Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Thunderstorm In Human Affairs Edited By Edwin Kessler, Alec H. Paul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This magnificent book is copiously endowed with figures and photographs, with generous pages of eight and one-half by eleven inches. The book is organized and written in such a way that the interested layperson, the meteorology student, and the thunderstorm researcher will all benefit from it. The list of authors reads like an American "who's who" of specialists in the field of thunderstorms.

The book is a project of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and it has much to interest residents of the Great Plains although its geographic scope encompasses the entire United States. Kessler has produced …

The Prairie Mermaid Love-Tests Of Pioneer Women, Robert H. Solomon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In some fictional, historical, and autobiographical accounts of the lives of married women on the prairies of North America during the brief period between initial exploration and permanent settlement, there appears a rather widespread and complicated motif. In it the woman lives on an empty prairie, usually far from the edge of town; physically isolated with her husband, she is psychologically alone, too, and friendless, especially in terms of female companionship. Often her family is far away; always her husband is insensitive and unsympathetic, and, in general terms, unworthy of her devotion. Sometimes even before she is able to voice …

The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I, Sylvia Lea Sallquist

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given …

Review Of Wolves For The Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts And Auxiliaries With The United States Army, 1860-1890 By Thomas W. Dunlay, Clyde A. Milner Ii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Books on the U.S. military in the trans-Mississippi West abound. Yet surprisingly, no comprehensive study of the familiar but exotic Indian scouts has been published. Thomas W. Dunlay's work sets out to fill this void and is on the whole very successful. Dunlay approaches his subject in an analytic, thematic manner. He has a set of questions that frame the central chapters of his book. In general, he wants to understand why the U.S. military chose to include Indians in its western service and how these Indians were used. In addition, he seeks to understand the Indian point-of-view, the dynamics …

Review Of Western Oklahoma: A Photographic Essay Photographs By Daisy Decazes, Introduction And Text By William S. Banowsky, John E. Carter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Over the last several decades the photographic essay has gained more respect and understanding among serious students of culture. Western Oklahoma: A Photographic Essay falls abysmally short of the powerful potential of this medium. The work consists of seventy-five photographs by Daisy Decazes, a Sorbonnetrained photographer, and a brief introduction by William S. Banowsky, past president of the University of Oklahoma. The work begins with Banowsky's introduction, a simplistic time line of human evolution in Oklahoma, beginning with the Native American people's life and attempt to hold the land, followed by the onslaught of rugged pioneers, and culminating in the …

Review Of Westering Women And The Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 By Sandra L. Myres, John Mack Faragher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Professor Myres began the research for this survey of women in the American West, many historians believed that there were few manuscript collections documenting the experiences of nineteenth-century women, "Such is not the case," Myres concludes. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800- 1915, the first volume of the Histories of the American Frontier Series devoted to the history of women, treats us to what the late Ray Allen Billington called "one of the most remarkable bibliographies to materials in this new area." Myres summarizes her extensive reading in these documents in topical chapters: western women's views of …

Review Of Southwestern Agriculture: Pre-Columbian To Modern Edited By Henry C. Dethloff And Irwin M. May, Jr., Mary W.M. Hargreaves

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume, a collection of the papers presented at an Agricultural History Symposium held at Texas A&M University in May 1980, brings together the work of twenty-six discussants on a wide variety of topics designed to illumine the Southwest as "a distinctive region, neither south nor west, but a cultural amalgam that is greater than the sum of its parts" (p. 1). Like most symposia, the Texas sessions provided an assemblage of papers uneven in both the subjects covered and the quality of research.

Major gaps in the survey of southwestern agriculture are evident in the absence of studies of …

Review Of The Cattle Guard By James F. Hoy, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For anyone who has traveled the back roads and trails of the range country in the Great Plains, the cattle guard is a familiar and welcome sight. It is an open gate that enables cars and trucks to pass through a fence but prevents livestock from getting out of pastures. Although many styles exist, the cattle guard essentially is a pipe, bar, or wooden grid laid over an open pit or trench. The bars are spaced so that livestock will not walk on them for fear their hooves will slip through. No one can say when the first cattle guard …

Review Of Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes In Action By Lew L. Callaway, William L. Lang

