Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Notes And News- Spring 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

2008 NEBRASKA SUMMER WRITERS' CONFERENCE

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

2008 WILLA CATHER SPRING CONFERENCE & SYMPOSIUM

Review Of Alexander's Bridge. By Willa Cather, Elizabeth Ammons

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather tried to disown Alexander's Bridge (1912). In her 1922 preface reprinted in this impressive scholarly edition, she compared her first novel invidiously to her second, O Pioneers! (1913): "The difference in quality in the two books is an illustration of the fact that it is not always easy for the inexperienced writer to distinguish between his own material and that which he would like to make his own." Whereas most of Cather's long fiction would concentrate on the Great Plains, the region she knew best and loved most deeply, this first novel takes place in Boston, England, and …

Review Of Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan By Robert Collins, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No one who ever sat down in a room with James H. Lane or heard him on the platform could doubt that he was a dramatic, mesmerizing personality. Any historian of Bleeding Kansas can testify to his importance. Indeed, he was doubtless the key figure in the affair. Journalists at the time and biographers since have tried to create accounts worthy of Lane himself, but, as Lloyd Lewis pointed out many years ago, he has largely eluded them. Lane remains a "shadowy figure," with many of his instincts and motivations subject to speculation.

A major problem is sources. Robert Collins …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 2 / Spring 2008

CONTENTS

EXTENDING THE SECURITY NET: THE IMPACT OF RANGELAND INSURANCE ON RANCHING ECONOMY AND CULTURE

CONTRUCTING A HOME ON THE RANGE: HOMEMAKING IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY PLAINS PHOTOGAPH ALBUMS

LIFE AND LANDSCAPES IN THE POST-OFFICE COMMUNITIES OF HOLT COUNTY, NEBRASKA

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of A Fate Worse Than Death: Indian Captivities In The West, 1830-1885 By Gregory And Susan Michno, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The field of captivity narrative studies has been expanding and evolving since the early 1990s. Thirty academic books have appeared since then, including individual editions, anthologies of narratives, studies of individual captives, and critical and historical monographs. Two aspects of Gregory and Susan Michno's volume contribute to captivity narrative studies in a very limited way: first, it considers the still underexamined captivity narratives from the West and Midwest; and second, like a biographical dictionary, it provides basic information about unfamiliar captives and captivities mostly taken from the narratives themselves. The book also includes maps, illustrations, and various appendices and tables. …

Review Of Muting White Noise: Native American And European American Novel Traditions By James H. Cox, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If, as James Cox argues, "the origin of colonialism is imaginative," and narrative "the force that sets colonialism in motion," then which stories have anchored Eurowestern colonialism? Conversely, what are the enduring stories of survivance and sovereignty that have sustained Native peoples through five hundred and more years of what Gerald Vizenor has termed "the word wars"? Taking as his premise that words create worlds, that stories carry within them "real world implications," Cox focuses his attention on half of his subtitle: Native American Novel Traditions. More specifically, he considers a prominent strand of this tradition: the artful revising and …

Extending The Security Net The Impact Of Rangeland Insurance On Ranching Economy And Culture, Rex J. Rowley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Humans have a complex relationship with the land. At the base of it lies our need for what the land can give: materials for shelter, food and water for sustenance, and scenic beauty for pleasure. But, similar to our interactions with other humans, our relationship with the land is not always perfect. The land can often be our worst enemy. Storm, drought, famine, and pestilence are common words from the historical record representing times when this connection between humans and nature is challenged.

Crop insurance is a relatively recent invention that attempts to level the playing field in our contest …

Review Of Lady Blackrobes: Missionaries In The Heart Of Indian Country By Irene Mahoney, William Furdell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sister Irene Mahoney has made a valuable contribution to the history of her Ursuline Order's work among Indians in Montana during the latter years of the nineteenth century, the "golden age" of the western missions. Beyond that, she has provided a useful model for historians who might wish to follow her lead eschewing "presentism" in favor of historical context and perspective.

