Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Framing The Tourist Gaze Railway Journeys Across Nebraska, 1866-1906, Jean P. Retzinger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As the last of the Conestoga wagons crossed the Nebraska plains along the worn and rutted Oregon Trail, the tracks of the Union Pacific were already being laid. Telegraph wires had crossed the continent by 1861; the railroad would follow within the decade. Touted as the latest technology to transform space and time, the railroad was to "bind all portions of our country in one homogeneous organism of political, military, social, commercial and Christian nationality and power."² Trains from the East transported consumer goods and consumers alike to the western territories, traversing in a single hour what once had …

Review Of Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays On Anglo, American Indian, & Chicano Literature By Robert Franklin Gish, Ricardo L. Garcia

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Good writing transcends boundaries, says Robert Franklin Gish in this cross-cultural inquiry into Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano literature. Beyond Bounds grew out of Gish's willingness to risk "the disdain of advocating ... 'Buffalo Chip Lit'" to test the notion that "no one ethnicity, no one group ... offers the ultimate 'truth' of tourism, seen most metaphorically as the 'tourism' of mortality."

Part One, "Anglo Visitors," examines the early twentieth-century writings of Charles Lummis, Erna Ferguson, Harvey Ferguson, and Witter Bynner, visitors to New Mexico who were unabashed supporters of Anglo conquest. Yet they recognized they were newcomers to an …

Review Of The Culture Of Wilderness: Agriculture As Colonization In The American West By Frieda Knobloch, Emily Greenwald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this intriguing synthesis, Frieda Knobloch brings a new set of ideas to existing scholarship on agriculture and the environmental history of the American West. She traces the process of "nature becoming culture," the ways in which naturally existing resources (land, animals, plants, and trees) were transformed into agriculturally-managed commodities, thereby serving the twin imperatives of colonization and agriculture. Knobloch argues that colonization and agriculture not only sprang from the same roots in the English language, but have also operated hand-in-hand to dispossess indigenous plants, animals, and peoples. In Knobloch's formulation, neither can exist apart from the other-essentially, agriculture is …

Review Of The Caddos, The Wichitas, And The United States, 1846-1901 By F. Todd Smith, Elizabeth A.H. John

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

An introductory assertion that neither the Caddo nor the Wichita had to endure a particularly traumatic relocation experience will startle any reader who has an inkling of the history of those tribes. Ultimately, it must perplex anyone who perseveres through the ensuing chronicle of repeated dispossession and decimation under the aegis of the governments of Texas and the United States. The first chapter presents further dubious analysis, sometimes irrelevant to the sources cited, in a quixotic attempt to trace both tribes from the '1540s to 1846 in sixteen pages.

Happily, the author hits his stride in chapter two, thenceforth relying …

Review Of "And Prairie Dogs Weren't Kosher": Jewish Women In The Upper Midwest Since 1855 By Linda Mack Schloff, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Spanning the experiences of early immigrants to those of contemporary women, Linda Mack Schloff's concise yet comprehensive history of the contributions of Jewish women in the upper Midwest is an important addition to the region's ethnic literature. The author successfully integrates disparate information from several time periods, enabling the reader to follow a progression of adaptations and social changes. The resulting mosaic displays general trends but also depicts the ways in which individual women worked out distinct solutions to their circumstances. The study relies heavily on first-person accounts or "voices" of both women and men. Excellent photographs enhance and reinforce …

Review Of The True Spirit And Original Intent Of Treaty 7 By Treaty 7 Elders And Tribal Council With Walter Hildebrandt, Sarah Carter, And Dorothy First Rider, David Reed Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The eleven numbered treaties between representatives of the Crown on behalf of the Dominion of Canada and First Nations resident within specific regions of central and western Canada were negotiated from 1850 to 1929. Treaty 7, negotiated 19 to 22 September 1877 at Blackfoot Crossing, included the Bloods, Peigans, and Siksika, three of the divisions of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Stoney (all southern Stoney except the Bighorn Band), and the Tsuu T'ina (Sarcee) and encompassed the region of southern Alberta.

