Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of A Dose Of Frontier Soldiering: The Memoirs Of Corporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877-1882 Edited By Thomas T. Smith, Markku Henriksson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For anyone interested in the "big picture" of what happened in the American West ten or fifteen years after the Civil War, Bode's memoirs will prove disappointing: he was not involved in any of the major campaigns in any meaningful way and reveals nothing not already known. If one is interested in a soldier's-although an exceptional one'sviews of some of his superior officers, or Indians, or mostly about the daily duties of an infantryman, Bode offers a good dose of "frontier soldiering." There is also useful primary material here on the 1870s and the social history of the military. Although …

"With One Mighty Pull" Interracial Town Boosting In Nicodemus, Kansas, Claire O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One steamy July day in 1887, a young American of African descent named H. R. Cayton arrived in the little northwestern Kansas town of Nicodemus in Graham County. He had traveled from Wyandotte to try his luck in the real estate and loan business, for he had heard that Nicodemus, a town founded by former slaves a decade earlier, was the place to be for an ambitious young black man like himself. Cayton's arrival was enthusiastically noted by one of the town's two newspapers, the Western Cyclone: "Mr. C. is a promising young man and has got 'git up …

Review Of Looking For History On Highway 14 By John E. Miller, Mark Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John E. Miller, a history professor at South Dakota State University, employs a blend of history, journalism, and travelogue in this enlightening book. He takes the reader on a tour of discovery across South Dakota's historic Highway 14, visiting fifteen roadside towns before ending in the Black Hills at Mt. Rushmore. Included in the tour are trips to Brookings (home to South Dakota's land grant university), De Smet (the "little town on the prairie" made famous by Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels), and Ft. Pierre (originally home to many Native American groups). Other towns visited include Elkton, Arlington, Manchester, Iroquois, Huron, …

Review Of Stephen Long And American Frontier Exploration By Roger L. Nichols And Patrick L. Halley, Seppo Tamminen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration is an excellent narrative of early nineteenth- century expeditions. It is enjoyable reading, and its information is particularly valuable for those interested in early westward expansion. The volume is also of importance to scholars studying other members of Long's expeditions, including Titian Peale, since it gives the historical context in which their work was done.

William Mckinley Holt And The Indian Claims Commission, Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When the bill to create the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was signed by President Harry Truman on 13 August 1946, he said it would provide "a final settlement of all outstanding claims" by the Indians against the United States. The process would foster the policy of assimilation, he said: "Indians can take their place without special handicaps or special advantages in the economic life of our nation and share fully in its progress." These hopes were not realized, however, as tribes faced three decades of difficult litigation, narrow opinions that reduced monetary claims, and many years when termination of tribes …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

IN MEMORIAM (Erwin H. Goldenstein)

CALLS FOR PAPERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

Sacramental Language Ritual In The Poetry Of Louise Erdrich, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As an intensely personal genre, poetry intimately reveals Louise Erdrich's voice as her well-known fiction does not. Evident in that voice are elements of the mosaic of cultural experiences that comprise Erdrich's life: Catholicism, German ancestry, working class, university education, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Erdrich's poetry is her first published work, her own writing without the collaborative effort and editing of her husband, Michael Dorris (Modoc). While some of Erdrich's poems garner their cultural rhetoric from differing points of view and values, most exhibit the variety of experiences that result from marginalization inherent in the omnipresence of race in North …

Frompin' In The Great Plains Listening And Dancing To The Jazz Orchestras Of Alphonso Trent 1925~44, Marc Rice

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This paper focuses on one of the most popular and influential of the territory band leaders, Alphonso Trent. From 1925 to the mid 1940s, his groups were acknowledged by listeners and by other musicians as among the very best of the jazz bands performing in the Southwest and Great Plains. In the cities and towns that they visited, their performances were always a special event, particularly in the African American communities. Trent's orchestras played an important role as musicians and entertainers of African Americans in the Great Plains States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Workers, Unions, And Historians On The Northern Plains, William C. Pratt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Labor history has corne of age over the past three decades. Today two national journals, Labor History and Labor's Heritage, focus on this subject in the United States, and many others, including the Journal of American History, publish articles in the field. In fact, much of what is called new social history often treats labor history topics, and many western historians have had an extended interest in labor history. Numerous recent examples, including the work of Carlos Schwantes, Michael Kazin, Vicki Ruiz, and others have been well received.

