Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Age Of The Gunfighter: Men And Weapons On The Frontier 1840-1900 By Joseph G. Rosa, Robert K. Dearment

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At first glance and a quick thumb-through, this large 10"x13" edition with its striking full color cover featuring W. C. Wyeth's dramatic painting of Wild Bill Hickok throwing down on a cheat at a gambling table might be considered just another slick picture book on the order of The Gunfighters, one of Time-life's Old West series of a few years back. But knowledgeable readers of factual gunfighter history, recognizing the author's name, would look further. Joseph G. Rosa has written a number of books dealing with Old West gunmen and their weaponry and is the uncontested authority on the …

Review Of Caddo Indians: Where We Come From By Cecile Elkins Carter, F. Todd Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Unlike the Native American tribes of the northern Plains-especially the Teton Sioux-the Indians of the southern Plains have been relatively neglected by historians. This is partially the result of these tribes' long, extensive dealings with the Spanish and French before interacting with representatives of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The nomadic buffalo hunting Comanches and Kiowas have had their share of chroniclers, due in part to the dramatic wars they fought in response to their being forced onto reservations following the Civil War. Only recently, however, has a historian, Stanley Noyes, written exclusively about the Comanches before 1845. …

Review Of The Drifting CowboyBy Will James I See By Your Outfit: Historic Cowboy Gear Of The Northern Plains By Tom Lindmier And Steve Mount, Richard W. Slatta

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Will James (1892-1942) served as living proof that prison can reform a man. Convicted of rustling in 1915, he used his writing and drawing ability in prison to prove his social worth and rehabilitation. By the time alcohol abuse ended his life, he had illustrated and written twenty-four entertaining volumes.

Most of James's books have been long out of print. Thanks to joint efforts by the Will James Society (PO Box 8207, Roswell, MN 88202) and Mountain Press Publishing, all of his works will be reprinted. The Drifting Cowboy, first published in 1925, joins his first book, Cowboys North …

Review Of The Frontier In American Culture: An Exhibition At The Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995 Essays By Richard White And Patricia Nelson Limerick, Susan A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

THE EMPEROR ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

Richard White, the creator of the touring panel exhibition "The Frontier in American Culture," made his reputation promoting a product labeled "New Western History." He wrote a textbook on the topic, and one passage in that book reveals the conception that frames this exhibition: "People simply murdered Indians," he writes (It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own [University of Oklahoma Press, 1991], p. 338). If you are one of the people, perhaps that kind of statement seems acceptable, but from the point of view of one of the Indians it looks like …

Title And Contents- Winter 1997

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1997 VOL. 17 NO. 1

CONTENTS

BLACK SOLDIERS AT FORT HAYS, KANSAS, 1867 -1869: A STUDY IN CIVILIAN AND MILITARY VIOLENCE James N. Leiker

ALLOTMENT, ALCOHOL, AND THE OMAHAS Benson Tong

A SOCIOECONOMIC PORTRAIT OF PRINCE HALL MASONRY IN NEBRASKA, 1900-1920 Dennis N. Mihelich

THE EARLY GROWTH OF THE CONRAD BANKING ENTERPRISE IN MONTANA, 1880-1914 Henry C. Klassen

REVIEW ESSAY: THE EMPEROR ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER Susan A. Miller

A review of a traveling exhibition from the Newberry Library,

"The Frontier in American CuI ture," curated by Richard White.

BOOK REVIEWS

Becoming and Remaining a People: …

Review Of Mediation In Contemporary Native American Fiction By James Ruppert, Catherine Rainwater

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James Ruppert discusses works by six Native American writers whom he believes "mediate" Indian and non-Indian world views. He argues convincingly that narratives by N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D'Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich are delivered from "an artistic and conceptual standpoint, constantly flexible, which uses the epistemological frameworks of Native American and Western cultural traditions to illuminate and enrich each other." These texts "create a dynamic that brings differing cultural codes into confluence to reinforce and recreate the structures of human life: the self, community, spirit, and the world we perceive." Often citing reader-response …

