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Title And Contents- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 4 / Fall 2007

Contents

Introduction: From the Weight Of Gold To The Weight Of History In Hbo's Deadwood

Deadwood and the English Language

No Law: Deadwood and the State

"Whores and Other Feminists": Recovering Deadwood's Unlikely Feminisms

"Gold Is Every Man's Opportunity": Castration Anxiety and the Economic Venture in Deadwood

Review Essay: Reviewing the Western

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Book Notes- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary. By August Scherneckau

The Life of Yellowstone Kelly. By Jerry Keenan

Washita Memories: Eyewitness Views of Custer's Attack on Black Kettle's Village. Compiled and edited by Richard G. Hardorff.

Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. By Donovin Arleigh Sprague

The Papers of Will Rogers. Volume Five: The Final Years August 1928-August 1935. Edited by Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson.

On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions. By Felix S. Cohen

Road, River, and 01' Boy Politics: A Texas County's Path from Farm to Supersuburb. By Linda Scarbrough.

Literary Austin. Edited …

Review Of The National Grasslands: A Guide To America's Undiscovered Treasures By Francis Moul, Daniel S. Licht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When one first opens a book one never quite knows what to expect (one of the joys of reading!). That was the case with The National Grasslands: A Guide to America's Undiscovered Treasures. The title suggests a field guide to the nooks and crannies of the national grasslands whereas the stunning photography suggests a coffee-table book. So I was surprised to find something much deeper. This book is also an excellent account of the history of the national grasslands and, more importantly, a discussion of their future.

In a style as refreshing as a prairie breeze, Moul begins by …

Review Of Out Of The West: The Gund Collection Of Western Art By Suzan Campbell, Anne Morand

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1985, the final year of its travels, the Gund Collection of Western Art was exhibited at the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. Museum visitors still talk about the show more than twenty years later. I was fortunate enough to view it at several venues, including the Oklahoma Museum of Art in 1980, and was struck not only by the wealth of western art, but also by the vision and perseverance of collectors like George Gund. It is a great pleasure to know that his collection will reside in perpetuity for the public to enjoy along with …

Review Of Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, And The Role Of The American West In National Belonging By Dan Moos, Kalenda Eaton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Outside America offers a perceptive analysis of racial and ethnic undercurrents integral to the shaping of American western history. Its chapters revisit "rough riding" Theodore Roosevelt, African American narratives of homesteading and prosperity on the Great Plains and further West, Mormon literature, and the dubious position of Native American "performers" in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.

The opening chapter on Roosevelt places the president in the midst of burgeoning conversations about the mythical West and includes passages from Roosevelt's writings on his experiences as a hunter and rancher, often citing his frequent trips to the Dakotas and other locales in …

No Law: Deadwood And The State, Mark L. Berrettini

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Deadwood's final episode of season 3 opens with a monologue from theater operator Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), a relative newcomer to the camp of Deadwood. Shown in a wide shot that spotlights him on the dark stage of his nascent theater, Langrishe ostensibly speaks to one of his companions, the actress Claudia (Cynthia Ettinger), shown in one medium reverse-shot. Yet Langrishe also speaks and performs beyond the theater to the residents of Deadwood and to the program's viewers extradiagetically as he sums up the tense state of affairs within the camp:

This camp is in mortal danger. The man …

Review Of Twilight Innings: A West Texan On Grace And Survival By Robert A. Fink, Paul Christensen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Twilight Innings is an interesting book of essays for reasons that may go beyond the intention of Robert Fink, a poet and creative writing teacher at Hardin-Simmons University, a small, religious school in West Texas. Fink writes glowingly of his faith, the baseball games he loves to watch, the students he teaches in his "open admissions" poetry writing seminars, his wife's accomplishments as a school counselor.

What we learn is how this part of the Southern Plains hammers people into the same shape in its tiny oasis, Abilene. They share in common the Baptist religion, patriotism, a hard-edged conservative outlook, …

Review Of One Of Ours By Willa Cather, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Published in 1922, One of Ours proved to be pivotal in Willa Cather's career. Although she had already penned four novels and gained increasing critical acclaim, One of Ours won Cather the Pulitzer Prize, elevating her to the highest rank of twentieth-century American authors.