Review Of Rooted In Dust: Surviving Drought And Depression In Southwestern Kansas By Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Thomas R. Wessel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few environmental disasters match the drought years of the 1930s. Drought extended well beyond the Great Plains for most of the decade, but was particularly intense in southwestern Kansas. Fiction writers and historians have generally concentrated on those who fled the drought stricken Plains, or written accounts condemning farmers and government programs for converting the southern Plains into a dust bowl.

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg transforms farmers from villains in a man-made environmental disaster into stubborn optimists with heroic perseverance. She acknowledges that many avoided the economic depression in Kansas, or at least the drought, by simply abandoning the state, but notes …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE: RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH (P. Jane Hafen)

THE FRONTIER MEDICAL COMMUNITY OF LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS (Charles R. King)

WILLIAM McKINLEY HOLT AND THE INDIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION (Francis Moul)

THE MISSOURI RIVER BASIN ON THE 1795 SOULARD MAP: A CARTOGRAPHIC LANDMARK (W. Raymond Wood)

REVIEW ESSAYS

Stephan E. Ambrose. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (John L. Allen; Clara Sue Kidwell; Donald Worster)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains

The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories

Stephen Long and American Frontier …

Review Of Cowgirls Of The Rodeo: Professional Athletes By Mary Lou Lecompte, Joan Wells

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book sets out to describe the lives and achievements of women wild west show and rodeo contestants from 1896 to 1992. Offspring of their culture, these cowgirls exhibited athleticism, ranching skills, competitive spirit, and perseverance. Historical chapters relate the quest of rodeo women to compete as equals in the exhibition of their athletic ability.

Early promoters recognized and supported the appearance of women in the sport of rodeo, admitting that their glamour, costuming, and skilled performances were necessary in selling rodeo as family entertainment. Cowgirls like Tad Lucas, Alice and Maggie Greenough, Lucille Mulhall, Florence Randolph, Mabel Strickland, Ruth …

Review Of Dangerous Passage: The Santa Fe Trail And The Mexican War By William Y. Chalfant, Duane A. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Chalfant, long time western historian and Hutchinson, Kansas, attorney, focuses on one period in the trail's history, the Mexican War phase of American "Manifest Destiny." His is the story of the military as it protects the trail and uses it as the invasion corridor to march to Santa Fe. The main story details the "troubled and often violent IndianWhite relations that plagued the trail during the war years" (p.xiii). Marc Simmons's foreword sets the scene and takes the reader into the narrative.

A wide variety of people will enjoy this study-those interested in military, Indian, transportation, and southwestern history …

Review Of Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader On The Northern Plains By Rachel Calof, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Along with the original narrative this volume provides an epilogue by Jacob Calof, Rachel's youngest child, and two essays, one by J. Sanford Rikoon, the other by Elizabeth Jameson. Jacob Calof's comments confirm the strength and courage we find in his mother's words.

The essays lend significant context to the narrative. Rikoon gives a concise and informative explanation of the history of Jewish families that left Russia and eastern Europe to settle on farms in the Heartland. Jameson's analysis places Rachel's narrative in historical perspective and emphasizes the importance of recognizing diversities of ethnicity, class, and gender in the interpretation …

Review Essay: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, And The Opening Of The American West By Stephen E. Ambrose, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From time to time, a serious book excites the imaginations of a vaster public than the audience of scholarly journals. Because the Center for Great Plains Studies has, over the past sixteen years, sponsored the reediting and publication of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, we could not help but notice the enormous popular success of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. To provide a focus on some of the scholarly concerns raised by this new text, we invited three prominent scholars to review the book from …

The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958-60, Ronald Walters

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1960, black youths conducted a "sit-in" in Greensboro, North Carolina to obtain the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. Others quickly replicated sit-ins throughout the South and, just as quickly, the press labeled Greensboro the "first" sit-in. Historian David Levering Lewis, for instance, said: "There were not a few white southerners, and probably a majority of white northerners, who would have wished to say to the first sit-in students, as did the woman in the Greensboro Woolworth's, 'you should have done this ten years ago.'" Even data-oriented social scientists such as Doug McAdams portray the sit-ins as …

Review Of Father Peter John Desmet: Jesuit In The West By Robert C. Carriker, Robert H. Keller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although DeSmet loved native people, believed in their innate goodness-even idealized them in the case of the Flatheads-and tolerated their cultures, he did not fully understand their life ways and failed to grasp how they perceived the easy Christianity he offered them. A belief that Indians could shed their culture and become fully "civilized" in twenty years proved exceptionally naive. Most of all, with the evidence right before his eyes, DeSmet seemed to miss the greatest irony in his life: that in attempting to save the Potawatomie, Osage, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Kalispel, Flatheads, Blackfeet, Crow, and Spokane he himself unwittingly …

Review Of Black Elk's Religion: The Sun Dance And Lakota Catholicism By Clyde Holler, John R. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Regrettably, Holler's own most original theoretical constructions suffer from what seems, anyway, the too-rigid (although unstated) metaphysics of the professional philosopher he once was. Black Elk Speaks gives John Neihardt's perspective, he judges, not Black Elk's. The reason? It is a work of art and therefore creative rather than faithful to Black Elk's message. The logic suggests that Holler has no available category or place for narrative realism as a means of being both creative and truthful. And at the end, he explains Black Elk's paired religious convictions by attributing to him an apparent non-cognitivist model of religious language. But …

The Left And Labor On The Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This issue of Great Plains Quarterly is given up to two long articles that probe different facets of the history of the Left on the Great Plains. In "Workers, Unions, and Historians on the Northern Plains," William C. Pratt surveys unions in Nebraska and the Great Plains with an eye to what historians have written about them, what stories remain to be told, and what sources are available for the telling. Certainly he finds no dearth of material, though he is disappointed not to find integrative texts in the school of the "new labor history" for the northern Plains, the …

Review Of Catch Rope: The Long Arm Of The Cowboy: The History And Evolution Of Ranch Roping By John R. Erickson, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Erickson sets his account in the literature of cowboys and roping and supplies a short but useful annotated bibliography. There is nothing here of the "New Western History," however, and little about socio-economic conditions, gender issues, Indians, or African American cowboys. Sharply focused on catch roping, the book nevertheless communicates well the tribulations and satisfactions of life on the range. The many quotations and paraphrases of stories by fellow cowboys give Catch Rope its evocative sense of camaraderie: we feel like we're sitting around a campfire with the author and his friends. And it is a good feeling.

Review Of Lone Wolf V. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights And Indian Law At The End Of The Nineteenth Century By Blue Clark, Ramona Skinner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Clark's unique approach in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock allows him to go beyond the initial examination oflegal precedent to reveal a story of human dignity and a people's survival. The book presents an authoritative account of Kiowa band chief Lone Wolf's relentless attempts, through various legal channels, to halt the selection and assignment of his own allotment. In the end, he joined the Elk Creek Baptist church and lived on his allotment with his family. What Lone Wolf and his tribe hoped to gain from the lawsuit, how the Court bestowed on Congress unlimited power over Indian affairs, and the …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

THE LEFT AND LABOR ON THE PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Frances W. Kaye)

WORKERS, UNIONS, AND HISTORIANS ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS (William C. Pratt)

"WHO'S GOING TO DANCE WITH SOMEBODY WHO CALLS YOU A MAIN STREETER": COMMUNISM, CULTURE AND COMMUNITY IN SHERIDAN COUNTY, MONTANA, 1918-1934 (Gerald Zahavi)