The Early Growth Of The Conrad Banking Enterprise In Montana, 1880-1914, Henry C. Klassen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the year 1880 two brothers, William G. and Charles E. Conrad, organized the First National Bank at Fort Benton in north central Montana, capitalized at $50,000. They supplied at least $10,500 of this capital and gradually came to own a majority of the stock. From this modest start, the Conrad partnership expanded through involvement not only in the First National but also in other Montana banks until its emergence as a banking empire thirty-four years later with a paid-up capital of more than half a million dollars. The partnership grew by entering several geographical markets, becoming a regional partnership. …

Review Of The Biographical Directory Of Native American Painters Edited By Patrick D. Lester, Richard Conn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Here is a long-needed and critically important reference work sure to be welcomed by the many scholars, collectors, artists, and others who will consult it frequently. The last work of this nature, Jeanne Snodgrass's American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory, was published in 1968, hence the importance and timeliness of Lester's Biographical Directory.

The body of the work (the actual Directory) is organized alphabetically by artists' names, each entry including biographical data, tribal affiliation, name in tribal language, and lists of awards, commissions, and works in public collections. If an artist works in more than one medium, the …

Review Of Indian School Days By Basil H. Johnston, Susan Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1939 Basil H. Johnston's mother told him he would soon be going on a short trip. The reasons for her seeming upset during preparations for his departure became clear to the ten-year-old Ojibway only when the agent came to collect him. Basil realized he was being taken to Spanish, a small village in northern Ontario and the site of the St. Peter Claver's Indian Residential School. Indian School Days renders the autobiographical remembrances of the author's years at the Jesuit boarding school.

Residential schools for Native American children were spread throughout Canada and the United States through the 1950s. …

Black Soldiers At Fort Hays, Kansas, 1867-1869 A Study In Civilian And Military Violence, James N. Leiker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians of the western army contend with many romanticized myths. Few of those myths, in recent years, have held the popular consciousness as has that of the army's first black regulars, known as "buffalo soldiers." By now, the origins of the segregated regiments are quite familiar. In 1866, with the nation's acting military force having dwindled to a fraction of its Civil War size, the Republican Congress encouraged the enlistment of newly freed slaves and northern free blacks. Assigned to remote western areas, black units played an instrumental role over the next few decades in opening the West for white …

Review Of They Call Me Agnes: A Crow Narrative Based On The Life Of Agnes Yellowtail Deernose By Fred W. Yoget, Assisted By Mary K. Mee, Marika Sandell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

They Call Me Agnes tells the life story of Agnes Yellowtail as narrated to anthropologist Fred Yoget and assisted in his work by Mary K. Mee. Yoget also includes information from other Crow informants and presents a chapter on Crow reservation culture based on Robert Lowie's classical ethnographical data. The last chapter discusses Crow traditional ceremonies and how they have changed during Agnes's life. In his introduction, Yoget gives details about where he has added material to each chapter and where it is Agnes's voice we are hearing.

Agnes Yellowtail was born in a tent during the Crow Indian Fair …

Review Of The Nature Of The Place: A Study Of Great Plains Fiction By Diane Dufva Quantic, Melody Graulich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Diane Quantic takes her title from Wright Morris: "Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion." Quantic's "opinion" is perhaps best conveyed on a t-shirt I once saw her wearing at a conference: "Kansas is the best kept secret in the United States."

I begin with this anecdote because Quantic has earned her authority by living her whole life in Kansas; I admire the way she establishes her relation to "place" in the book's first line: "My mother grew up in Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight …

Review Of The Dull Knifes Of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey By Joe Starita, Donald L. Parman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Joe Starita's book centers on five generations of the Dull Knife family from the 1870s until the present. The original Dull Knife was a Northern Cheyenne who, with Little Wolf, led his people north from Indian Territory in 1878. The flight became one of the more famous episodes of the Indian wars. His son, George Dull Knife, born in 1875, probably came north to the Pine Ridge reservation several years later and identified with the Lakota rather than the Northern Cheyenne. George worked in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and later served as a tribal policeman. His son, Guy, Sr., …

Review Of Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real By Carol Miles Petersen, Barbara W. Rippey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Nebraska author (1881-1954), believed that if people want to do something badly enough, they will find the time to do it. Carol Miles Petersen, her biographer, tells us that Aldrich wanted so much to write that care of a husband, four children, and a home failed to deter her. The early death of Aldrich's husband added an economic impetus to her initial drive. She published a dozen books and numerous short stories and articles in meeting her artistic and family responsibilities. Moreover, during depression years, she aided her community substantially by offering quiet financial help to the …

Notes And News- Winter 1997

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT SEMINAR

PUBLICATIONS A WARDS

Review Of Voices Of The Plains Cree By Edward Ahenakew, Jennifer S. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Voices of the Plains Cree was first published in 1973 by McClelland & Stewart. As it has been out of print for some time, the Canadian Plains Research Center has rendered useful service in once again making this important book available in a new edition with striking and attractive cover artwork by Allen Sapp.