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The image of a hastily gathered posse comitatus riding out of a fearfully paralyzed western town to administer swift and violent justice to a band of desperadoes is as firmly etched in the American mind as nearly any popular western scene. In one violent portrait, the remoteness of the frontier from civilization, the failure of established institutions, and the necessity of good men to protect their families and property are capsulized. The fascination with vigilantes is bred of the excitement of its violent solution and the inherent mystery behind it all. What drove men to take the law under their …

Review Of Belle Starr And Her Times: The Literature, The Facts And The Legends By Glenn Shirley, Darlis A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Glenn Shirley, whose extensive writings on outlaws and lawmen include Heck Thomas, Shotgun for Hire, Temple Houston, and West of Hell's Fringe, informs us that more than one hundred books and pamphlets have been published describing the exploits of Belle Starr, "the most maligned and written-about woman in America." Shirley wants to set the record straight, believing that Belle Starr deserves vindication. "My purpose," he states, "is to provide at least one comparison of contemporary reports and official records with the folklore and legends."

For aficionados of the outlaw-West, Belle Starr and Her Times will make intriguing reading. Like …

Review Of Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle By Sallie Reynolds Matthews & Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878 By Frances Mayhugh Holden, Sandra L. Myres

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Written as a memoir for her grandchildren, Sallie Reynolds Matthews's Interwoven was first printed in 1936 and reissued in 1958 in a handsomely designed edition by Texas's famous printer and designer Carl Hertzog with illustrations by E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz. As the reputation of the Matthews book grew, copies became harder and harder to find, and both the 1936 and 1958 editions are now rare and expensive. Happily this 1982 volume is an exact duplication of the 1958 Hertzog edition.

Born in 1861 in Stephens County, Texas, Sallie Reynolds grew up on the edge of the Great Plains, a harsh, …

Review Of The Great Kansas Bond Scandal By Robert Smith Bader, Patrick G. O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1933 Kansas was mired in the Great Depression, ravaged by the Dust Bowl, and afflicted by human cupidity. The biggest public scandal in Kansas history is the subject of this thorough and well-written monograph.

Ronald and Warren Finney, son and father, were the principal malefactors in the bond scandal. The state reverberated from the exposure of the "freewheeling, charismatic" Ronald's forging and deposit of bonds in the state treasury, brokerage houses, and banks to finance high living and business ventures. Even more disquieting was the knowledge of the culpability of his father, a respected, civic-spirited, influential businessman and banker …

Review Of Prairie Mosaic: An Ethnic Atlas Of Rural North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Robert C. Ostergren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ethnic atlases appeal to the general public because they graphically verify long suspected or perceived patterns of local or regional cultural differentiation. They are useful to academia because the geographic pattern portrayed is a variable that is basic to a wide variety of scholarly inquiries. Unfortunately, good ethnic atlases are few in number because compiling the data necessary to accurately describe ethnic patterns at an appropriate scale is a difficult and time-consuming task that few are willing to undertake. Those who have the patience to do this kind of work deserve our admiration and thanks.

This atlas is the work …

Review Of Cowboy Life On The Texas Plains: The Photographs Of Ray Rector Edited By Margaret Rector, Charles S. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This slim volume is a happy combination of photographs from the Texas ranching country and a breezy but thoughtful essay about cowboys.

The introduction by John Graves dissociates itself from the specific time and place of the photos but maintains its Texas connection in its regional values and the color of its language. Graves gives broad consideration to economic change, technological development, the persistence of tradition and myth, and the impact of ecological change upon cowboy life. The cowboys he portrays came from rural places, participated in a legend they had already absorbed, and performed their jobs for fun and …

Review Of Texas Woollybacks: The Range Sheep And Goat Industry By Paul H. Carlson, B. Byron Price

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Paul Carlson presents readers with a comprehensive, well-organized, and easily read treatment of a subject comparatively neglected by historians of the American livestock industry. The first major synthesis of the Texas sheep and goat business in nearly forty years, Texas Woollybacks adds measurably in detail and focus to omnibus classics like Shepherd's Empire (1945) and America's Sheep Trails (1948), and to pioneering studies of the Texas business such as Winifred Kupper's The Golden Hoof (1945) and more recently Val W. Lehmann's Forgotten Legions (1969). The author, nevertheless, leans heavily on these and a variety of other supporting secondary sources. While …