REVIEW ESSAY

Ric Burns. The Way West: Episode I, Westward, the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1845-1864; Episode II, The Approach of Civilization, 1865-1869; Episode III, The War for the Black Hills, 1870-1876; Episode IV, Ghost Dance, 1877-1893. (Martin Blythe; Mia Graeffe; Sanna Heinsalo; Ossi Heinanen; Ari Helo; Kari Hirvinen; Piia Kiviniemi; Vello …

Review Of Vision Quest: Men, Women And Sacred Sites Of The Sioux Nation Photographs By Don Doll, S.J. Introduction By Vine Deloria, Jr., John E. Carter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Don Doll is not the first person of Euro-American ancestry to point the lens of a camera at American Indians. In fact, there is a long tradition of that dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. And neither is he the first person to produce a book of such photographs. That, too, is old hat. But Doll's work is quite different from that of his fellows, and his recent volume, Vision Quest, an assemblage of photographs of Sioux people (inclusive of all three major bands) and the lands that are sacred to them, is proof of that. It …

Review Of Girl On A Pony By La Verne Hanners, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This small book is written in a straightforward, unassuming, conversational style with the result that it's deceptively simple, seeming at first to be just another reminiscence of pioneer days, although in a somewhat unusual place. It's the story of La Verne Hanners's childhood and young womanhood in the Valley of the Dry Cimarron of New Mexico, only a few miles from the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle and just south of the Colorado border. Here is a landscape of grandeur, of severe drought, of sudden, fierce hail and wind and snow storms, of walls of water unexpectedly racing down dry …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (Frederick C. Luebke)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IN MEMORIAM (James Sinclair Ross)

Review Essay: Environmental History, Donald Worster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A summer ago I canoed down the Missouri River, along the wild pristine White Cliffs of Montana, with the Lewis and Clark journals in hand (the De Voto abridged edition). Like many others, I have felt strongly the pull of that famous expedition, the nostalgia for a lost West without cities, dams, or overgrazed pastures, when Indians still defined the place. But I was not prepared to like this retelling of the story, with its hagiographical and militaristic title spliced to its Wallace Stegner-ish subtitle. Was this to be Meriwether Lewis as the Colin Powell of another day? Or as …

The Frontier Medical Community Of Leavenworth, Kansas, Charles R. King M.D.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the important elements in the development of a North American frontier community was a system of medical care. During the nineteenth century the work of all frontier professionals was dramatically facilitated by new means of transportation and communication. Mid-century frontier communities had direct contact with urban centers via the telegraph and could acquire supplies over railroads and improved roadways. The development of a medical care system in Leavenworth, Kansas, during the second half of the nineteenth century illustrates the important role that physicians and other health providers played in community building on the western frontier, as well as …

Review Essay:The Way West Written And Directed By Ric Burns, Martin Blythe, Mia Graeffe, Sanna Heinsalo, Ossi Heinänen, Ari Helo, Kari Hirvinen, Piia Kiviniemi, Vello Ruus, John Wright, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Way West, scripted and directed by Ric Burns, is advertised as the story of United States expansion into the American West from 1845 to 1893. Burns sets the series' temporal boundaries arbitrarily from a New York editor's first use of the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 address on the significance of the frontier and his announcement of its close. The documentary's episodes actually focus on the struggle for control of the Great Plains, pitting the U.S. Army against the Sioux nation and its allies. Largely forsaking the challenge of providing a sure overview of …

Review Of Education For Extinction: American Indians And The Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 By David Wallace Adams, Rebecca Dobkins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Adams makes a number of important contributions, including raising several significant topics deserving further investigation: the local consequences of tension between centralization and decentralization in the boarding school system, the connections between the movement for compulsory education for Indians and for the U.S. school-age public at large, and the relationship between the schools' project of Indian assimilation and American nationalism of the time, particularly the drive to make citizens out of the immigrant "melting pot." In addition, Adams's research, building upon that of many other scholars, demonstrates that the Indian boarding school experience offers rich ethnographic and historical material for …