She offers solid information and reasoned insights into the lives and work of the missionaries, noting that their motives may have been "flawed" by today's understanding, but also that there could be no doubt that the Ursulines who came …

Constructing A Home On The Range Homemaking In Early-Twentieth-Century Plains Photograph Albums, Christina E. Dando

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These lyrics capture a yearning for a place to call home. But what landscape is associated with this longing? For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"-but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would consider this an ideal landscape for home. So how did the people who settled on the Plains "view" this landscape? What did they see? How did this land come to be recognized …

Life And Landscapes In The Post-Office Communities Of Holt County, Nebraska, Rebecca A. Buller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Thumb through the pages of a DeLorme gazetteer of any Great Plains state .and you will find small black diamonds, each with its own place-name, scattered throughout the large-scale maps. For those who are familiar with the area, the existence of some of the diamonds, supposedly marking the location of a community, can be confusing since these markers do not represent contemporary towns. Additionally, when you travel country roads in rural areas of the Great Plains you will stumble upon markers that identify a nearby post office, which, also no longer exists. What do these diamonds on the map represent? …

Review Of The Cowboy Girl: The Life Of Caroline Lockhart By John Clayton, Karen Walcott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The back cover of Cowboy Girl promises the story of Caroline Lockhart, "a woman whose work and life teetered between realism and romanticism, who wrote novels 'like a man' yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist." What John Clayton delivers is the life story of a racist and elitist who spent much of her free time trying to "get" her enemies.

Lockhart's second novel, The Lady Doc (1912), is a book about revenge, literally. Lockhart wrote the novel to attack the character of one of her enemies, Dr. Frances Lane. Its main character, Dr. Emma Harpe, …

Review Of The Cherokee Nation In The Civil War. By Clarissa W. Confer., Brad Agnew

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Because military action in Indian Territory had negligible impact on the Civil War, most accounts of America's deadliest conflict are focused elsewhere. Few Civil War buffs realize the magnitude of death and destruction suffered by the Cherokees and neighboring tribes. Clarissa W. Confer's study of the impact of the conflict on the Cherokee Nation documents and personalizes the tragedy that decimated its people, destroyed the work of a generation following the Trail of Tears, and left a legacy of strife and animosity.

Confer focuses on a single tribe among the so-called Five Civilized Nations which she suggests "encapsulated much of …

Review Of Notebooks Of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Jace Weaver

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the preface to this new edited volume, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn notes that while she learned to read and write English as a small child growing up on South Dakota's Crow Creek reservation, it took "many decades" for her to learn to use the language "efficiently." She writes, "I published nothing until I was forty." That would have been 1970, barely two years into what has become known as the Native American Literary Renaissance.

The Dakota writer and scholar certainly made up for lost time. In the ensuing decades, she has produced a formidable corpus of work, both in terms of …

Review Of Mennonites In Texas: The Quiet In The Land Text And Photographs By Laura L. Camden And Susan Gaetz Duarte., Marilyn E. Lehman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This arresting collection of black-and-white prints, complemented by concise, historically and culturally sensitive narrative text, documents two distinct groups of Mennonites who have found refuge in the Great Plains. As the title and cover photo suggest, a place to live out distinctive non-mainstream lifestyles-apart and in peace-is important to these separatist groups of Mennonites. And the Plains of Texas have provided a fitting refuge. Along with "a series of immigrants fleeing the Old World-Germans, Czechs, Russians, Irish, and more," as former governor and Texas icon Ann Richards writes in the preface, these SwissGerman and German-Russian religious ethnic groups have found …

Review Of Cowtown Wichita And The Wild, Wicked West. By Stan Hoig, Robin C. Henry

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stan Hoig traces the development of Wichita, Kansas, from a nexus of Native American trading and hunting to a fledgling frontier town, to a crossroads of both the cattle and railroad industries, to an emerging modern city at the close of the nineteenth century. Poised at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers, Wichita's location, Hoig notes, made it ideal for trade and interaction among Indians, military, and cattlemen, and immigrant, African American, and Anglo settlers, all of whom contributed to the city's history.

In his introduction, Hoig states his intention is not to place his narrative into …

Review Of Migrations: New Directions In Native American Art. Edited By Marjorie Devon, Janet Catherine Berlo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Tamarind Institute is a well-known and well-respected venue where contemporary artists collaborate with master printmakers to realize their work in multiples, principally in limited edition lithography. In the decades since its establishment in New Mexico in 1970, artists as diverse as Elaine de Kooning, Ed Ruscha, Fritz Scholder, Judy Chicago, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, James Havard, and Jose Bedia have been in residence. As the above sample indicates, Native artists have long been a part of the collaborative mix.

