Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Destruction Of The Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 By Andrew C. Isenberg, William A. Dobak

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The transformation of the Great Plains through the introduction of new plants and animals and the restriction or near-eradication of native species is one of the great environmental events of the past two hundred years. In The Destruction of the Bison, Andrew C. Isenberg describes the nineteenth-century decline and near-extinction of one species and early twentieth-century attempts to regenerate and reintroduce it to its former habitat. Isenberg deals with cultural, ecological, and economic factors, stressing the "volatile" nature of the Plains and declaring that "the destruction of the bison was not merely the result of human agency, but the …

Review Of George Washington Grayson And The Creek Nation, 1843-1920 By Mary Jane Warde, Michael D. Green

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Late in his long and illustrious life, George Washington Grayson wrote a memoir. W. David Baird edited and published it in 1988 under the title A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy. Grayson had written mostly about his service in the Civil War but included enough about his life as politician and businessman to suggest he would be an excellent candidate for a biography. Mary Jane Warde, who began this study as a graduate student under Baird's direction, has done her subject justice.

Warde says Grayson was a progressive nationalist and a cultural broker. Well-educated, he represents a type in …

Review Of Massacre Along The Medicine Road: A Social History Of The Indian War Of 1864 In Nebraska Territory By Ronald Becher, Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Indian War of 1864 provides the historian of the West with a wealth of sources, as one may imagine after nearly a century-and-ahalf of accumulation. Official army reports and contemporary newspaper accounts join later reminiscences and oral histories to form a sizeable, if not formidable, body of information. Add to these some newly appreciated sources, such as the vast bureaucratic paperwork generated by the 1890s Indian depredation claims found in the National Archives, and it could only be a matter of time before a book like Massacre along the Medicine Road: A Social History of the Indian War of …

Bison: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Great Plains, An Introduction, Kenneth J. Winkle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout history, bison have exerted a fundamental influence on life and culture on the Great Plains, as both an ever-present reality and an enduring symbol. When planning the Center for Great Plains Studies' Interdisciplinary Symposium for the spring of 2000, Charlene Porsild, now with the Montana Historical Society, and I wanted to choose a topic with relevance that spanned the millennia, and so we selected the bison. Three years in planning, "Bison: The Past, Present, and Future of the Great Plains" brought over five hundred people to discuss, debate, analyze, and celebrate the bison as perhaps the premier symbol of …

Review Of European Immigrants In The American West: Community Histories Edited By Frederick Luebke, Jon Gjerde

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

European immigrants, Frederick Luebke argues correctly in his introduction to this collection of previously published essays, have been all but ignored by Western historians. Earlier Turnerian historians expected European immigrants to assimilate because this accorded well with their American frontier narrative. "New Western historians," focused as they are on race, also overlooked Europeans. Because European immigrants were "white," these revisionists of Turner similarly anticipated the Europeans' assimilation into the white majority. For their part, labor historians who have concentrated on class have rued the failure of Western workers, in part because of their attachment to ethnic group, to develop a …

Title And Contents- Spring 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 2 / Spring 2001

CONTENTS

BISON: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF THE GREAT PLAINS AN INTRODUCTION Kenneth Winkle

THE FIRST PHASE OF DESTRUCTION: KILLING THE SOUTHERN PLAINS BUFFALO, 1790-1840 Pekka Hamalainen

"THE LAST BUFFALO HUNT" AND BEYOND: PLAINS SIOUX ECONOMIC STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY RESERVATION PERIOD Jeffrey Ostler

"WHEN WE WERE FIRST PAID": THE BLACKFOOT TREATY, THE WESTERN TRIBES, AND THE CREATION OF THE COMMON HUNTING GROUND, 1855 William E. Farr

REVIEW ESSAY: THE GREAT PLATTE RIVER ROAD ARCHWAY MONUMENT Susan Wunder and John Wunder