Review Of Oil Booms: Social Changes In Five Texas Towns By Roger M. Olien And Diana Davids Olien & Oil In West Texas And New Mexico: A Pictorial History Of The Permian Basin By Walter Rundell, Jr., Frederick W. Rathjen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Permian Basin covers about sixty-eight thousand square miles of west-central Texas and the adjacent southeastern corner of New Mexico. About two hundred million years ago the region lay beneath a salt sea that laid down a limestone floor upon which were subsequently deposited complex geologic formations that entrapped equally complex ecosystems. This combination of geological and biological evolution produced petroleum deposits that made possible a veritable marvel of the contemporary industrial world.

Before 1920, persons who considered themselves of sound mind found little attraction in the environment of the Permian Basin, for the region seems to present the worst …

Review Of Gauchos And The Vanishing Frontier By Richard W. Slatta, Douglas W. Richmond

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Professor Slatta has written a solid social history of the Argentine countryside in the nineteenth century. Not only does he describe and analyze the life-style of the gauchos-in itself, a formidable task-but he also outlines changes in the economy and in the political structure.

Slatta's research is quite thorough. He avoids the tendency of many historians of Argentina to overlook primary sources, especially in the Archivo General de la Nacion. Moreover, the author has looked into provincial archives, particularly those at Tandil, and demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the relevant secondary sources.

Handsomely produced and graced by attractive illustrations as …

Review Of The West Of Wild Bill Hickok By Joseph G. Rosa, Gary L. Roberts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Joseph G. Rosa's earlier book They Called Him Wild Bill is not only the definitive biography of the redoubtable James Butler Hickok but also a model for biographies of other western figures. The same qualities that marked Rosa's original biography of Hickok are evident in the present work. The West of Wild Bill Hickok is not a revision of the original biography (although it does present some new material not included in Rosa's 1974 revised edition), but rather, a thoughtful and detailed examination of the photographic record of the life and times of wild Bill Hickok. The purpose of the …

Review Of Jewels Of The Plains: Wildflowers Of The Great Plains Grasslands And Hills By Claude A. Barr, Curtis M. Twedt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After earning a degree from Drake University, author Claude Barr settled on a homestead just south of the Black Hills. In addition to his principal occupation as a rancher, Barr began to observe and propagate native plants in his small garden. One of his earliest ventures into writing about his avocation was an article in 1930 on the pasqueflower. He commented, "I was paid $20 for it, which seemed like a munificent price." This modest effort led to at least one hundred articles over the next fifty years.

Jewels of the Plains is not simply a compilation of plant characteristics …

Review Of The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico By David J. Weber, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This amply illustrated, fully documented and well-organized study is essentially a synthesis "built mainly on the work of other scholars" (p. xxii). However, David J. Weber also makes use of archival sources and primary materials in this overview of the Mexican borderlands. Part of the Histories of the American Frontier Series, this account sheds new light on "a dark age in the historiography of the Southwest" and differs from prior studies in two ways. First, it attempts to place this period "squarely within its Mexican context, without minimizing the significant activities of Anglo Americans and other aliens." Second, "the region …

Review Of Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, And Gerald Vizenor By Alan R. Velie, Charles L. Woodard

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Some of today's best writing is by Native American authors. That fact is not as widely known as it should be for two reasons: the majority culture tends to compartmentalize writing by and about Native Americans as "Indian" literature, and the traditions out of which such writing comes are different in many respects from European traditions, causing it to be undervalued and/or misunderstood. There is a strong need for bridge building between literary cultures in this country, and an equally strong need to break down the tendency to restrict Native American literature to ethnic categories.

