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Review Of Texas And Northeastern Mexico, 1630-1690 By Juan Bautista Chapa, Kimberly Henke Breuer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This English translation of two seventeenth- century manuscripts concerning the exploration and settlement of northeastern Mexico and Texas is long overdue. The majority of the book is dedicated to Juan Bautista Chapa's Historia del nuevo reino de León de 1650 a 1690; the other translated manuscript is the revised 1690 expedition diary of Governor Alonso de León (the younger). This is the first widely published translation of Chapa's Historia into English. De León's revised diary is published here for the first time in either Spanish or English. Ned Brierley's translations, from the original manuscripts, are eminently readable and accessible.

Great Plains Quarterly, Volume [19], No. [4], Fall 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"THE SILENT ARTILLERY OF TIME": UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE RURAL MIDWEST -Jon Lauck

COMMUNITY DREAMING IN THE RURAL NORTHWEST: THE MONTANA STUDY, 1944-47 -Philip J. Nelson

ROMANTIC WOMEN AND LA LUCHA: DENISE CHAVEZ'S FACE OF AN ANGEL -Francine K. Ramsey Richter

WHITHER COWBOY POETRY? -Jim Hoy

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

FROM THE EDITOR

NOTES AND NEWS

INDEX

Review Of Seeing The White Buffalo By Robert B. Pickering, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For those unfamiliar with the White Buffalo and its relationship with Native American spirituality, this is the book to read. The author, curator of anthropology for the Denver Museum of Natural History, has written an accessible, informative guide that surveys the popular response to Miracle, the female white buffalo calf born in 1994. Pickering covers four areas: first, the personal perspectives of Dave and Val Heider, the Janesville, Minnesota, couple who run a small buffalo herd in which Miracle was born; then the "historical-cultural perspectives of American Indians"; the "spiritual perspectives" of Native and non-Native peoples toward Miracle; and the …

Whither Cowboy Poetry?, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a cultural phenomenon the explosion in popularity of cowboy poetry in the past dozen years has been nothing short of spectacular. Until the first full-scale cowboy poetry gathering at Elko, Nevada, in late January 1985, poetry was arguably the one aspect of cowboy culture that had not been expropriated into American popular culture. Certainly the mental picture of the cowboy himself-big hat, high-heeled boots, silk neckerchief, leather chaps-has long since become an icon that represents the very nation: wear a cowboy hat and you will be taken for an American anywhere in the world. The two essential working skills …

Review Of Constructing The Little House: Gender, Culture, And Laura Ingalls Wilder By Ann Romines, Fred Erisman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Linking her own experiences with those of the fictional and historical Laura Ingalls Wilders, Ann Romines advances several issues she considers central to a fuller understanding of Wilder's well-known "Little House" books. Her five chapters (plus a conclusion) take up the books in chronological order, from Little House in the Big Woods (1932) to the posthumously published The First Four Years (1971), exploring the personal, cultural, and literary processes at work in each.

Review Of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity In The Hollywood Western By Michael Coyne, John G. Cawelti

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

English and French scholars began to write serious critical commentaries on the American Western almost before Americans did. Beginning with Andre Bazin's important essays of the 1950s, the analyses of Jean Mitry and Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, and coming down to Paul Bleton's 1997 collection Les hauts et les bas de l'imaginaire western, the French have helped us realize the artistic importance of the generic Western just as they showed Americans how to appreciate Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, and many other major figures. The English critical tradition on the Western has been equally rich but different in its orientation. Beginning …

Book Notes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Arbitrary Indian: The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990. By Gail K. Sheffield. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Appendices, notes, bibliography, index. viii + 223 pp. $27.50.

Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait. By Karen Holliday Tanner. Foreward by Robert K. DeArment. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Illustrations, maps, charts, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. xxx + 338 pp. $28.95.

McKinney Falls: The Ranch Home of Thomas F. McKinney, Pioneer Texas Entrepreneur. By Margaret Swett Henson. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1999. Illustrations, notes. 48 pp. $7.95 paper.

