Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Willa Cather's Nebraska Priests And Death Comes For The Archbishop, L. Brent Bohlke

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Willa Cather returned to the prairies of her childhood as a locale for her fiction in O Pioneers! in 1913, she returned to a number of other things as well. Among these were the religious faith and practice of her old neighbors and the importance of this faith to their lives. Cather's experience of rediscovery, struggle, and assimilation of the Christian faith is reflected throughout her Nebraska books and is particularly evident in Death Comes for the Archbishop, written after she, along with her parents, had been confirmed into the Episcopal Church at Grace Church, Red Cloud. Although …

Review Of Labyrinths Of Voice: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch By Shirley Neuman And Robert Wilson, George E. Wolf

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Some years ago, in an interview with fellow praine writer Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch remarked, "You and I, because we are western Canadians, are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience." Kroetsch's published works (seven novels, a volume of collected poems, a book on Alberta, and a host of stories, critical essays, and interviews) are now a vital part of this new literature, and anyone interested in the life of the imagination in prairie Canada must read and savor-and sometimes contend with-Robert Kroetsch.

It is good, therefore, to have Labyrinths of Voice available in the Western …

Notes & News- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

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Cather's Last Three Stories A Testament Of Life And Endurance, Marilyn Arnold

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Near the end of her career-and her life-in the conclusion to the story "Before Breakfast," Willa Cather described the "first amphibious frog-toad" who, when he "found his water-hole dried up behind him," undauntedly "jumped out to hop along till he could find another" and in doing so, "started on a long hop."l At first glance, this little parable might appear to be a misplaced curiosity in a story by a Midwesterner about a frazzled businessman seeking refuge on an island off the North Atlantic sea coast. Closer scrutiny reveals it to be essential to the meaning of the story and …

Review Of Critical Essays On Willa Cather Edited By John J. Murphy, Bruce P. Baker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John J. Murphy's volume in G. K. Hall's series Critical Essays on American Literature is a significant contribution to Cather studies. In a substantial introduction, Murphy, who presently contributes the annual bibliographical essay "Fiction: 1900-1930" to American Literary Scholarship, has collaborated with Kevin Synnott in surveying Cather scholarship over the years. Both negative and positive reviews as well as important articles and books are chronologically presented and succinctly characterized. Murphy and Synnott give considerably more attention to the reviews than did Bernice Slote's fine bibliographical contribution to Sixteen Modern American Authors (1973); in so doing, they call attention to …

Review Of Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher Of The Plains By Helen Winter Stauffer, Robert Gish

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Invariably the name of Mari Sandoz is associated with the Great Plains and more particularly with Nebraska. As Helen Winter Stauffer's comprehensive biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains, makes clear, such an association had both its advantages and disadvantages in Sandoz's life and in her career as a writer. Like other authors who for better or worse come to be known as regional, Sandoz had to reconcile knowing her home intimately and being inspired by the "spirit" of that place with the need to transcend and universalize her home and her life stories through the very form …

Review Of Farm Women On The Prairie Frontier: A Sourcebook For Canada And The United States By Carol Fairbanks And Sara Brooks Sundberg, Vernon R. Lindquist

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a book divided-almost against itself. The first half consists of a series of brief essays, the second half a series of annotated bibliographies. The early essays seem caught between a chatty informality and serious scholarship. Added to this apparent indecision about style is a lack of collaboration on focus so that Sundberg's essay, "Early Agricultural Settlement on the Interior Grasslands of North America," seems without significant connection to Fairbanks's essay, "Women and their Visions: Perspectives from Fiction." More importantly, the authors seem confused about the book's purpose. It is called a "sourcebook," which implies a detailed bibliography (which …

Review Of Conversations With Wallace Stegner On Western History And Literature By Wallace Stegner And Richard W. Etulain, Kenneth C. Mason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Any new book by Wallace Stegner is a cause for celebration among students of the fiction and history of the American West, and this collection of ten interviews, conducted by Richard W. Etulain in 1980 and 1981, is an event of signal importance to all admirers of Stegner's work. The interviews begin with biographical clarifications, treat the fiction next (with separate chapters on The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose), and then turn to the Mormons, western literature, western history, and the western wilderness, with a concluding miscellaneous chapter.