In the 1920s, Edward Ahenakew, a Saskatchewan Cree ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 1912, quietly began to write down the memories and legends told to him by Chief Thunderchild (Peyasiw-awasis, also known as Kapitikow), then living on Onion Lake Reserve (Saskatchewan). Thunderchild, a follower of …

Review Of Becoming And Remaining A People: Native American Religions On The Northern Plains By Howard L. Harrod, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Primarily this is a book about pre-reservation religions among the Hidatsa and Mandan, with a final chapter on the Cheyenne and Crow. Its purpose, an important one, is to reveal Hidatsa and Mandan culture as dynamic and transformative, nourished by religious values that provided social continuity as well as a symbolic language for adaptation and innovation. Unlike the many books dealing with northern Plains religions as static, or locked into unchanging cycles of religious ritual, Becoming and Remaining a People clearly shows how northern Plains religious experience and interpretations shaped new patterns of identity and social reconstruction while providing a …

Review Of This Fragile Land: A Natural History Of The Nebraska Sandhills By Paul A. Johnsgard, Bob Ross

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This Fragile Land, though written for a popular audience, is not intended for children or for light bedtime reading. In language midway between academic discourse and good literary prose, Paul Johnsgard characterizes the plant and animal communities of the Sandhills thoroughly- and with humor and imagination.

Part One describes the "geology and historical geography" of the Sandhills region and its borders; it is the only part that might be tedious for some. In his preface, Johnsgard advises readers to begin with Part Two and skip-and-sample backward. In five chapters, he details the geographic relationships of species' habitats to one …

Review Of Born In The Country: A History Of Rural America By David B. Danbom, Michael W. Schuyler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David B. Danbom, professor of history at North Dakota State University, Fargo, is widely respected as one of the nation's leading authorities on agricultural history. His purpose in writing this book, to provide a general history of rural America combining traditional political and economic history with the new social history, he accomplishes with admirable success. Born in the Country will quickly become a standard text in the field.

Danbom traces the history of agriculture from the nation's beginnings, when rural Americans dominated the nation, down to a present in which farmers and people living in rural areas have become a …

A Socioeconomic Portrait Of Prince Hall Masonry In Nebraska, 1900-1920, Dennis N. Mihelich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On 6 March 1775, a British military lodge of Freemasons initiated Prince Hall (his name, not a title) and fourteen other African Americans after the white colonial lodge at Boston had rejected their petition. Independence did not alter the attitude of white American Masons; thus, a separate black Masons' organization evolved. Hall secured a charter from the "mother" grand lodge in England and reconstituted his group as the African Grand Lodge of North America. Following his death in 1807 the fraternal order renamed itself in his honor.

Prior to the abolition of slavery Prince Hall Masonry spread slowly among the …

Allotment, Alcohol, And The Omahas, Benson Tong

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"The welfare of the Omaha is close to my heart ... I am living among them and I know what I am writing about," wrote Noah La Flesche in a 1916 letter to the Superintendent of the Omaha School, the field official in charge of the Omaha agency. In a passionate tone, La Flesche went on to plead: "If we had a man who would take the drunken Indian, fine him, put him in jail till he sobered up, drinking would not be so bad. This is going to ruin the Omaha. I ask you to help us ... we …

Review Of Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France And The American Northeast By Gary Brienzo, Richard Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Using a fine-tuned blend of textual criticism, biography, and primary research, Gary Brienzo sheds light on the importance of the American Northeast and New France on Willa Cather's life and art.