Guide to Nebraska Authors. By Gerry Cox and Carol MacDaniels. …

From The Editor

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This issue marks my last as editor of the Great Plains Quarterly. As I take up my new duties as Assistant Director of Humanities at the University of Nebraska, I leave the GPQ in the able hands of Chuck Braithwaite. Chuck comes to us from the University of Montana and I hope you'll support him as wholeheartedly as you did me. I want to thank my staff: Lona Dearmont, Daniel Justice, Andrea Radke, Linda Ratcliffe, Gretchen Walker, and George Wolf for their unfailing assistance, patience, and good humor. Thanks also to all of our anonymous peer reviewers who took …

Review Of With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History By Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun And Josephine Waggoner, Bea Medicine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With My Own Eyes represents an historic event for this reviewer, who grew up on Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota where the name Josephine Waggoner was known and remembered. In my view, she represented a local Native intellectual who had a great interest in the history of the reservation. It was known by my father's generation that she had interviewed local headmen (itancan or "chiefs"). She also represents the companionship of Lakota women as they aged. Her literary partnership with Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun was a fortuitous and productive bonding.

It is amazing that this history is finally published. …

Review Of A Thousand Honey Creeks Later: My Life In Music From Basie To Motown And Beyond By Preston Love, Annette L. Murrell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

That's why his book is an intriguing combination of autobiography, sermon, and manifesto. Love's mission is not only to recount his life's many memorable moments, but also to lament the present state of jazz in America (particularly the weak music scene in Omaha, a city that between the 1930s and 1960s boasted of world class musicians and a thriving club scene), and the "whitewashing" of jazz which he considers to be black music. "If my anger seems excessive," he writes, "consider that Elvis Presley became the biggest star in the history of show business and was referred to as the …

The Death Of Edward Mcmurty, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Edward McMurty would have been lost to history if it hadn't been for the way he died and for what it meant in frontier Nebraska. McMurty's bloated body was found on 20 June 1869 in a pond on an island in the Platte River, about five miles from the town of Columbus (Fig. 1). He had been missing for six weeks. His body had been tethered to a large log and weighted down in the water. But distant snowmelts in the Rocky Mountains and a torrential Nebraska downpour on June 19th swelled the Platte, which flowed onto the island, flooding …

Review Of Confessions Of A Maddog: A Romp Through The High-Flying Texas Music And Literary Era Of The Fifties To The Seventies By Jay Dunston Milner, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The title Confessions of a Maddog carries a reference that most readers will not recognize: the "Maddogs" were an assortment of Texas writers and musicians, rowdy "good-old-boys" (and a few girls), who in the 1960s created a social circle-Maddogs, Inc.-complete with official membership cards and a slogan. Milner's book is part autobiography, but mostly a memoir/reminiscence of a particular time and group of people. Billie Lee Brammer, Larry L. King, Bud Shrake, Dan Jenkins, Peter Gent, Gary Cartwright, and Milner himself led the somewhat motley crew. Musician Jerry Jeff Walker was a regular participant. More famous individuals, including Willie Nelson, …

Review Of Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative Of Custer's Defeat By Gregory F. Michno, Robert Larson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Among the attempts to give the Indian version of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Gregory F. Michno's Lakota Noon may be one of the most systematic and creative. The study uses the eyewitness accounts of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho participants, as contradictory and confusing as some of them are, and arranges them chronologically in ten-minute intervals, beginning at three in the afternoon and ending at six. Although the testimony is taken primarily from warriors, the observations of women, older people, and even youngsters like the now-famous Black Elk are not overlooked. Michno also adds a spatial dimension …

Index

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Pages 323-331 (9 pages)

Review Of Researching Western History: Topics In The Twentieth Century, Gerald D. Nash And Richard W. Etulain, Eds., Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Between bookend pieces by Earl Pomeroy and Gene M. Gressley, this anthology of hopes comprises essays on economic history by Gerald D. Nash, environmental history by Thomas R. Cox, urban history by Roger W. Lotchin, political history by Robert W. Cherny, women's history by Glenda Riley, cultural history (mainly literature) by Richard W. Etulain, and mythic history (mainly film) by Fred Erisman. The authors vary in the degree to which they emphasize historiography (what already has been done) or the historical agenda (what they think ought to be done), but the formula is much the same throughout: scan the recent …

Review Of Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal Of The Native American In Film Edited By Peter C. Rollins And John E. O'Connor, Michael J. Hilger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of essays, a number of which first appeared in a special issue of the journal Film and History, represents a variety of perspectives within the basic historical, cultural approach to film. Though the emphasis on the context and content of the films discussed may give pause to some film critics, the essays provide valuable ways to think about the meaning and impact of Hollywood's portrayal of American Indian characters.