The transcripts of the interviews were revised only …

Review Of Willa: The Life Of Willa Cather By Phyllis C. Robinson, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I dwell in possibility," one of Emily Dickinson's memorable fIrst lines, would be an appropriate epigraph for this biographical study, which titilates the reader with suppositions about Cather's attachments to other women. For example, Louise Pound was an early "infatuation" for two years, until Cather attacked brother Roscoe Pound because "he must have hurt her in a way she could not forgive .... Had he found himself attracted to her and been rebuffed? Had he lashed out and bullied her for preferring his sister to himself? Perhaps he made fun of her attachment to Louise? Perhaps he did more than …

Review Of Western American Literary Criticism By Martin Bucco, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Martin Bucco's Western American Literary Criticism is a tight, terse compendium of Western American literature and its criticism from the mid-1700s to the present. Beginning with an examination of the relative worth of the early criticism (and finding much of it "a byproduct of the bar and the pulpit"), he discusses the American preoccupation at various times with Western humor, regionalism, morality, and the effect of Marxist criticism on the literature.

With so much territory to cover in so little space, Bucco cannot present a detailed study of the many individuals important to the field, but he manages adroit brief …

Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

So much has been written about Willa Cather and the influence of the classics and later European literature that one sometimes forgets the American literary climate in which she developed. It was a postromantic age of realism, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt to limit fiction to normal characters in commonplace situations, which would make of it, as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's illusion preserver." But the new breed of "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in revolt against Howells and his more accomplished contemporary, Henry James, and advocated a return to romance without the chivalric trappings of Walter Scott …

Review Of Wichita: The Early Years, 1865-1880 By H. Craig Miner, John C. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

City histories written in the late nineteenth century by amateurs were panegyrics to local men of property and standing. City "biography" was very much just that-a collective biography of the men who made the city what it was. As the discipline of urban history has matured, the view that tied each community's development to the unique personalities of its leaders has given way to an interest in the process of urbanization and the examination of cities as case studies, important primarily because of what they say about the larger urban experience.

Craig Miner's Wichita is a throwback to the …

Review Of The Gate City: A History Of Omaha By Lawrence H. Larsen And Barbara J. Cottrell, Harl A. Dalstrom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This work, the fourth volume in Pruett Publishing Company's Western Urban History Series, is a survey of the history of Omaha from its founding in 1853-1854 to 1980. It is the third general history of Omaha to be published since 1980 and is the first to give any relatively significant treatment to the city's history in the post-World War II era.

Larsen and Cottrell divide their narrative into ten chapters that cover five periods, each from twenty to thirty years. The narrative of fewer than three hundred pages, including a large number of photos, is synoptic and fast. paced, and …

Notes And News- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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Review Of Plains Families: Exploring Sociology Through Social History By Scott G. Mcnall And Sally Allen Mcnall, J. Allen Williams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Scott and Sally McNall, of the University of Kansas, provide a new and interesting way to teach sociology. Plains Families uses the social history of the Great Plains region of the United States from the 1860s to the present to demonstrate how abstract sociological ideas and concepts are grounded in reality.

A variety of source materials (e.g., letters, diaries, interviews) are used by the authors to construct composite case histories of families. The presentation of each case is followed by a chapter designed to illustrate a major dimension of sociology. The illustration, in turn, affords the reader a much better …

Review Of Men Of The Steel Rails: Workers On The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 1869- 1900 By James H. Ducker, Robert H. Zieger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Using an impressive array of company and union publications, newspapers, directories, and archival materials, James H. Ducker delineates the lives and experiences of the Santa Fe Railroad's labor force. Although he includes three chapters relating to unionism, strike action, and working-class politics, his main focus is on the more private side of his subjects' stories. Even in his chapter on the railroad unions, the author is as interested in the fraternal and social functions they served as in their collective bargaining character.

Ducker carefully places each of his topics in an appropriate historiographical context. When dealing with the strikes of …

Review Of Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks At The Wild And The Tame By Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, John W. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anthropologists have been slow to take up intensive fieldwork in American life, partly because their professional training has emphasized that "the exotic" is something found only in remote tribal societies, not in urbanized North America. But with the transformation of tribal cultures into developing nations, anthropologists have begun to turn to their own culture and have found it possible to see it as exotic. This book is an example of that new genre. The author has unusual equipment for the task: she was trained as a veterinarian and also as an anthropologist, and her study of rodeo grew out of …

Review Of The Platte: Channels In Time By Paul A. Johnsgard, Leslie T. Whipp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This little book about Nebraska's Platte River is an inch wide and a mile deep.

In both form and content, the book is an argument for the life of the Platte River Valley. The prose text is less than a hundred pages; weaving in and around it are verses from Pawnee songs; maps and aerial photos; photos of animals, birds, and plants. Appendices identify the many different species of life that flourish in the valley, their locales and seasons.

The text takes us from before time until our own time, then confronts us with tomorrow. The author associates the Platte …

Mapping The Interior Plains Of Rupert's Land By The Hudson's Bay Company To 1870, Richard I. Ruggles

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By royal charter, Charles II in 1670 granted to a small coterie of London entrepreneurs, united in a joint stock company, exclusive trading privileges in a vast territory of then unknown dimensions. The group was the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay," the Hudson's Bay Company. The territory was Rupert's Land, named for Prince Rupert, cousin of the monarch, who graciously consented to act as the first governor of the company. By charter, Rupert's Land included "all the Landes Countryes and Territoryes upon the Coastes and Confynes of the Seas" lying within Hudson Strait, that is, the …

Review Of Inventing Billy The Kid: Visions Of The Outlaw In America, 1881-1981 By Stephen Tatum, Kent L. Steckmesser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Here is a sophisticated study of an individual who is both a "timeless conventional outlaw and a timely invented outlaw." Tatum traces the changes in the images of Billy the Kid over one century, relating them to concurrent social and cultural circumstances. The historical William H. Bonney is accorded one chapter, but the book's main concern is the multitude of interpreters who have created their own versions of his life in works ranging from dime novels and biographies to ballets and films.

Initially, between 1881 and 1900, the Kid's biography was formulated as a "romance." As a "bad" badman, a …

Review Of Shadows Of The Indian: Stereotypes In American Culture By Raymond William Stedman, Paul H. Hutton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Raymond William Stedman approaches the pervasive stereotyping of American Indians with the awe of the devotee of popular culture who was raised on stories of noble warriors and animalistic savages, but also with the outrage of a modern humanist who hopes to reveal and discredit demeaning images. This leads to an interesting dichotomy in the book as the author presents endless examples of insulting-but sometimes entertaining-Indian images from histories, novels, plays, films, and television. After more than two hundred pages of insulting, humorous, and sometimes wonderfully lascivious material, Stedman delivers a twentypage sermon on the evils of such material and …

Review Of Plains Indian Studies: A Collection Of Essays In Honor Of John C. Ewers And Waldo R. Wedel Edited By Douglas H. Ubelaker And Herman J. Viola, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A dual Festschrift is unusual, but here we have one celebrating a collective century of achievement by John Ewers and Waldo Wedel, two scholars of the first rank. Ewers and Wedel, long-time colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, are well known to historians and anthropologists with special interests in the plains of North America. Indeed, each has contributed to the basic structure of their respective disciplines: Ewers essentially to ethnology and Wedel to archeology. Neither scholar worked within a strictly academic setting and thus, neither had students in the usual sense, yet Ewers and Wedel have been remarkably influential and are …

Review Of A Bibliographical Guide To The Study Of Western American Literature By Richard W. Etulain, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As Richard Etulain states in his preface, this is a comprehensive but not exhaustive bibliography of books, dissertations, and articles about western American literature. The bulk of the volume lists materials on more than 350 major western authors, including some major historians and nonfiction writers, but perhaps the most significant part of the book is the section dealing with seven important aspects of the field that suggest ways of arranging research to go beyond individual works and authors to overviews and generalizations.

Etulain's categories are: (1) local color and regionalism, (2) popular western literaturedime novels and the Western, (3) western …

Review Of The Matador Land And Cattle Company By W. M. Pearce, Richard A. Bartlett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The question that immediately comes to mind is: what justified a second printing in hardcover of this book first published eighteen years ago? The book is certainly well written, though it is not of great literary excellence; it is also very well organized and researched, yet not brilliantly so. The real contribution is clearly its subject matter.

In 1882 a group of businessmen, most of them from in and around Dundee, Scotland, purchased for $1,250,000 what became the Matador Land and Cattle Company. At the time, many other British and Scottish investors were also plunging into the American cattle business. …

Review Of The American Farmer And The New Deal By Theodore Saloutos, David E. Hamilton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This posthumously published study by Theodore Saloutos is an important addition to the burgeoning number of works on New Deal farm programs. The subject is enormous. Saloutos focuses on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's efforts to curtail production and to enact marketing agreements, the struggle to broaden farm relief to include both black and white farmers on the bottom half of the rural economic and social scale, the fight to bring electricity to rural America, Henry Wallace's quest to open up the clogged system of international trade, and the programs to rescue the farmers and ranchers of the Great Plains from …

Title And Contents- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SUMMER 1984 VOL. 4 NO.3

CONTENTS

THE PRAIRIE MERMAID: LOVE-TESTS OF PIONEER WOMEN Robert H. Solomon

MAPPING THE INTERIOR PLAINS OF RUPERT'S LAND BY THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY TO 1870 Richard I. Ruggles

THE IMAGE OF THE HIRED GIRL IN LITERATURE: THE GREAT PLAINS, 1860 TO WORLD WAR I Sylvia Lea Sallquist

BOOK REVIEWS

Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers

Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle

Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878

Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915

Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes in Action

Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts …

Review Of Red Harvest: The Communist Party And American Farmers By Lowell K. Dyson, Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By surveying Communist efforts to organize farmers and farm workers, Lowell K. Dyson has done for agriculture what Bert Cochran did for the CIO in Labor and Communism-presented a full account of Communist activities uncolored by Red-baiting or apologies. Dyson begins by noting the paradox in Communist efforts: "Communists sought to change the very nature of the American agricultural system, but the programs which won them the broadest hearing among farmers were aimed at preserving the system" (p. xi). Maintaining an even-handed objectivity, Dyson nonetheless conveys a sympathetic understanding of how some farmers came to espouse radicalism.

In the …

Review Of This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas Of United States And Canadian Society And Cultures Edited By John F. Rooney, Jr., Wilbur Zelinsky, And Dean R. Louder, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What would you like to know about the cultural geography of the United States and Canada? Many aspects of society and culture in North America are displayed on the 387 maps and drawings in this fine atlas, which is a major landmark in the development of cultural geography.

The atlas is an outgrowth of the work of the Society for the North American Cultural Survey, which has as its long-term goal the production of a definitive atlas of contemporary American cultures based on fieldwork and surveys. This Remarkable Continent is an interim report that represents the extent of existing knowledge. …

Review Of Singing Cowboys And All That Jazz: A Short History Of Popular Music In Oklahoma By William W. Savage, Jr., Stephen Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A monograph defined by state boundaries must begin (and may very well end) as an inventory- even if the scholar intends by careful study of the particular to make a contribution to wider human understanding, perhaps, or to explain the ways of a state to itself. Enthusiasts of six powerful genres of American music will recognize Oklahoma as an apt subject for an inventory of popular music. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was first transcribed at a Choctaw boarding school in Oklahoma and sent to the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nashville, Tennessee, who made it among the best known of black …

Review Of Many Tender Ties: Women In Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 By Sylvia Van Kirk, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The bittersweet story of women in the fur trade of the Canadian Northwest has been a long time in the telling. According to standard historical interpretations, trading furs was an exclusively male domain; related activity, particularly if it involved women, was seen as peripheral, and often as libertine. As Sylvia Van Kirk makes clear, however, that is a one-sided view at best; the previously dismissed social aspect of the fur trade was far more important than has generally been assumed.

The Hudson's Bay Company did its official best to prevent alliances from developing between its men and Amerindian women. This …