Brienzo sees Cather's artistic life as a search for a "quiet center," a unified, comforting vision, given focus by an appreciation she developed for the "domestic qualities that enhanced life." He credits Sarah Orne Jewett for providing Cather this "alternative literary tradition," which celebrated woman-centered communities and the power of domestic ritual. Brienzo details Cather's discovery of Quebec and the appeal of its French traditions, for there she recognized …

Review Of Soul In The Stone: Cemetery Art From America's Heartland By John Gary Brown, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Gary Brown, a professional photographer from Lawrence, Kansas, has collected over a period of time a variety of unique photographs documenting examples of cemetery art found in the central states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. The author, through his photographs and to some degree his text, illustrates the rich mixture of personal efforts that stone sculptors and vernacular artists have developed in this special art form. While cemetery art is public, the photographs Brown presents, through his use of a multiplicity of artistic images, often suggest particularly private stories. Brown begins …

Mari Sandoz's Portrait Of An Artist's Youth: Robert Henri's Nebraska Years, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert Henri's life story would have appealed to Mari Sandoz even if he were not an important early twentieth-century American artist. Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad) came from a time, a place, and a family that at first glance seem unlikely to have produced an avant garde painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits; it was the sort of paradox Sandoz liked to explore. That Henri had spent much of his youth in her native Nebraska in a family headed by a magnetic and dominating man not unlike her own father also interested her. That the family left Nebraska in …

Review Of The Way To The West: Essays On The Central Plains By Elliott West, A. Yvette Huginnie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In one delightful volume, Elliott West offers four engaging, far-ranging essays on the Central Plains. Originally presented in 1993 as the ninth annual Calvin Horn Lectures on Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico, these expanded essays are now available to a wider audience. The Horn lectures enabled West, a distinguished social historian, to explore some new aspects of western American history, specifically environmental and Native American studies. Interweaving secondary materials from a multiplicity of disciplines-anthropology, ecology and environmental studies, history, literature, sociology-with ample primary materials, West 'presents engrossing essays from which we can all benefit. He …

Marl Sandoz's Slogum House Greed As Woman, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her 1937 novel, Slogum House, Mari Sandoz turned the usual stereotype of greed and cupidity on its head. Instead of presenting a voracious male rancher aggrandizing his land holdings to the detriment of hard-working homesteaders, Sandoz created Regula Haber Slogum, a grasping woman who eventually owns nearly an entire county, which she has managed to have named after her family. Although Gulla, as she is known, controls most of Slogum County, she continues brutally to foreclose mortgages and force sheriffs' sales, even during the depression years of the 1930s.

Despite this depiction of what Katharine Mason has called …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

AN INTRODUCTION (Barbara Rippey; John R. Wunder)

"SHE DOES NOT WRITE LIKE A HISTORIAN": MARl SANDOZ AND THE OLD AND NEW WESTERN HISTORY (Betsy Downey)

MARl SANDOZ'S SLOGUM HOUSE: GREED AS WOMAN (Glenda Riley)

RECASTING EPIC TRADITION: THE DISPOSSESSED AS HERO IN SANDOZ'S CRAZY HORSE AND CHEYENNE AUTUMN (Lisa R. Lindell)

MARl SANDOZ'S PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST'S YOUTH: ROBERT HENRI'S NEBRASKA YEARS (Helen Winter Stauffer)

BOOK REVIEWS

Prairie University: A History of the University of Nebraska

Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas

Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment , 1920,1990

Lakol Wokiksuye: …

Marl Sandoz Nebraska Sandhills Author A Centennial Recognition, Barbara Rippey, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

1996 marks the centennial year of Mari Susette Sandoz's birth to Swiss immigrant parents, Mary and Jules Sandoz, on a homestead in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Mari, the oldest of the six children in the Sandoz family, was shaped and hardened by her father's temper and by bearing the brunt of hard physical work both outdoors on the homestead and as her mother's helper. The people of her neighborhood were the kind of people who not only witnessed but made history, the kind of people whose lives and stories could be transformed into literature. Red Cloud, Robert Henri, Crazy Horse, "Gulla …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

REVIEW ESSAYS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Review Of The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities In The Modern West By Carl Abbott, Robert B. Fairbanks

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This important book initiates a new series on The Modern American West edited by Gerald D. Nash. In it the author not only documents the critical role cities have played in the development of the West since World War II, but claims that those cities really personify the three mythic images of the West as locus of democracy, opportunity, and individual fulfillment. Defining the West as all of the Great Plains and Pacific States, Carl Abbott examines mid-size cities as well as large, but concentrates on the impact of metropolises like Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston …