Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Civil War On The Missouri-Kansas Border By Donald L. Gilmore, John M. Sacher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Donald Gilmore seeks to redefine our understanding of the conflict on the Missouri-Kansas border during the Civil War era. He contends that biased histories have long portrayed Kansans as innocents who suffered depredations at the hands of lower-class Missouri bushwhackers- a pejorative term that historians continue to use. These histories place special emphasis on William Clarke Quantrill, whom they almost invariably depict as a demonic leader of savages. According to Gilmore's corrective, if anyone should be blamed for the atrocities of the border war, it should be the abolitionist Kansans. Kansans, including Jim Lane, James Montgomery, and "Doc" Jennison, had …

Review Of Hidden Treasures Of The American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, And Alice Marriott By Patricia Loughlin, Courtney Vaughn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Patricia Loughlin has written an excellent work about three female scholars specializing in Native studies on the frontier, more specifically Oklahoma. Loughlin couches her analysis of Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott in terms of Nancy Parezo's concept of "hidden scholars." They comprised scores of early twentieth-century women who wrote for scholarly and popular audiences about Native people. Ironically, the three subjects in Loughlin's book were conceptually part of this larger movement but often worked in isolation. Although Debo did teach at West Texas State College, and Wright was editor of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, especially Debo …

Review Of A History Of Migration From Germany To Canada, 1850-1939 By Jonathan Wagner, Hans Werner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

German speakers have been important migrants to the Great Plains, but in Canada most came not from Germany, but from Eastern Europe. Given the low numbers that came to Canada from the Reich itself, Jonathan Wagner's study is more about explaining the country's failure to attract Germans than about their actual migration. According to Wagner, this failure can be explained by Canada's later and less complete industrialization, which meant that its "perceived needs could not win converts in the more industrialized Germany." While Canada was seeking immigrants to farm the wide-open spaces of the Canadian prairies, Germany was already an …

Review Of The Women There Don't Treat You Mean: Abilene In Song By Joe W. Specht, John Wheat

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What's in a name? If that name is "Abilene" and it rhymes easily with other poetic phrases and occupies a mystic landscape in the popular imagination, then there's quite a bit. That is the basic message of this modest but surprisingly complex essay in cultural geography that traces the presence of Abilene, Texas, in some sixty popular songs over the past century. Author Joe Specht, librarian and music historian at McMurry University in Abilene, has collected music and files on this subject for many years and finally brought it all together with recent interviews with many of the songwriters themselves. …

Review Of Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography And The Law By David ]. Carlson, Hertha D. Sweet Wong

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Sovereign Selves, David ]. Carlson presents an original, thoughtful, and convincing argument that early Native American autobiography was profoundly shaped by Native "engagement with colonial legal discourse." Even more dramatically, he proposes that such an engagement framed post contact Native self formulations. In short, the federal legal system constructed notions of the "Indian" (child of the forest, ward of the state, etc.) that Native autobiographers both accepted and refashioned.

Well read in legal, historical, and autobiography studies, Carlson takes the scholarship of Indian law further than most by showing not merely its tangible effects on Native populations, but …

Review Of The Heavy Hand Of History: Interpreting Saskatchewan's PastEdited By Gregory P. Marchildon; On The Side Of The People: A History Of Labour In Saskatchewan By Jim Warren And Kathleen Carlisle; & Saskatoon: A History In Photographs By Jeff O'Brien, Ruth W. Millar, And William P. Delainey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

CENTENNIAL SASKATCHEWAN

In their pictorial overview about the northern prairie city of Saskatoon, Jeff O'Brien, Ruth Millar, and William Delainey note that the opening decade of the twenty-first century contains three significant centennials for Saskatchewan, a land described by journalist Peter Gzowski as "that most Canadian of provinces." In 2005, Queen Elizabeth II joined Canadians in observing the centenaries of this western province as well as its restive sibling, Alberta. During 2006, residents and officials recognized the hundredth anniversary of Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan and home to the majestic University of Saskatchewan. For 2007, similar celebrations are planned …

Notes And News- Spring 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES AND NEWS

CALL FOR PAPERS

PLAINS INDIANS AND THE MAORI

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Review Of Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views Photographs By John Conway, Courtney Milne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his acknowledgments, John Conway writes: "I have 'gone out photographing' with only one other person in my life, my friend Garth Abrams. When we arrived at a place, we usually walked off in different directions, each preferring our own way." That statement defines Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views. As a Saskatchewan landscape photographer, I too resonate deeply with the solitude the Great Plains invites, if not commands. Conway's spartan landscapes form the mouthpiece for a haunting lament shared by all who choose to spend time alone here. To recognize these unadorned one hundred sweeps and unpretentious corners is to acknowledge our …