This volume considers the work of six Native artists who collaborated with master printmakers to produce new work: Steven Deo (Creek), …

Review Of Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family's Long Journey From Russia To Canada By Arthur Kroeger, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hard Passage is an intelligent, innovative, and eloquently written family history. It recounts the last years of Heinrich and Helena Kroeger's life in Russia, upheaval and exile in the Soviet Union, and their migration to and settlement in Alberta. It also recounts the eventual acculturation of the Kroegers' five sons and a daughter to middle-class, liberal Canadian life. The author, Arthur Kroeger, was one of the sons and the one who was able to attend university-the University of Alberta and then Oxford; he subsequently developed a successful career in Canada's foreign service, earned multiple appointments as federal deputy minister, and …

Review Of After Lewis & Clark: The Forces Of Change, 1806-1871. By Gary Allen Hood, Suzan Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the late 1940s, the wealthy Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease collected western art he believed best told the story of America. His unwavering determination led him to collect more than 100,000 objects, which became the founding collection of the Gilcrease Museum.

This beautifully designed volume, which accompanied an exhibition at the Gilcrease in 2006, features the work from the museum's collection by well-known and lesser-known artists who were lured west following Lewis and Clark's epochal expedition, eager to portray the land and peoples of the exotic terra incognita that was now in America.

While this story of exploration and discovery …

Review Of Beyond The Missouri: The Story Of The American West By Richard W. Etulain, Julie Courtwright

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West, Richard Etulain, a self-proclaimed "radical middler," proposes to provide a "center-of-the-road book" that tells of the complex and changeable American West without allowing heroes and villains to overwhelm the narrative. This he does remarkably well. Etulain places his text within a school of Western history, recently emerged, that emphasizes complexity over the old frontier thesis and over the more recent conquest-oriented New Western histories.

Writing a balanced history from the prehistoric landscape to the post-1980s, Etulain takes a broad view of his topic, skillfully weaving a story that …

Review Of The Border Between Them: Violence And Reconciliation On The Kansas-Missouri Line By Jeremy Neely, Nicole Etcheson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Border between Them traces the troubled relationship across the Kansas-Missouri state line during the nineteenth century. Jeremy Neely successfully recreates the world of ordinary settlers, such as western Missouri farmer John Dryden, who didn't care whether Kansas became slave or free but suffered political violence nonetheless. In order to make the settlers' story intelligible, however, Neely often has to describe larger political events, making for much summary familiar to students of the Civil War era.

Missourians pioneered a slave frontier. They expected Kansas to be part of this dynamic economy, but free soil migrants resisted. Neely emphasizes some elements …

Review Of The Big Empty; Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers Edited By Ladette Randolph And Nina Shevchuk-Murray, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ladette Randolph and Nina ShevchukMurray have assembled a powerful collection of essays in The Big Empty, so titled because some people might describe Nebraska in that manner. This text counters that perspective. Each essay writer {save one} has published one book of nonfiction, and the expertise of each is apparent. Included are writers who seem like old friends through works-Ted Kooser, Lisa Knopp, Bill Kloefkorn, Roger Welsch, John Janovy Jr., Paul Johnsgard, Joe Starita, Ruth Raymond Thone, Mary Pipher. Other voices are mixed in, and the result is a fluid collection. Topics include Native American issues, J. Sterling Morton's …

Review Of Welcome To The Homeland: A Journey To The Rural Heart Of America's Conservative Revolution By Brian Mann, Donald P. Haider-Markel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Brian Mann's Welcome to the Homeland weaves together astute observations of the American political system with a personalized journey into the oonservative base of American politics. Mann's thesis is that the political divisions in America can be best characterized by an urban versus rural divide that has evolved over the past eighty or so years. Mann refers to rural voters as homelanders who have increasingly turned to the Republican Party in pursuit of their version of an America with nineteenth-century traditional values. City folk, meanwhile, are dubbed metros, and their increasingly cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and secular world view has led them …

Review Of Mennonites, Politics, And Peoplehood: Europe-Russia- Canada, 1525-1980 By James Urry, Benjamin W. Redekop

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For much of their history, Mennonites have tended to think of themselves as apolitical, quietistic folk-"the quiet in the land"-who eschew involvement in worldly affairs, especially those involving the use of any kind of "force," whether it be political, military, or even that of labor unions (such as strikes). Mennonite identity has been wrapped up in a biblical pacifism or "nonresistance" that goes back to the sixteenth century, and this has resulted in an often tense and ambiguous relationship with governments, as James Urry documents in Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood. The book is a deeply researched and sprawling account of …