One of Ours is sometimes referred to as a "war story," but Cather's intent was to portray a young man from the Plains who came to France in World War I and found himself. This character, Claude Wheeler, was based on Cather's cousin, G. P. Cather, who was killed in France in May 1918. Richard Harris …

Review Of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place And Landscape In Literature Of The American Heartland By William Barillas, Sarah Jayne Hitt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Critical studies on the importance of place and landscape in Midwestern literature are not uncommon, but as William Barillas traces the trajectory of the pastoral tradition he provides a fresh perspective on how it has evolved through time and continues to influence contemporary writers. This analysis emphasizes ecology as well as landscape, making the book valuable for ecocritics as well as for scholars of the Midwest and Great Plains.

Barillas effectively argues that there is not one version of the Midwestern pastoral; rather, writers define the pastoral according to their individual artistic, cultural, and environmental concerns. Here Willa Cather is …

Review Of Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance To Termination, 1950-59 By Edward Charles Valandra, Patrice H. Kunesh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the vein of Vine Deloria Jr., the preeminent American Indian intellectual who in 1969 forced a raw consciousness about the tragic history and political status of Native peoples with Custer Died for Our Sins, Edward Valandra reminds us in Not Without Our Consent of the continuing importance of documenting twentieth- century American Indian history lest the Indian story be forgotten. Deloria, whose Lakota heritage and national leadership in Indian affairs significantly informed Valandra's work, contributed the foreword, setting the backdrop for one of the book's main themes, the federal government's "Indian Problem" in the 1950s and its imprudent plan …

Review Of Kansas Murals: A Traveler's Guide By Lora Jost And Dave Loewenstein, Karal Ann Marling

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a perfectly amazing little book-part toss-it-in-the-backseat tourist's guide and part scholarly tome filled with amazing facts and trenchant observations about some ninetyodd works of art embellishing various public walls, silos, grain elevators, and culverts scattered from one end of Kansas to the other. The authors, who paint murals themselves, have a delightfully catholic taste in art, too. The examples illustrated in all their luscious, technicolor glory run the gamut from community projects involving school kids and senior citizens to Beaux Arts maidens in cheesecloth borrowed from World's Fairs of the nineteenth century, to earnest New Deal paeans to …

Review Of From Prairie Farmer To Entrepreneur: The Transformation Of Midwestern Agriculture By Dennis S. Nordin And Roy V. Scott, Kimberly Porter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Students of agricultural history should be familiar with the works of Roy Scott (railroads, extension) and Dennis Nordin (the Grange). Similarly, students of agricultural history will find no immediate challenges to the familiar narrative of twentieth-century American agriculture in From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur. Indeed, chapters devoted to the story of the Great Depression and the rise of agricultural technology provide few if any challenges to the traditional canon.

No reader should lay this book aside, however, before arriving at its conclusion. For, according to Nordin and Scott, "Painful as the tragedies of failure were for individuals, their net …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Review Of Hollywood's West: The American Frontier In Film, Television, And History Edited By Peter C. Rollins And John E. O'Connor & Making The White Man's Indian: Native Americans And Hollywood Movies By Angela Aleiss, Armando Jose Prats

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Western, yet again, lies dormant. The revival that began in the late eighties with the greatest of adventures on the Great Plains, Lonesome Dove, and peaked some years later with Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (followed closely by George Cosmatos's Tombstone), announced that the gente had reclaimed its luminous moral core, even if it would henceforth cast its light in chiaroscuros of regret and remorse. Released in late 1990, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves revitalized the Indian Western, though in doing so it also revived the rancid myth of the Vanishing American. Whatever else may be said about it, …

"Whores And Other Feminists" Recovering Deadwood's Unlikely Feminisms, Anne Helen Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The very first vision of the female form in Deadwood is one of ultimate despair: the woman sits alone in the corner of a room, hysterically weeping, her face swollen and bruised with beating. A man sits across the room, a bullet through the temple, barely alive. He was beating her; she responded with a Derringer shot to the head. Moments later, the woman is on the ground in her pimp's office, his boot square on her neck. She writhes beneath him, nearly strangling to death before whispering through bloodied lips: "I'll be good." Meanwhile, the other prominent female character …

"Gold Is Every Man's Opportunity" Castration Anxiety And The Economic Venture In Deadwood, Kyle Wiggins, David Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In one of the most famous and quoted passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, "Men make their own history, but not spontaneously, under conditions they have chosen for themselves; rather on terms immediately existing, given and handed down to them." While the historical conditions that engendered the Black Hills gold rush of the mid-1870s were more "forced" by and upon the participants than "handed" to them, Marx's argument resonates loudly with the anti-romantic project of HBO's critically acclaimed Western, Deadwood. Series creator David Milch makes a similar point about the town of Deadwood: …