This volume represents a synthesis of information gathered by the Treaty 7 Project, a special collaborative research endeavor of the …

Review Of Standing In The Light: A Lakota Way Of Seeing By Severt Young Bear And R. D. Theisz, Kelly J. Morgan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dance, song, and spiritual renewal are at the heart of traditional Lakota life in contemporary America. Severt Young Bear's life experiences, as told in this collaborative work resulting from Young Bear and R. D. Theisz's close relationship developed over three decades, are a continuation of Lakota autobiographical and biographical literature. Theisz's fluency in Lakota language, his broad knowledge of traditional and contemporary Lakota life, as well as his adoption by a Lakota family, lend to his credibility in co-authoring the text. His friendship with Young Bear centered on their common interests in music and dance, and each's particular talents led …

Review Of Legacy: New Perspectives On The Battle Of The Little Bighorn Edited By Charles E. Rankin, Gregory J. Urwin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For more than twenty years, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument has generated more controversy than any other unit administered by the National Park Service. Amateur historians belonging to the Little Big Horn Associates-angry because their overpriced, vanity press books were not sold in the park bookstore-had the staff investigated for alleged anti-Custer bias. At the same time, increasingly belligerent Native American activists protested that the site of their ancestors' greatest victory was being run as a shrine to the frontier military.

In 1988, Russell Means and other militants from the American Indian Movement stormed onto the battlefield and desecrated …

Feature Folio Images Of Great Plains Train Travel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Images of Great Plains Train Travel (8 pages)

Financing The Palliser Triangle, 1908-1913, Warren M. Elofson, John Feldberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A decade ago, David C. Jones compellingly described the immense ecological and human tragedy that occurred in the southern, semiarid districts of Alberta and Saskatchewan in the late 1910s and early 1920s.¹ Prior to World War I settlers poured into these provinces buoyed by dreams of a better life, but in the decade or so following 1915 many who had taken homesteads in the so-called Palliser Triangle saw their hopes shattered by successive years of drought and crop failure. One of the crucial vehicles in this tragedy was the financial institution. Between 1908 and 1913 investment firms made available …

Trains Through The Plains The Great Plains Landscape Of Victorian Women Travelers, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The young British novelist Iza Hardy, during her travels to America in 1881-83, anticipated the American West as terra incagnitae, a place completely beyond civilization. Like many other British tourists to America in the late nineteenth century, Hardy traveled extensively throughout the East Coast and South, and took a transcontinental journey to the Pacific Coast by train (Fig. O. Out of her American travels Hardy produced Between Two Oceans: Or, Sketches of American Travel (1884) and a book about Florida. Hardy's coverage of the western portion of her American journey followed the transect the railroad did, with chapters of …

Review Of Goff On Goff: Conversations And Lectures Edited By Phillip B. Welch, Carl Matthews

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bruce Goff's career as an architect and educator spanned almost seven decades with some five hundred buildings designed and 147 built. In 1916, at the age of twelve, he was apprenticed to the architectural firm of Rush, Endacott & Rush in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was promoted to partner at age twenty-five. After serving in the military in the 1940s and a brief practice in Berkeley, California, Goff accepted a teaching position at the University of Oklahoma, recognized for one of the most creative programs in the country during this period, and quickly assumed the role of Department Chair. He resumed …

Review Of The Real West Commentary By Patricia Nelson Limerick, Robert Hower

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an exhibition and publishing collaboration, the Colorado Historical Society, the Denver Art Museum, and the Denver Public Library provide an absorbing visual and conceptual experience titled The Real West. Its strength is the manner in which the publishers have provided a novel visual statement through the color plates and photographs that comprise over 75 percent of the book.

The volume represents the effort of numerous individuals: Andrew E. Masich wrote the Introduction; Patricia Nelson Limerick authored the Commentary; Georgianna Contiguglia, Gwen F. Chanzit, and Eleanor Gehres collaborated on the Afterword. The text provides a frame of reference for …

Review Of People Of The Great Plains By Peter Miller, Gregory L. Morris

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his introduction, Peter Miller declares of the Great Plains: "This is a metaphysical land." By the time both he and his reader, however, make their way through the visual and literary territory covered in this. handsome volume, the Great Plains come to seem far less metaphysical and far more problematical a place. While Miller reinforces some of the traditional mythology of the Plains in his complementary texts and photographs-the elemental and inherent freedom of Plains life, the stubborn resilience of its people, the soul that resides in geography-he also explores the contradictions that have come in time to trouble …

Review Of Uncommon Common Women: Ordinary Lives Of The West By Anne M. Butler And Ona Siporin, Gaynell Gavin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Written for a general audience, Uncommon Common Women examines "ordinary" female experience in the American West. Although the women who appear in this book are ordinary in the sense of having gained neither fame nor notoriety, most of them expressed remarkable courage and fortitude in the face of hardship. Uncommon Common Women also emphasizes diversity in western experience.