Review Of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960. By Bill Anthes, Joyce M. Szabo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Arguing that Native artists developed a unique modernism between 1940 and 1960 as a response to cross-cultural encounters requiring both accommodation and resistance, Bill Anthes explores how differing styles of abstraction and growing artistic freedom coexisted with Native identity. During the 1920s and 1930s, a style of flat application of color, firmly outlined forms, and readily recognizable nostalgic Native images developed in Oklahoma and Santa Fe. Dominating Indian art for decades, this style became "traditional" Indian painting with its tenants upheld by institutions like the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa where annual Indian painting competitions began in 1946. Between 1940 and1960 …

Review Of Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood In The Boreal Forest By Rudy Wiebe, Hildi Froese Tiessen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rudy Wiebe, author of nine novels and three collections of stories as well as numerous other works, is best known for his historical fiction-particularly for novels featuring Canada's Native peoples. A first-generation Canadian whose German-speaking Mennonite parents fled Stalinist Ukraine in 1929 and then homesteaded in Saskatchewan, Wiebe has tended to set his fiction on the prairies or in the north. Appalled by the prevailing view that the Plains were "empty" before European immigrants arrived, he has consistently worked to document the repressed history of Canada. His writing has focused not only on the First Nations of his native land, …

Review Of Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer And Her Work By Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her career as critic and scholar, Lou Rodenberger has made a significant contribution to the study of Texas literature. Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own (1997), which she co-edited with Sylvia Grider, is in particular a readable and extremely useful literary history. Rodenberger's new book, Jane Gilmore Rushing, offers a full-scale biography and critical assessment of one of the most important Texas women writers of the twentieth century.

Rushing's engaging memoir, Starting from Pyron (1992), supplies much of what we know about the author's beginnings. Jane Gilmore was born in 1925 and grew up in the …

Review Of Riding To The Rescue: The Transformation Of The Rcmp In Alberta And Saskatchewan, 1914- 1939. By Steve Hewitt, Michael Dawson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a timely book. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has served as a popular symbol of Canadian identity since the late nineteenth century, is today awash with financial scandals and accusations of corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups. The police force that has its roots in the creation of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 is now perceived by many Canadians as just one more example of a modern, bureaucratic organization that has fallen victim to the misuse and abuse of power. Of particular concern is the RCMP's controversial role in monitoring and detaining suspected threats to national security. …

Review Of Fire In The Water, Earth In The Air: Legends Of West Texas Music By Christopher J. Oglesby, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From Bob Wills, Buddy Holly, and Waylon Jennings to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Ely, and Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks, Lubbock and its greater West Texas environs have been home to an unusually eclectic and creative musical community. Defining precisely what constitutes West Texas music is difficult, and diversity and variety often overshadow common features, but a West Texas "sound," blending elements of country, western, blues, early rock and roll, and folk and roots traditions into an identifiable if multifaceted genre, is widely accepted. The list of music "legends" associated with this region is indeed long and impressive and …

Review Of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora In Indian Country Edited By Tiya Miles And Sharon P. Holland, Susan Stebbins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This edited volume grew out of presentations made at the '''Eating Out of the Same Pot': Relating Black and Native (Hi)stories" conference held at Dartmouth in 1998, which examined the intersecting histories of American Indians and African Americans.

The collection includes fifteen essays, with an afterword by Robert Warrior, who reflects both on the essays and the '''Eating Out of the Same Pot'" conference. The introduction, co-edited by Miles and Holland, nicely summarizes some of the issues that gave rise to the Dartmouth conference and the essay collection. Cultural artifacts such as "doing things in an Indian way" may be …

The Pageant Of Paha Sapa An Origin Myth Of White Settlement In The American West, Linea Sundstrom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a literary work initiated and directed by a committee of women, The Pageant of Paha Sapa captures the zeitgeist of the post Arontier era through the eyes of the influential women of one small town. Like all origin myths, this script presented the current populace as the rightful heirs of the place and its resources, having won them through persistence, struggle, and divinely ordained destiny. The pageant's message was that "civilizing" influences had transformed the former Indian paradise and frontier hell-on-wheels into a respectable modern community. This theme of social evolution was typical of the larger pageant movement; however, …