Title And Contents- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 3 / Summer 2007

Contents

How William F. Cody Helped Save The Buffalo Without Really Trying

Imagining Kansas: Place, Promotion, And Western Stereotypes In The Art Of Henry Worrall (1825-1902)

"Young Poets Write What They Know": William Reed Dunroy, Poet Of The Plains'

Review Essay: Ghost Dancing Anew

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of The Borderlands Of The American And Canadian Wests: Essays On Regional History Of The Forty~ Ninth Parallel Edited By Sterling Evans, Phil Bellfy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Before getting into my admittedly narrowly constructed remarks, I wish the reader to understand that overall this volume is a good and useful one. Despite its claim to be an examination of the "Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel," most of the nineteen essays focus exclusively on Great Plains history (about six have a decidedly non-Plains focus, while a few address more general area-wide topics). The value of the book is in its commitment to exploring how the imposition of the border affected people throughout the region, given the reality that no natural physical features exist to mark such an …

Review Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life And Times Of A Career Army Officer By Wayne R. Kime, Charles Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Richard Irving Dodge was a soldier and author whose diaries and published works on the Great Plains have served as primary sources for many years. Four of Dodge's Great Plains journals were edited for publication by Wayne R. Kime, who now caps that achievement with a long-awaited biography.

As Kime notes in his introduction, reprints of Dodge's works during the twentieth century maintained his reputation as an author, "but the facts of his military career were all but forgotten." In Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life and Times of a Career Army Officer, he has successfully resurrected Dodge's military career. …

Review Of Riding For The Brand: 150 Years Of Cowden Ranching By Michael Pettit, D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a family of ranchers, there is little doubt that the Cowdens have contributed to 150 years of the history of the western fringe of the Great Plains in Texas and New Mexico. As descendent and author Michael Pettit suggests, the Cowdens arrived in Texas approximately five years after the state was admitted to the Union. To add an additional perspective, Quanah Parker's band of Comanches were twenty-five years away from accepting reservation life at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory as William Hamby Cowden settled in Palo Pinto County, Texas. He clashed with bands of Comanches, . but in the …

How William F. Cody Helped Save The Buffalo Without Really Trying, David Nesheim

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although Leopold's aphorism refers to the common response to human suffering, it also reflects the way many historical accounts of the restoration of the American bison omit an important piece of that phenomenon. Most historians have focused their attention on two elements: western ranchers who started the earliest private herds and eastern conservationists who raised funds and lobbied for the creation of the first national preserves. However, the perpetuation of the image of buffalo in the hearts and minds of Americans was equally important in the eventual recovery of the species. No one was a more effective popularize than William …

Review Of American Outback: The Oklahoma Panhandle In The Twentieth Century By Richard Lowitt, Debbie Colson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Richard Lowitt's look at the Oklahoma Panhandle in American Outback is one of the first books documenting the area's recent history. Authors usually focus on the cattle operations prior to 1900 or solely on the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Ironically, not much is written in Oklahoma history books that specifically focuses on the Panhandle's history, so Lowitt's attention to its contemporary history is rewarding. He includes details about significant subjects such as the Dust Bowl; agricultural, oil and gas development; and the Optima Dam. In referencing farmer and magazine contributor Caroline Henderson, Lowitt recognizes her role in drawing …

Review Of The Broidered Garment: The Love Story Of Mona Martinsen Andlohn G. Neihardt By Hilda Martinsen Neihardt, Timothy G. Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1907, John G. Neihardt published A Bundle of Myrrh, his first volume of lyric poetry, thirty-three poems of often frank sexuality and longing. Reviewers found the book daring-the New York Times noted its "riotous joy of the flesh"-and occasionally crude. But it won Neihardt the ultimate rave review when it was read by a young American sculptress then studying with Auguste Rodin in Paris. When twenty-three-year-old Mona Martinsen read the poems, she was moved to write to the twenty-six-year-old Nebraska poet, beginning a correspondence that would culminate in a marriage proposal. In November 1908, when Mona Martinsen stepped …

Book Notes- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nebraska 1875: Its Advantages, Resources, and Drawbacks. By Edwin A. Curley