BOOK REVIEWS

Andrew C. Isenberg The Destruction of …

"When We Were First Paid" The Blackfoot Treaty, The Western Tribes, And The Creation Of The Common Hunting Ground, 1855, William E. Farr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In mid-October of 1855, Blackfoot Treaty commissioner Isaac 1. Stevens, governor of Washington Territory and ex-officio its superintendent of Indian Affairs, and his co-commissioner Colonel Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Superintendency including Nebraska Territory, finally assembled the Blackfoot Peace Council just below the confluence of the Judith and Missouri Rivers. The federal government through the Office of Indian Affairs by then had already pieced together a new reservation policy for the West. This "new order of things," largely designed by Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny, hoped to reduce white conflicts with Indians, to prevent, if possible, expensive military …

Review Of The Earth Shall Weep: A History Of Native America By James Wilson, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This general history proposes to offer a Native American perspective on Indian-Anglo contact. Wilson's approach is now fairly standard. He includes substantial quotes from collections of Indian origin traditions and general ethnographic descriptions of elements of Indian cultures, bringing the narrative into the 1970s with accounts of the Indian occupations of Alcatraz in 1969 and the Wounded Knee trading post in 1972 .

Wilson's sympathetic telling of Native history leads to certain problematic interpretations. He describes Aztec leaders, for example, as holding flowers to their noses to counteract the unpleasant body odor of Spanish conquistadors who did not bathe, although …

Review Of Something In The Soil: Legacies And Reckonings In The New West By Patricia Nelson Limerick, Mark Daniel Barringer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stories matter.

That simple statement is at the heart of the now decades-old struggle between the "Old" and "New" Western histories. The stories people hear about their pasts contribute to the construction of both personal and collective identities. In other words, what we believe about who we are is, to a significant extent, determined by the stories we are told about where we came from. The dominant story of the past two centuries in American history has been the tale of the frontier-for most Americans, the "winning" of the West. It has become the creation myth of the United States. …

Review Of Into The West: The Story Of Lts People By Walter Nugent, Anne M. Butler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Walter Nugent's Into the West: The Story of Its People adds an outstanding volume to the canon of Western history, reminding readers of the intellectual vitality that fuels this discipline. The book undertakes a grand sweep of Western history, from the speculative past of prehistoric tribes to the speculative future of the twenty-first century. On this epic journey across and through the American West, Nugent delivers exactly what he promises: a book about people.

Despite romantic notions about the region that haunt Americans, Nugent sees the West as a definable place with a history larger than images of a "frontier …

Review Of A Country In The Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard Devoto, History, And The American Land By John L. Thomas, Frank J. Popper

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Thomas, a historian at Brown University, offers a conservation-focused portrait of two of the last century's most distinguished men of American Western letters, Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) and Wallace Stegner (1909-1993). Both grew up amid the ambivalent legacy of the boomer frontier. Both became prolific historians, novelists, journalists, and public intellectuals with touchy ties to academia. Both rank among the creators of modern environmentalism.

Thomas's sharply written, often evocative account of their life, work, and friendship deals largely with their efforts to preserve the public domain-that is, the federal lands of the intermountain West, what Thomas calls the national commons. …

Review Of Documents Of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, And Conventions, 1775-1979 Edited By Vine Deloriajr. And Raymond J. Demallie, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The relationship of Indian tribes to the federal government constitutes a legal maze since federal Indian law is embodied in a vast array of Congressional Acts, treaties and agreements, executive orders, rulings, conventions, and judicial opinions. Charles Kappler's Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties has been a standard reference for important documents relating to American Indian diplomacy. In their impressive two-volume set, part of the Legal History of North America series, Deloria and DeMallie have reproduced hundreds of treaties and agreements made by Indian nations that are unavailable in Kappler.

Volume one's twelve chapters range from the Pre-Revolutionary War period to …

Review Of The American West: A New Interpretive History By Robert V. Hine And John Mack Faragher, Keith Edgerton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is flat out the best, most inclusive, least partisan textbook on Western American history available to contemporary professionals and the general public. Lack of a suitable, comprehensive, apolemical text has long constrained teachers of Western US history; this one is something of an anomaly too: a textbook that is actually compelling to read.