One of the first, Ted Jojola's "Absurd Reality II," is notable for the tour of modern and contemporary film and TV its American Indian author offers the reader, …

Review Of Beyond The Frontier: Exploring The Indian Country By Stan Hoig, Suzanne Jones-Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Beyond the Frontier: Exploring the Indian Country, Stan Hoig has compiled a compendium of explorers who traversed present-day Oklahoma from 12 July 1541 to 15 June 1860. Intended for non-scholarly audiences, the book offers just the plain unvarnished facts-culled from a variety of primary and secondary sources-about these adventurers and their probes.

The introduction establishes the geographic limits of Indian Territory, delineates the period under consideration, and discusses the various jurisdictional disputes over this area. For the reader's convenience the author has provided a brief biographic sketch of each explorer.

According to Hoig, by focusing on the minute …

Review Of Satanta: The Life And Death Of A War Chief. By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Benjamin R. Kracht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Set-t' ainte, or "White Bear," whose name was Anglicized into Satanta, was one of the most feared Southern Plains warriors and raiders in the mid-nineteenth century. Robinson's biography of Satanta also remembered as the "Orator of the Plains"-grew out of the author's research into the history of Fort Richardson and the May 1871 killing of seven teamsters outside the nearby town of Jacksboro, Texas. White Bear and Big Tree, the two Kiowa warriors held responsible for the teamsters' deaths, were the first American Indian leaders to be tried in a civil court (State of Texas v. Satanta and Big …

Community Dreaming In The Rural Northwest The Montana Study, 1944-47, Philip J. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On 28 April 1944, three intellectuals, each representing the views of different regions of the country, met in Chicago and laid the basis for an experimental program in adult education and community outreach. Ernest Melby, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of Montana system of higher education, Baker Brownell, a respected Northwestern University philosophy professor and leading advocate of the small community, and David Stevens, head of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation agreed on the shape of a community action project that would later be called the Montana Study. They brought together the concerns and needs of …

Review Of Religion In Modern New Mexico, Ferenc M. Szasz And Richard W. Etulain, Eds., Rev. Christine Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ferenc Szasz and Richard Etulain begin their book by remarking that the history of the American West has mostly been studied and told without reference to the religious lives of the people who lived and settled there, and that this omission necessarily reduces our understanding of the region. To remedy the omission, the editors have gathered a group of fellow professors and graduate students to contribute essays on the especially rich variety of religious faiths and institutions of the people of New Mexico over 450 years. Various authors write of the several strains of Catholicism found here (Northern European, Hispanic, …

Title And Contents- Winter 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 19/ Number 1 / Winter 1999

Contents

The Death Of Edward Mcmurty

Litigation, Mitigation, And The American Indian Religious Freedom Act: The Bear Butte Example

Literacy Practices At The Genoa Industrial Indian School

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of Mexican Americans In The 1990s: Politics, Policies, And Perceptions, Ed. Juan Garcia, Ed A. Muñoz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Mexican Americans in the 1990s, Juan Garda assembles a fine collection of essays addressing the tremendous diversity and fluidity of the Latino/Chicano/Mexican American political experience in contemporary US society. More importantly, the contributors' admirable analyses and interpretations of Latino/Chicano/Mexican American identity, culture, and politics in the thirty-year wake of the Chicano Movement provide a refreshing alternative to those who view the decline of strict cultural nationalism and oppositional politics as detrimental to Chicano self-determination and community empowerment.