Alan R. Velie's Four American …

Closing The Circle The American Optimism Of Laura Ingalls Wilder, William Holtz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It was the summer of 1894. Their wagon had halted where the ferry would take them across the Missouri River, while across the parched landscape they had just traversed, "covered wagons stood one beyond another in a long, long line." The woman spoke to the child at her side, '" That's your last sight of Dakota.''' At twenty seven, she had turned her back on Dakota and a failed homestead to set out for a new life in the Missouri Ozarks, leaving behind her own family and her husband's, in every way all she had ever known of home. Her …

Title And Contents -Spring 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SPRING 1984 VOL. 4 NO.2

CONTENTS

CLOSING THE CIRCLE: THE AMERICAN OPTIMISM OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER William Holtz

INDIAN MAPS: THEIR PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF PLAINS CARTOGRAPHY G. Malcolm Lewis

CARL SCHURZ AND THE INDIANS Hans L. Trefousse

THE BEGINNINGS OF WHEELED TRANSPORT IN WESTERN CANADA Barry Kaye and John Alwin

BOOK REVIEWS

With Good Intentions: Quaker Work among the Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas in the 1870s

Lakota Society

Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980

American Farm Tools: From Hand-Power to Steam-Power

NOTES & NEWS

Review Of Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan And The Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980 By Michael L. Lawson, Janet Mcdonnell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Under the Pick-Sloan plan the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed five mainstem dam projects that destroyed more than 550 square miles of tribal land in North Dakota and South Dakota. The projects wreaked havoc on five Sioux reservations: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and Yankton, Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980 chronicles the development and implementation of the plan and traces the events, personalities, and agencies involved.

The Pick-Sloan plan, formulated by Colonel Lewis A. Pick of the Army Corps of Engineers and William Glenn Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation, …

The Beginnings Of Wheeled Transport In Western Canada, John Alwin, Barry Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Water transport has played a major part in the economic development of Canada. It has been claimed that a series of east-west water routes were essential to Canada's evolution as a transcontinental nation. The many connecting rivers and lakes formed the lines of least resistance through the environment, so that in most regions of Canada, water transport was almost invariably the earliest and most important form of transport. Land transport and land routes developed more slowly and thus played a secondary role in Canada's development prior to the beginning of large-scale agricultural settlement. However, there was one region, the prairie …

Notes And News- Spring 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

UPCOMING CONFERENCES

PUBLICATION POSSIBILITIES

Carl Schurz And The Indians, Hans L. Trefousse

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Carl Schurz's importance as an immigrant leader and ethnic politician is well documented; his efforts on behalf of civil service reform and anti-imperialism have often been commented upon. His role as an administrator, however, is less familiar but by no means insignificant. Because it contributed to the more rational treatment of native Americans and the conservation of natural resources, it deserves to be explored more fully.

In March 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes sent to the Senate his nomination of Carl Schurz for secretary of the interior, party regulars were outraged. "In the selection of Mr. Schurz as one …

Review Of With Good Intentions: Quaker Work Among The Pawnees, Otos, And Omahas In The 1870s By Clyde A. Milner Ii, Robert H. Keller Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Early in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant began his "Quaker Policy" by inviting the Society of Friends to take responsibility for the administration of Indian affairs in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. The Friends, by appointing superintendents, hiring all reservation employees, and operating mission schools, would replace a corrupt patronage system and at the same time help tribes accommodate to a new way of life. The federal government, for its part, would supply goods, money, and official endorsement. Clyde A. Milner investigates the results of this experiment on three small reservations in Nebraska.

Over the past twenty years historians …

Review Of American Farm Tools: From Hand-Power To Steam-Power By R. Douglas Hurt, Reynold M. Wik

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

R. Douglas Hurt deals with the invention and development of American farm implements and machinery with a special emphasis on the nineteenth century. The material is organized around the functions of various agricultural machines used in the major grain-growing states. Ten chapters focus on the improvements made in plows, grain drills, corn planters, cultivators, reapers, binders, headers, corn binders, corn shellers, threshing machines, combined harvesters, mowing machines, hay stackers, feed mills, and steam traction engines.

The author decided to describe certain lines of farm equipment without trying to catalogue all agricultural tools, implements, and machines. Therefore the reader will not …

Review Of Lakota Society By James R. Walker, Herbert T. Hoover

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume contains a hodgepodge of personal writings and field notes by a physician who served at Pine Ridge Agency soon after the establishment of a reservation for Oglalas in western South Dakota. Without formal preparation, James R. Walker recorded (between 1896 and 1914) what he perceived from observations and collected from informants. Guided by published materials on the same general subject, Raymond DeMallie has strung them together on a thin editorial thread. Together, the meagerly trained researcher from a previous era and an anthropologist who has served on the faculty of Indiana University in recent years have produced a …