjects of the inquiry-as historical actors engaged in a process of adjustment to wrest a living from a rough physical setting and a constantly changing social environment. Their experience in the Texas Borderlands resembled that of other settlers in the trans-Mississippi West who confronted similar forces.

The author wishes to revise and update numerous long-standing interpretations of Texas-Mexican life in the Lower Valley of Texas (which includes those counties in deep South Texas that parallel the Rio Grande). He posits that Tejano history in the region begins with the first colonies founded during …

Review Of Many Danes, Some Norwegians: Karen Miller's Diary, 1894 Edited By John W. Nielsen, Ann Marie Legreid

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Letters, diaries, and other amateur writings provide an important prospect on the immigrant experience in America. Literary expressions of this kind are valuable; while mundane and archaic-sounding, they inform us of the lives of immigrants, their perceptions, their everyday encounters with a larger world. Many Danes, Some Norwegians is the diary of Karen Miller (Moller), a Danish immigrant who wrote from her home at Elko, Scott County, rural Minnesota, in 1894, a year before her death. The original manuscript was translated by Olaf M. Norlie in 1952, then mimeographed and bound. The current version was translated by Ninna Engskow using …

The "In Between" Landscapes Of Transformation In Ted Kooser's Weather Central, Mary Lou K. Stillwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Etude," which launches Weather Central, Ted Kooser's most recent full-length collection of poems, is in many ways typical of the poet's work. The poem is what it professes to be: an etude, a study, a preview of all the poems that are to follow. It also defines the major poetic devices or characteristics that will be important throughout the 1994 volume: direct, plain-spoken language; use of interior and exterior landscape{s); and explicit metaphor that particularizes the poet's life.

Many of us who make our home on the plains recognize the Great Blue Heron in the cattails, the bubbles along the …

A Topographic Map Of Words Parables Of Cartography In William Least Heat,Moon's Prairyerth, O. Alan Weltzien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In "Thought and Landscape," geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes an essential double perspective required for any comprehensive understanding of rural landscape. A geographer studies landscape "from 'above,'" for example, but "The side view ... is personal, moral, and aesthetic. A person is in the landscape ... from a particular spot and not from an abstract point in space. If the essential character of landscape is that it combines these two views (objective and subjective), it is clear that the combination can take place only in the mind's eye. Landscape appears to us through an effort of the imagination .... It is …

Review Of Harvesting The High Plains: John Kriss And The Business Of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950 By Craig Miner, David B. Danbom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Craig Miner uses the life and career of Cobly, Kansas-based megafarmer John Kriss to make two points. He argues first that, far from being the forbidding desert suggested by the Dust Bowl experience, the High Plains is an area where productive dry-farming of wheat can be undertaken profitably by intelligent and alert producers. And second, he contends that farming is a business to which planning, efficiency, and economies of scale can and should be applied, regardless of romantic notions about the mythic "family farm."

Kriss is the right sort of farmer to illustrate these points. Starting but as a farm …

Review Of Capturing Women: The Manipulation Of Cultural Imagery In Canada's Prairie West By Sarah Carter, Catherine Cavanaugh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Capturing Women, an extended essay examining the role of Indian captivity narratives in racializing prairie society, is a welcome addition to prairie history, which has been particularly resistant to gender and race analysis. In this small volume Sarah Carter takes up both of these subjects in the context of nineteenth-century imperialism. Beginning with a close reading of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delany, she shows how captivity narrative was used to reestablish white male authority in the aftermath of what has become known as the Second …

Review Of Fugitives From Justice: The Notebook Of Texas Ranger Sergeant James B. Gillette By James B. Gillette, Mary Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1878 the Texas Adjutant General issued each Texas Ranger a book listing all known fugitives from justice to assist in apprehending criminals. The book served as a blanket arrest warrant, listing more than 4,000 fugitives who were wanted in Texas for crimes such as murder, rape, serious assaults, and horse thefts. Organized by county, the list gave the name, crime, date of indictment, and occasionally the physical description of each fugitive. While on the move, Texas lawmen carried the book with them as a quick and easy reference tool whenever they located a suspected criminal.

Fugitives from Justice is …

Essay On Place The Map As Big As The World, Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I have spent a lot of time looking at Kansas maps. Once, I memorized the shapes and names of all lOS counties. On another map, I drew in red magic marker over each highway after I had traveled it, hoping, someday, to have traveled every mile in this 200-by-400-mile rectangle. A huge old school map of Kansas, published by A. J. Nystrom & Co., Chicago, hangs in my east study windows instead of curtains or shades. On sunny mornings, it glows, and since its color comes from elevation- the "3,000 to 4,000 Feet" in western Kansas, to the "Under 1,000 …

Review Of The Journals Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition, Volume 11: The J Oumals Of Joseph Whitehouse, May 14, 1804-April2, 1806 Edited By Gary E. Moulton, Kerry R. Oman, Fred R. Gowens

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This eleventh volume in the series of the Louis and Clark Expedition continues Gary Moulton's masterful work. Here the story of the journey is seen through the eyes of one of the enlisted men, Joseph Whitehouse, whose journal is the only surviving record of a. private on the expedition. In the introduction, Moulton briefly covers Whitehouse's life before and after the expedition, although there is little known of him during these times. He was one of the men who joined Lewis at Kaskasia, from Captain Russell Bissell's company of the First Infantry. The volume itself contains two versions of Whitehouse's …

Review Of An Army Of Women: Gender And Politics In Gilded Age Kansas By Michael Lewis Goldberg, Carmen Heider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michael Goldberg, a cultural historian of politics, undertakes a valuable study of the dynamic relationship between politics and gender. His argument is, simply, that to fully understand the actors and organizations in Gilded Age Kansas politics, we must "integrate gender into their story." This "cast of political players" includes the Farmer's Alliance, the Woman Movement, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Prohibitionists, and activist leaders such as Annie Diggs and Mary Lease, all of whom are situated within religious, economic, racial, and ethnic contexts. To explore the gendered relationships between and among these groups and individuals, Goldberg uses organizational records, songs, and a …

Title And Contents- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 19/ Number 2 / Spring 1999

Contents

Introduction: Imagining Literary Landscapes

History And Nature: Representations Of The Great Plains In The Work Of Sharon Butala And Wallace Stegner

The "In-Between": Landscapes Of Transformation In Ted Kooser's Weather Central

A Topographic Map Of Words: Parables Of Cartography In William Least Heat-Moon's Prairyerth

Essay On Place: The Map As Big As The World

Review Essay: Crime And Responsibility

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes And News

Review Of Encyclopedia Of The American West By Charles Phillips And Alan Axelrod, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The goal of encyclopedias is to make knowledge readily and objectively available to a wide audience. Generally massive undertakings requiring a number of years to complete, they succeed or fail depending not only on accuracy but on their flexibility as reference works to interest a wide range of audiences, both as stopping or starting points for research. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, no strangers to undertaking large projects such as biographical dictionaries, have compiled an excellent Encyclopedia of the American West.

Joining Howard W. Lamar's masterful Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West (1977), now available in a revised edition …

Review Of Frontiers Of Historical Imagination: Narrating The European Conquest Of Native America, 1890-1990 By Kerwin Lee Klein, Alex Long

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Frontiers of Historical Imagination, Kerwin Klein traces the changes in the historical discourse of the European conquest of Native America. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study synthesizes twentieth-century historiography, encompassing debates in history, anthropology, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. While Frederick Jackson Turner's writings serve as organizing texts for Klein's account, the changing interpretations and narratives of the American frontier provide the thematic focus.

Klein arranges his study into four books, each in turn, organized around a trope-a la Hayden White's Metahistory: metaphor ("The Language of History")' metonym ("From Spirit to System"), synecdoche ("Time Immemorial"), and …

Review Of Policing The Elephant: Crime, Punishment, And Social Behavior On The Overland Trail By John Phillip Reid, Lorna R. Mclean

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Policing the Elephant is a companion volume to John Reid's Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (1980). Through an incisive analysis of the diaries, journals, and letters of emigrants crossing from Missouri or Iowa to Oregon or California, Reid examines how overland travellers experienced and responded to anti-social actions and theii' punishment. Along the trail, emigrants watched for the elephant. "To see the elephant," Reid explains, "meant undergoing hardships, to learn the realities of a situation firsthand, or to encounter the unbelievable."

Reid skillfully adapts the symbol of the elephant to explore what average …

Review Of The Powder River Expedition Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, R. Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Richard 1. Dodge served in the United States Army from 1848 to 1891. By the time of the 1876 Powder River Expedition, one of several military responses to the crushing defeat suffered at the Little Big Horn, Dodge had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. At the behest of Brig. Gen. George Crook he accepted the command of the infantry contingent of this winter campaign against SiouxCheyenne foes.

The campaign met with some success, and many historians consider it the beginning of the end of the Great Sioux War. On 25 November 1876, a Cheyenne village of Chief Dull Knife …

Review Of Many Wests: Place, Culture, And Regional Identity Edited By David M. Wrobel And Michael C. Steiner, Diane D. Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anyone interested in any place west of the Mississippi will find some part of Many Wests valuable. Editors David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner have collected essays that, in content and style, confirm the variety in the over-used term the West. Divided into four sections, the essays concern "Environment and Economy," "Aesthetic Wests," "Race and Ethnicity," and "Extended Wests"-Alaska, Hawaii, and British Columbia. They range from historical surveys to engaging personal accounts like Bret Wallach's essay focusing on typical Oklahoma houses and the people who inhabit them. Some scholars concentrate on a unique aspect of a region. Ann Hyde …

Review Of Cowboy Fiddler In Bob Wills' Band By Frankie Mcwhorter, John Schmitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Reading this book, as written in Frankie McWhorter's own words, is like being out on the West Texas Plains, sitting around the campfire listening to a veteran cowboy tell his stories. It has an authentic bunkhouse feeling, deservedly so coming from a man who has spent almost fifty years as a working cowboy.

The book is written in two-part form. The first half deals with McWhorter's musical background and his time in the Bob Wills band. The latter half recounts McWhorter's experiences as a working cowboy. McWhorter's family lived in the Texas Panhandle town of Plaska, about twenty-five miles from …

History And Nature Representations Of The Great Plains In The Work Of Sharon Butala And Wallace Stegner, Walter Isle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When he was five, Wallace Stegner's family moved to a small town and to a homestead on the Great Plains, in the extreme southwestern corner of Saskatchewan just above the Montana border, where they lived for six years before drought and crop failures forced them to move on. Sharon Butala moved to a ranch and farm in the same short-grass prairie country in 1976 when she was thirty-six years old and newly married to Peter Butala, a rancher native to the place. Both Stegner and Butala went on to write about this land, and their representations manifest very different attitudes …

Notes And News- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

In Memoriam

Indian Prose Award

Gpq's Home In Cyberspace

Communities Through Photographs

Montana Manuscript Prize

Life On The Great Plains

Cfp: Into The Next Millennium

Nebraska Research Grant

Great Plains Music, Dance, And ...Bison!

Introduction Imagining Literary Landscapes, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In compiling this issue of Great Plains Quarterly, Charlene Porsild responds to issues at the heart of the rising "new regionalism." One premise of the renewed interest in regionalism is that learning to navigate the virtual world of cyberspace means needing to know place in the actual world, and understanding mapping means learning how to orient oneself, how to read a landscape, and how to move from one place to another. The four essays presented here offer complementary responses to that challenge.

One's stance in time undergirds one's relation to place, as Walter Isle demonstrates in "History and Nature: …

Review Of Women Of Oklahoma, 1890-1920 By Linda Williams Reese, Patricia Loughlin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Women of Oklahoma, Linda Williams Reese traces the experiences of African American, Native American, and white women from the creation of Oklahoma Territory in 1890 to the decade following statehood. Using a wealth of source material including diaries, letters, newspaper articles, oral histories, and census materials, Reese reconstructs the lives of Oklahoma women-offering a record of the past often overlooked in Oklahoma history prior to this important work.

Review Of Cowboy Justice: Tale Of A Texas Lawman By Jim Gober, Mark R. Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1980, James Gober inherited a discolored and aged bundle of papers that had once belonged to his grandfather, Jim RansIer Gober. To his surprise, he found they contained a rough, unedited autobiographical account of his grandfather's life as a Great Plains cowboy, lawman, detective, gambler, and saloon- keeper. Although Jim Gober was a relatively unknown Great Plains figure, his grandson believed his life story contributed significantly to the history of this region; with the assistance of B. Byron Price, a historian and executive director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, he edited and organized the narrative for publication.

Review Of Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind The Legend By John E. Miller, Ann Romines

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since Laura Ingalls Wilder's fictionalized biography, as the Little House series, has become one of the long-running hits of US popular culture, it is surprising for most readers to realize that the actual woman is a little-known figure. Reticent, determined, and deeply committed to propriety, Wilder had many friends in the small town where she lived for the last fifty-some years of her life, but few intimates beyond her husband and one daughter. Thus John E. Miller's scrupulous new biography of Wilder is a valuable and absorbing book. Miller's aim was to write "a biography describing and explaining the lived …

Litigation, Mitigation, And The American Indian Religious Freedom Act The Bear Butte Example, Kari Forbes-Boyte

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"S acred mountains, of whatever culture, become merchandise in the dark age that is enveloping the planet. The voices of the spirits are falling silent beneath the roar of the machines that bleed the land and poison the waters and the air. A country, however powerful at the moment, that does not honor and preserve its sacred places is not fit for survival." So states a Lakota man when asked to describe the importance of sacred places to his culture. Sacred places, recognized by indigenous peoples worldwide, are highly esteemed by particular individuals or groups and are perceived to be …

Review Of Too Good A Town" : William Allen White. Community. And The Emerging Rhetoric Of Middle America By Edward Gale Agran, Diane Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In "Too Good a Town" Edward Gale Agran demonstrates William Allen White's influence on Americans' view of themselves, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the "sage of Emporia" was a nationally recognized cultural arbiter. A reader interested in the history of community or middle-class culture, particularly in the Middle West, would find this study useful. but it is of less value to someone more interested in the Great Plains. Occasionally Agran focuses on White's hometown, Emporia, Kansas, as a distinct geographical location, but his primary purpose is to demonstrate White's embodiment of the town as a broader …

Review Of Changing Ones: Third And Fourth Genders In Native North America By Will Roscoe, Sue-Ellen Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the 212 text pages of Changing Ones, Roscoe demonstrates his storytelling abilities as he reweaves previously published papers with a canonical polemic that deeply engages his own and others' writings about purported Native American sexuality, sex, and gender definitions and practices. In presenting his analysis of select writings on "berdache," he generously acknowledges those who have become his adversaries by painstakingly replaying those authors' points of view against his own interpretations. For example, in the field of sexuality studies, Roscoe's disagreement with Ram6n Gutierrez ("Must We Deracinate Indians to Find Gay Roots?" Out/Look [Winter 1989] ) and Richard Trexler …

Review Of Blessing For A Long Time: The Sacred Pole Of The Omaha Tribe By Robin Ridington And Dennis Hastings, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Omahas occupied a strategic position on the Missouri River and served as important middle men in the rapidly expanding fur trade. By mid-century, however, epidemics and white incursions having devastated their way of life, they were confined to a small reservation in northeastern Nebraska. As with other tribes, their culture came under continuous assault by missionaries, agents, and reformers who wished to accelerate their assimilation into mainstream American society.

In the face of these unwelcome changes, tribal elder Yellow Smoke worried that he would not be able to maintain his role as Keeper …

Notes And News- Winter 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Calling All Fort Totten Boarding School Alumni

Prairie Anthologists Seek Essays

Archive Of Native American Writers

Gpq Author Wins Award

Oklahoma Visiting Scholars Program

"The Silent Artillery Of Time" Understanding Social Change In The Rural Midwest, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The great historian of republicanism, J. G. A. Pocock, noted that "[f]rom Jefferson to Frederick Jackson Turner and beyond, it was commonplace that sooner or later the frontier would be closed, the land filled, and the corruptions of history-urbanization, finance capital, 'the cross of gold,' 'the military-industrial complex' -would overtake America. Here are the origins of American historical pessimism." The American frontier has long since closed, the agrarian order has long-since passed away, and the pessimism has mushroomed into a "palpable despair and cynicism and violence," "dark signs of the times," according to the philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain. The disappearance …