Review Of Fort Randall On The Missouri, 1856-1892 By Jerome A. Greene & Fort Concho: A History And A Guide By James T. Matthews, Barton Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

National Park Service historian Jerome A. Greene, a leading figure in western military historiography, here offers a comprehensive study of Fort Randall, which served as a bastion of U.S. Army presence in the Great Plains for thirty-eight years. Built in 1856, Fort Randall's garrison was expected to keep peace among Native Plains nations, prevent Indian-white conflicts, and monitor the burgeoning traffic on overland trails and the Missouri River. Located just above the Nebraska-South Dakota border, Fort Randall lay within two hundred miles of the Ponca, Santee, Yankton, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge reservations. Despite its proximity to these sometimes troubled reservations, …

Review Of The Shawnees And Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 By Stephen Warren, Christopher Arris Oakley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, historian Stephen Warren skillfully examines the various ways that the Shawnees responded to the expansion of the United States during the nineteenth century. According to Warren, for most of the 1700s the Shawnees lived in small to medium-sized politically autonomous villages governed by hereditary chiefs. After removal in the 1830s from Ohio to a reservation in Kansas, however, Indian agents and other federal officials encouraged the creation of a centralized Shawnee tribal government under a national council. This led to a struggle among the Shawnees between the descendants of the old village chiefs …

Review Of John Brown To Bob Dole: Movers And Shakers In Kansas History Edited By Virgil W. Dean, O. Gene Clanton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For nearly half of its existence as a political entity, it would seem that Kansas was assigned a larger-thanlife role on the national stage and-arguably-was on the right side of history, or at least aspired to be on the side of a common humanity; since then, especially from the 1920s and New Deal eras to the present, one might contend the state has been lodged within a backwater of time, in need of a new "crop of leaders" capable of dealing with modern exigencies. But according to this study's introductory essay, "this commodity seems in short supply at present .... …

Review Of We Know Who We Are: Metis Identity In A Montana Community By Martha Harroun Foster, James M. Pitsula

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is a rigorous, yet readable, exploration of Metis ethnic identity in Montana. It focuses on the Spring Creek community near Lewiston, tracing its Red River antecedents, analyzing responses to changing economic conditions, and examining ethnicity in the context of a variety of factors. The U.S., unlike Canada, has never given its Metis population official recognition. Despite this omission, Foster argues that the community has retained a strong sense of its core identity. As the title states, "We Know Who We Are." At the same time, this identity is complex, multilayered, and situational. The boundaries are porous, enabling the …

Title And Contents- Winter 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 1 / Winter 2007

CONTENTS

THE ART OF OPEN SPACES: CONTEMPORARY SEA AND PRAIRIESCAPES

"EVERYTHING PROMISED HAD BEEN INCLUDED IN THE WRITING": INDIAN RESERVE FARMING AND THE SPIRIT AND INTENT OF TREATY SIX RECONSIDERED

CRAZY HORSE: THE STRANGE MAN OF THE OGLALAS BY MARl SANDOZ: HISTORIOGRAPHY, A PHILOSOPHY FOR RECONSTRUCTION

REVIEW ESSAY: BUFFALO BILL, SUPERSTAR

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

"Everything Promised Had Been Included In The Writing" Indian Reserve Farming And The Spirit And Intent Of Treaty Six Reconsidered, Derek Whitehouse-Strong

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In December 2005, a Canadian federal court justice dismissed a six-hundred-million-dollar claim by the Samson Cree related to alleged mismanagement of its energy royalties. In newspaper interviews, a lawyer for the Samson Cree expressed disbelief and stated that the justice "discounted the testimony of our elders" and "followed essentially the word of the white man and the written word of the white man."

He continued: "It's as if the white man cannot be biased, but the Indians might be biased in their recounting of history." Interestingly, 120 years before the justice dismissed the Samson Cree case, the Canadian Department of …

Review Of A Seat At The Table: Huston Smith In Conversation With Native Americans On Religious Freedom By Huston Smith, Michael D. Mcnally

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As Native American religious traditions have reached new visibility and vitality over the last forty years, it is clear that constitutionally protected religious liberty has not extended to Native American communities. This is no mere matter of a tragic past; it is of currency today as a human rights concern. Indeed, two landmark cases by which the Rehnquist Court shrank the reach of constitutional protection for religious minorities generally involved Peyote practices of the Native American Church and management of sacred sites on federal lands.