Review Of Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation Of The Rural North, 1870-1930 By Hal S. Barron, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mixed Harvest is a good title for a book that documents the complexity of interests involved in twentieth-century farming. A broad swipe at characterization too often substitutes in histories for a more careful analysis in which surface affinities fall apart. Barron uses case studies from selected counties of the battles fought across the East and Midwest over roads, consolidated schools, farmers' grain elevators, and mail-order buying to probe a "second transformation" of American society following the initial spread of industrial capitalism early in the nineteenth century. This "transformation" was marked by centralization of the economy, expansion of state power and …

Review Of Oil, Wheat, And Wobblies: The Industrial Workers Of The World In Oklahoma, 1905-1930 By Nigel Anthony Sellars, Salvatore Salerno

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The strength of Sellars's work is that it draws attention to the activities of the IWW at a local level during the least understood period of its history. This is particularly true of the book's focus on the A WOo A pioneer in the development of some of the IWW's most important strategies during this period, the A WO has received little previous attention. While Sellars illuminates the local, his work runs into trouble in its treatment of larger struggles within the IWW, the relative importance of the IWW's industrial unions, and the movement's culture. For example, although the book …

Review Of Proclaiming The Gospel To The Indians And The Metis: The Missionary Oblates Of Mary I Mmaculate In Western Canada, 1845-1945 By Raymond ]. A. Huel, Gerhard J. Ens

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate were the dominant Catholic clergy in western Canada and as such played an important role in the colonization of the Great Plains. Proclaiming the Gospel to the Indians and the Metis, the third volume in the Western Oblate History Project, has as its focus the Oblates' missionary work in Canada's prairie provinces from 1845 to 1945.

Raymond Huel begins his study by delineating the ideological values and goals that motivated the Oblate mission in Canada, and then provides a useful analysis of the order's various mission initiatives. During their early years in western Canada …

Review Of Autobiography Of Red Cloud: War Leader Of The Oglalas Edited By R. Eli Paul, H. David Brumble

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is wonderful that as-told-to autobiographical narratives by pre-literate American Indians continue to appear. At one end of the editorial scale is Janet Wall Hendricks' edition of To Drink of Death: The Narrative of a Shuar Warrior (1993), where the editor/amanuensis has taken great care to present this warrior's life stories in something very like the way he told them. Autobiography of Red Cloud is close to the scale's other end. In the 1890s Red Cloud told his stories to an old friend named Sam Deon; unbeknownst to Red Cloud, Deon retailed these stories daily to the Pine Ridge postmaster …

Review Of Loyal Till Death: Indians And The North-West Rebellion By Blair Stonechild And Bill Waiser, Christopher Hannibal-Paci

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Loyal till Death, Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser retell the North-West Rebellion from the Indian perspective, an ambitious task not without precedent. Earlier revisions of the events of 1885, such as Rudy Weibe's novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1976) and Walter Hildebrandt's book of poetry Sightings (1991), deconstruct the historical narrative, so that "from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it," as Linda Hutcheon notes in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), "we now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and …

Review Of The Chiricahua Apache Prisoners Of War: Fort Sill 1894-1914 By John Anthony T Urcheneske Jr., William T. Hagan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is the first full-length treatment of the Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war, whose experience is unparalleled in Native American history. Many Indians underwent imprisonment, but no group for anything like the Chiricahuas' twenty-seven years as official prisoners of war. It took them from a reservation in Arizona to Fort Marion in Florida, from there to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, then on to Fort Sill in Oklahoma; finally most were relocated to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico while others remained in Oklahoma.

Each of these removals is discussed in detail and, since choices had to be made, there …

Review Of The Nebraska Indian Wars Reader, 1865-1877 Edited By R. Eli Paul, James O. Gump

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Between 1854 and 1890, the military frontier in western Nebraska witnessed major events, including Harney's victory over the Sioux at Ash Hollow in 1855, the Republican River Expedition of 1869, the Battle of Massacre Canyon in 1873, skirmishes in the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, and the killing of Crazy Horse in 1877. These years also featured the activities of such famous Lakota leaders as Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Crazy Horse, the US Fifth Cavalry headquartered at Fort McPherson, as well as the "Dandy Fifth's" leading personalities, including General Eugene Carr, "Buffalo Bill" Cody (chief of scouts), and Major …

Review Of Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes Of Absence And Presence By Gerald Vizenor, Diane Glancy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is hard to review Gerald Vizenor, especially when writing something of your own, because he zooms into the creative imagination and his words transpot whatever it is you're writing.

In other words, his words have a fracturing factor which makes a magic of language. Vizenor is generative. He forms and splices, even in the critical essays of Fugitive Poses.

Vizenor's writing releases words. Those usually kept in their places in the dictionary and the dominant way of thought, but which are alive, words still on the building-meaning block and wished to be loosed to roam again. This is …