The authors have used an interesting, but somewhat problematic, blend of history, fiction, and photographs. The photographs, for instance, enhance the text, but lack of captions or numbers makes it arduous for readers to correlate photographs with the numbered photo credits appearing …

Title And Contents- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SPRING 1998 VOL. 18 NO.2

CONTENTS

LITERATURES OF THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Francis W. Kaye

A CULTURAL DUET: ZITKALA SA AND THE SUN DANCE OPERA P. Jane Hafen

WOMEN WRITING ABOUT FARM WOMEN Becky Faber

GENDERED LANDSCAPES: SYNERGISM OF PLACE AND PERSON IN CANADIAN PRAIRIE DRAMA Anne F. Nothof

THE CORPORATE FARMING DEBATE IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II MIDWEST Jon Lauck

REVIEW ESSAY: HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES Linda Ray Pratt

A review of Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie OLsen and Meridel Le Sueur, and Nora

Ruth Roberts, Three Radical Women …

Book Review: Killing The White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans At The End Of The Twentieth Century By Fergus M. Bordewich, Tom Holm

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fergus M. Bordewich's foray into Native American politics and identity is disturbing on a number of different levels. It is, on the one hand, a remarkably accurate look at Native American political dilemmas, frustrations, and achievements. On the other, it is a flawed survey of what it means to be Native American in the United States. It lacks a clear critical framework and races willy-nilly from one group to another, judging achievements on the basis of economic success or how the tribes fit into the hierarchical apparatus that runs the nation.

Bordewich is at his finest when dealing with the …

Review Of The Frontiers Of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives And The Rhetoric Of Westward Expansion By Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Georgi-Findlay takes on the seemingly impossible task of synthesizing one hundred years of women's writing about American westward expansion. While focusing each chapter on just a few key texts, she draws widely on the works of Anglo-American novelists, journalists, settlers, travelers, tourists, army officers' wives, missionaries, and teachers, writing about a geographical area extending from Mackinaw Island to Puget Sound to Santa Fe. The author constructs a female counterpoint to male renditions of frontier adventure and conquest, but at the same time explores how white women's cultural practices existed in complicity with American territorial acquisition.

The book's three parts are …

Review Of Contented Among Strangers: Rural German Speaking Women And Their Families In The Nineteenth- Century Midwest By Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Here is an important study that joins the growing number of histories of rural American women. Its strengths are many. First, it uncovers the complex and multi-layered worlds of German-speaking immigrants; Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, a professor of German and Foreign Languages, uses her linguistic dexterity to unveil a rich cache of German-language diaries, letters, and memoirs, delivering it to North American readers in finely-crafted English narrative. The work is also remarkably sensitive to German immigrant diversity; although the immigrant groups hail from five Midwest states-Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska-they represent both Dreisziger Germans and "Germans from Russia," religious and …

Review Of Myths And Traditions Of The Arikara Indians By Douglas R. Parks, Tressa Berman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Once again, Douglas Parks has offered an unsurpassed account of Arikara oral traditions by carefully selecting and elaborating upon his earlier, though less accessible, Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 1991, in four volumes). Parks's careful English translations of a range of Arikara narratives fulfill the interests of specialists and non-specialists alike through detailed descriptions of both stories and storytellers. Old stories become infused with new life as we learn more about the narrators themselves and the various performative contexts in which stories get told. If this was an attempt on Parks's part to bring the …

Review Of The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation Of The Zulu And The Sioux By James O. Gump, Learthen Dorsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James Gump's comparative study of the transformation of the Zulu and Sioux nations as a result of their interaction with whites on "closing frontiers" in the eastern region of South Africa and on the western Plains of North America respectively is an impressive undertaking. His foci are two battles-the Zulu assault at Rorke's Drift in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the United States government's massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1892. According to the author, these two events have become powerful metaphors, "evoking images of Thermopylae in the first instance and systematic genocide in the latter." Both …

Review Of Son Of Two Bloods By Vincent L. Mendoza, Domino Renee Perez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Vincent Mendoza's Son of Two Bloods, the 1995 winner of the American Indian Prose Award, is an honest and at times heart-wrenching autobiography. The son of a Mexican father and Creek Indian mother, Mendoza conveys his struggle to locate himself within either community. When Vincent was a child, his father moved the family away from a predominately Mexican neighborhood, and his mother allowed the boy to attend Indian school. Both circumstances contribute to the author's feeling "lost" about who he was: not quite Mexican or Indian. He is moved by the Mariachi music his father and uncle play, and …