A Seat at the Table explores the wide range of these contemporary issues, from protection …

Review Of The Colonel And Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, And The Beginnings Of Superstardom In America By Larry Mcmurtry Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody And The Wild West Show By Louis S. Warren, Sarah J. Blackstone

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

BUFFALO BILL, SUPERSTAR

William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody was the best known man of the Gilded Age, and in the eighty-nine years since his death his life and accomplishments have been examined, retold, debunked, reinvented, and dramatized hundreds of times. It could be said that there is nothing new to be learned about this iconic American figure. In 2005, however, two new books, each by a highly respected western historian, were published on the subject, and it turns out there is still much to be said about Cody. What makes these new studies different from those that have .come before …

Review Of Leaving Shadows: Literature In English By Canada's Ukrainians By Lisa Grekul, Mary K. Kirtz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the 1890s, when Canadian government officials first began a concerted effort to settle Canada's prairie provinces, they sent envoys to Eastern Europe, most notably to the area that is now Ukraine, to find people willing and able to accept the harsh conditions of the prairie region. Thus came the first large wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, followed by two others: during the Great Depression and immediately after World War Two. How has this large contingent of settlers fared in the Canadian imagination, specifically in its literature, as succeeding generations, born and raised in Canada, grapple with their dual …

Review Of Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life By Kingsley M. Bray, R. Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is a rare gift to receive a milestone book to review. Kingsley Bray's Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life is such a gift, as well as a turning point in the his torical literature of the Great Plains. Simply put, Bray's biography of the famed Lakota leader officially replaces Mari Sandoz's Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas: A Biography (1942) and consigns that most original work to the historical fiction section of our bookshelves where it has long belonged.

That it has taken sixty-plus years to supplant the one with the other speaks more of the difficulty of …

Book Notes- Winter 2007

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Architecture, Town Planning and Community: Selected Writings and Public Talks by Cecil Burgess, 1909-1946. By Cecil Scott Burgess

WinniPeg 1912. By Jim Blanchard

Alberta Remembers: Recalling Our Rural Roots. By Karen Brownlee

A History of Education in Saskatchewan: Selected Readings. Edited by Brian Noonan, Dianne Hallman, and Murray Scharf

Roadside History of Colorado. By Candy Moulton.

A Travel Guide to the Plains Indian Wars. By Stan Hoig

A Legacy Greater Than Words: Stories of u.s. Latinos & Latinas of the World War II Generation. Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Juliana Torres, Melissa DiPiero-D'Sa, and Lindsay Fitzpatrick

Review Of Going It Alone: Fargo Grapples With The Great Depression By David Danbom, Sean Taylor

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Going It Alone provides an in-depth examination of Fargo, North Dakota, during the Great Depression. Danbom was drawn to this study by his interest in the city in which he has lived for thirty years and by the impact the Great Depression had on his parents, his mother in particular. She, along with many other people who lived through that decade, carried the habits and attitudes shaped by the Depression throughout her adult life. The author notes correctly that any event "powerful enough to mold one's life is worthy of careful attention."

Danbom begins his study by outlining a series …

Review Of Charlie Siringo's West: An Interpretive Biography By Howard R. Lamar, Randolph B. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although he was born near the beach on Texas's Matagorda Peninsula in 1855 and died in a suburb of Los Angeles in 1928, Charlie Siringo spent most of his adventurous life on the Great Plains. He became a cowboy as a teenager, drove herds on the Chisholm Trail and helped establish the LX Ranch in the Panhandle while in his twenties, and married and opened a store in Caldwell, Kansas, before he turned thirty. Somewhat ironically, given that he left the cowboy life at an early age, Siringo then published an autobiography that gave future authors and movie makers everything …

Review Of Women Writing Women: The Frontiers Reader Edited By Patricia Hart And Karen Weathermon, With Susan H. Armitage, Gioia Woods

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The essays collected in Women Writing Women: The Frontiers Reader weave together theoretical, personal, and material frameworks feminist scholars use to write about their lives and the lives of other women. The essays, organized centrifugally ("Writing the Self" to "Writing Women from a Distance"), were selected by the editors from essays published originally in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Like the journal, Women Writing Women is multidisciplinary, theoretically informed, and, above all, grounded in the lived experiences of diverse women. Explaining the cohesiveness of the anthology in their introduction, editors Hart, Weathermon, and Armitage insist that the "diversity …

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man Of The Oglalas By Marl Sandoz Historiography, A Philosophy For Reconstruction, Mary Dixon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