From Lead Mines to Gold Fields: Memories of an Incredibly Long Life. By Henry Taylor

Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Joseph Gossage of Dakota Territory. Edited by Paula M. Nelson

New Mexico Past and Future. By Thomas E. Chavez

Marc Simmons of New Mexico: Maverick Historian. By Phyllis S. Morgan

A Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures. Edited by George Horse Capture and Emil Her Many Horses

A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise …

Review Of Making Home Work: Domesticity And Native American Assimilation In The American West, 1860-1919 By Jane E. Simonsen, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the fields of western women's history and American Indian history have flourished in recent years, rarely have the two been brought together in such fruitful fashion as in Simonsen's remarkable study, Making Home Work. As her title suggests, Simonsen takes as her subject "the deliberate, arduous, and often self-conscious production of domesticity" in western spaces of cross-cultural "encounter." In doing so, she dramatically extends previous scholarly attention to the centrality of "women's work" to both the broad "mission" of indigenous assimilation and the particular project of Native women's "uplift." This book pursues the workings of white women's domestic discourse …

Review Of The Ambivalent Art Of Katherine Anne Porter By Mary Titus, James T.F. Tanner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mary Titus's The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter is an original, serious, feminist study of Porter's ever-shifting and problematic self-analysis respecting the proper roles of women in modern culture. According to Titus, Porter rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, unbecoming in view of the conventional notion of woman as child bearer. Yet Titus is certain that Porter overcame such notions, or at least ambivalently tempered them, to create her· memorable fiction.

In her fiction, Katherine Anne Porter (1890- 1980) provides varied treatments of the Great Plains areas …

Review Of Railwayman's Son: A Plains Family Memoir By Hugh Hawkins, Carlos A. Schwantes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Railwayman's Son is a lovingly crafted memoir of growing up in small-town Kansas and Oklahoma during the 1930s and 1940s. For this reviewer, who grew up in small-town Indiana during the 1940s and 1950s, Hugh Hawkins's evocative recollection inspired a flood of memories. The author is professor emeritus of history and American studies at Amherst College. Though we have never met, and though the particulars of Hawkins family life differ noticeably from mine, the process of coming of age in a Midwestern town in the years that bracket World War II would seem to offer us considerable common ground to …

Review Of In The Shadow Of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story Of The Indian Wars By Roger L. Di Silvestro, Bruce Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The U.S. Army excused the killing of one of its officers, Lt. Edward W. Casey, by Plenty Horses, an Oglala Lakota, to maintain its official position that the "incident" at Wounded Knee was a battle, not a massacre. Roger Di Silvestro's In the Shadow of Wounded Knee is the first full-dress history of this coda to the event at Wounded Knee during which between two hundred and three hundred and fifty Native peoples died, as well as forty-nine soldiers, many of whom were killed by friendly fire.

Casey, ironically, was himself something of an Indian rights defender. He recruited scouts, …

Imagining Kansas Place, Promotion, And Western Stereotypes In The Art Of Henry Worrall (1825-1902), Karen De Bres

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In May of 1876 three men took a private Santa Fe railroad car from Topeka, Kansas, ro the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. One was the Santa Fe land commissioner and the director of the railroad's exhibit, another was secretary of state for the Kansas Board of Agriculture. The third was a self-trained artist in the railroad's employ, and the designer of both the Kansas and Santa Fe exhibits. Fifty-one year old Henry Worrall lifted himself from a boyhood in the back streets of Liverpool to a comfortable life, and this journey in a company car, through artistic endeavors that helped support …

Review Of Hostiles?: The Lakota Ghost Dance And Buffalo Bill's Wild West By Sam A. Maddra & Ghost Dances And Identity: Prophetic Religion And American Indian Ethnogenesis In The Nineteenth Century By Gregory E. Smoak, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GHOST DANCING ANEW

The history and significance of the Ghost Dance received renewed scholarly attention in 2006, as these two fine but very different works attest. Sam A. Maddra's study adds new material to the significant literature about the bestknown incarnation of the Ghost Dance, which flourished among the Lakotas and gained infamy by association with 1890's tragedy at Wounded Knee. Gregory E. Smoak's book proceeds in a much different direction by examining Ghost Dances among the Shoshones and Bannocks, along with those groups' changing identities during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Together they not only enrich our understanding …