Gendered Landscapes Synergism Of Place And Person In Canadian Prairie Drama, Anne F. Nothof

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Mirage, Sharon Pollock's Generations, and Connie Gault's Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with …

Review Of Winter Quarters: The 1846-1848 Life Writings Of Mary Haskin Parker Richards Edited By Maurine Carr Ward, Martha Peterson-Taysom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Winter Quarters, the first in the new Life Writings of Frontier Women series edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, is the result of Maurine Carr Ward's excellent editing of the journal of Mary Haskin Parker Richards, who converted to Mormonism in Lancashire, England, in 1838 and joined other church members in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1843. Most of the journal, however, was written between 1846 and 1848, from the time she left Nauvoo until her husband, Samuel Richards, nephew of the better-known Willard Richards, returned from Britain to Winter Quarters.

The journal, in offering its richly detailed daily life of one …

Review Of Charles M. Russell: The Life And Legend Of America's Cowboy Artist By John Taliaferro, Elizabeth Dear

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For all the books written on Russell, an accurate, up-to-date biography has been lacking. Perhaps a definitive biography can never be fashioned since Russell left so little writing about himself. He and his wife Nancy did, however, leave many clues in letters to friends, in his fascinating tales, and in numerous other documents which, when pieced together, provide a credible portrayal of this complicated individual.

The first biography, published in 1948, twenty-two years after his death and eight after his wife's, was based on a manuscript commissioned by Nancy Russell which she deemed unsuitable for publication. Earlier autobiographies by some …

Review Of Mexicans In The Midwest, 1900-1932 By Juan R. Garcia, Ralph Grajeda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an important book on a significant and neglected topic: the immigration of Mexicans into the Midwest during the early decades of this century.

In contrast to the Southwestern US, the Midwest-with its distinctive Plains landscape and northern weather-would seem inhospitable to a predominantly working-class, Catholic, Spanish-speaking people accustomed to the desert regions and temperate weather of the central valley of Mexico. Mexican immigrants came, though-single men first and families later-"pushed" out from a Mexico in economic or civil strife and "pulled" in by the ready availability of US jobs. Using published materials, government documents, and archival sources, Juan …

Review Of Out Our Way: Gay And Lesbian Life In The Country By Michael Riordon, Ian C. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michael Riordon, radio playwright and author of The First Stone: Homosexuality and the United Church (1990), is obviously a master interviewer. From meetings with some three hundred gay men and lesbians in rural Canada, he distills the personal narratives of subjects from the pseudonymous tightly closeted to local semi-acknowledged "characters" and internationally known figures such as writer Jane Rule or Jim Egan, recent challenger to the Canadian Charter of Rights. Quotable nuggets of wisdom and sharp human observation come from all, often marked by fear, loneliness, and bigotry. Overwhelmingly, story after story echoes the phrase, "I always knew I was …

Review Of The Black Hills Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, Paul L. Hedren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Formal exploration of the Black Hills was long thwarted by their remoteness in northern Indian country and then by their inclusion in the Great Sioux Reservation created by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Changing national circumstances by 1874, however, led to Custer's well-publicized Black Hills survey where gold was discovered, as he reported, among the roots of the grass. Though several practical miners traveled with Custer, his expedition's pronouncements were not scientifically grounded, and doubt shrouded his discovery.

Across the nation the prospect of a new El Dorado grew irresistible, and the federal government soon authorized a formal scientific study …

Notes And News- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Images Of The Northern Great Plains

Visiting Scholar Program, University Of Oklahoma

Mid-American Studies

Communities And Traditional Knowledge

Western History Conferences

Review Of Farm Boys: Lives Of Gay Men From The Rural Midwest Collected And Edited By Will Fellows, John Gilgun

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dear Will Fellows:

Thank you for collecting and editing Farm Boys. I have already found a use for it. Today, in one of my classes, a student, Ed Grimes, read a poem he had written. I have asked Ed if I can use some of it here:

Jeremiah, twenty-two years old, great looking, great personality, yet he is so damn alone, trying to bust out of the prison which is his closet of sexuality.

He sees fear, he senses despair, he sees facing family, friends and life of such blackness that he cannot comprehend all of the changes it …