HISTORIOGRAPHY: MYTH FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

Noted historians Will and Ariel Durant have outlined the importance of knowing, understanding, and celebrating history as a valuable heritage. They call historiography "an industry, an art, and a philosophy-an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of the materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment." A true evaluation of the history of the American West is an important consideration for Americans, because as the Durants claim, there is much to gain from a proper understanding of it. In order to gain perspective and enlightenment from …

The Art Of Open Spaces Contemporary Sea And Prairiescapes, Elizabeth Schultz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Once part of a great inland sea, Kansas and other Great Plains states have been landlocked for millennia. Yet the prairies' "grassy waves" and "islands of cottonwoods" continue to evoke these ancient waters. Diane Quantic in The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction points out that "[ilt is a rare plains writer who does not invoke the image of the sea of grass, and a rare critic or observer [of the plains] who does not comment upon [this image's] ubiquity." In his index for The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination, under "Prairie, likened to ocean," …

Review Of Indian Wars: The Campaign For The American West By Bill Yenne, Todd Leahy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Arguing that the Indian Wars after the Civil War were the longest campaign ever waged by the United States military, Bill Yenne once again covers welltrod territory. To anyone familiar with the work of Robert M. Utley, Yenne's Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West is immediately recognizable. Yenne states that his work will break down old stereotypes about the Indian wars and that "this book places the people and the battles in the context of the overall history of the nineteenth century and the Indian Wars in the West so that their place in American history will be …

Review Of Hidden In Plain Sight: Contributions Of Aboriginal Peoples To Canadian Identity And Culture, Volume L Edited By David R. Newhouse, Cora J. Voyageur, And Dan Beavon, Robin Brownlie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hidden in Plain Sight is a book with an unusual agenda: to discuss and publicize the many constructive, meaningful contributions that Aboriginal peoples have made to Canadian society. Aimed primarily at the general public, students, and Aboriginal people themselves, the book contains essays from treaty researchers, civil servants, lawyers, teachers, curators, artists, writers, undergraduate students, and academics. The book's impetus arose from its editors' frustration over the constant equation of Aboriginal people with pain, problems, and struggle. Widely absent from public discourse and academic writing, they felt, was attention to the strengths and capacity of Aboriginal peoples, their achievements in …

Review Of Indians And Emigrants: Encounters On The Overland Trail By Michael L. Tate, Susan Badger-Doyle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Relations between emigrants and the Indians they encountered along the central route of trails ro Oregon, California, and the Salt Lake Valley were a significant aspect of overland travel, particularly on the segment crossing the Great Plains. Emigrants and Indians is a comprehensive study of the complex history of these intercultural relations from 1840 to 1870. In contrast to popular stereotypical images of "savage" Indians and a focus on conflict, Michael Tate shows that cooperation, aid, and mutual benefit dominated Indian-white relations throughout the period. In topical chapters, he examines the evolving nature of relations between two fundamentally different peoples …

Review Of The Conquest Of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing In The Promised Land, 1820-1875 By Gary Clayton Anderson, Sam W. Haynes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The struggle between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans in Texas was a long and violent one. Beginning with the arrival of the first settlers to Stephen F. Austin's colony in the 1820s, when the area was still under Mexican rule, it would continue largely unabated until the U.S. Army's campaign against the western Plains tribes in the 1870s. In his latest book, Gary Anderson reexamines this collision of cultures, and in doing so challenges the triumphalist, Anglocentric narrative that has long dominated the historiography of the state.

In seeking to provide a new paradigm for the racial conflict that spanned half …

Review Of Tulia: Race, Cocaine, And Corruption In A Small Texas Town By Nate Blakeslee, J. Patrick Hazel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Tulia is a fascinating read and hard to put down. Unfortunately (especialiy for a native Texan), it is a true story that took place during the last year of the twentieth century and the first three years of the twenty-first in a small Texas town of about 5,000 located in Swisher County in the Texas Panhandle. The dominant themes are racial prejudice and legal misdoings, if not corruption, with justice finally winning out. But it is not really a "happy ending" book.

The events in Tulia were too reminiscent of my childhood. As a Texas trial lawyer and teacher of …

Review Of American Women Modernists: The Legacy Of Robert Henri, 1910-1945 Edited By Marian Wardle, Sharon L. Kennedy-Gustafson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is a common tendency in art history to lump artists and art styles into simplified categories, and early-twentieth-century modernist art is no exception. While the term broadly encompassed the ideas of individuality and social diversity, it later became equated with abstract art and an aggressive style, dominated by men. In this book, Marian Wardle and six other female scholars set out to broaden the modern art parameters and reinsert some two hundred professional women artists into the picture. Because Robert Henri taught thousands of men and women over a thirty-five-year period, the unifying thread is this astute, modernist teacher …