The book is a substantial revision of Hine's 1984 The American West: An Interpretative History, second edition. It is comprehensive and capacious in its sweep-incorporating a great deal of important new scholarship on gender, the environment, ethnicity, and Native Americans-generous in detail, replete with superb …

Review Of Buffalo Soldiers And Officers Of The Ninth Cavalry, 1867-1898: Black & White Together By Charles L. Kenner, Tom Phillips

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Charles Kenner presents a vivid portrait of some of the men and officers of one of the four regiments of black enlisted men and mostly white officers in the post-Civil War army. This regimental cast runs the gamut from the dedicated and gallant to bigots and bullies. There is Colonel Edward Hatch, who commanded the Ninth for twenty-three years, and Major Guy V. Henry, a tireless cheerleader for the regiment and his own career. Here, too, are rankers "of all degrees of competence," such as Emanuel Stance, a Medal of Honor winner so hated he was probably murdered by fellow …

Review Of The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology And Animal Kinship By Howard L. Harrod, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Over the past several decades Howard Harrod-Oberlin Alumni Professor of Social Ethics and Sociology at Vanderbilt University- has published widely and well regarding the religious history of Great Plains Indians. His latest work examines what he calls "'sacred ecology' ... the sensibility, evident in North Plains cultures, that the world was constituted by powers that took the form of Persons. In hunting cultures, these Persons often appeared in animal form." A non-Indian (indeed, a non-hunter), Harrod has written his book because he thinks that these Native Americans have valuable insights for us all in "reimagining our relationships with the nonhuman …

The First Phase Of Destruction Killing The Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840, Pekka Hamalainen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The eradication of the vast bison herds from the North American Great Plains is one of the oldest topics in western history and, recently, also one of the most popular. Drawing ideas and methodologies from ecology and zoology, historians have revealed in the 1990s an entirely new anatomy of the destruction. According to the new interpretation, the great slaughter of the 1870s merely delivered a clinching blow to herds that had already been weakened in a number of ways. Concentrating on the Southern Plains, Dan Flores has concluded that large-scale dying may have begun as early as 1840, when a …

Notes And News- Spring 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News- Spring 2001

Circles Of Knowledge: Plains Indian Education

Marl Sandoz Heritage Society: Call For Papers

Missouri Valley History Conference: Call For Papers

Great Plains Chautauqua Society

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

Tribal Colleges

"The Last Buffalo Hunt" And Beyond Plains Sioux Economic Strategies In The Early Reservation Period, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sometime in late May 1882, several thousand bison appeared on the Great Sioux reservation about 100 miles west of the Standing Rock Indian agency (see Fig. O. According to James McLaughlin, the Standing Rock agent, the Indians knew "instinctively" that the buffalo had arrived, even though "it had been many years since the buffalo had sought the hunting-grounds of that part of the reservation." With this "rich store of succulent meat in sight," McLaughlin continued, "it was not possible that the Indians could be held in check." On 10 June, over 600 Standing Rock Lakota and Yanktonais left the agency. …

The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, Susan Wunder, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The summer of 2000 marked the grand opening of the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument just east of Kearney, Nebraska, on Interstate 80. Costing approximately $60 million the site features exhibits on the history of the American West in the first and only "museum" to straddle an interstate highway. At the 16 July grand opening, former Nebraska Governor Frank Morrison, a spry ninety-five years, reminisced before an audience of over six hundred, including both of Nebraska's US senators and its current governor, about having realized his dream of honoring the nation's westward movement.

Coverage of the event in the …

Review Of Sacred Fireplace (Oceti Wakan): Life And Teachings Of A Lakota Medicine Man By Pete S. Catches Sr. Edited By Peter V. Catches, Daniel J. Gelo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The late Oglala Lakota traditionalist Pete Catches or Petaga Yuha Mani (He Walks with Hot Coals) has left behind a memoir that is most noteworthy for what it doesn't offer. There is no sterile, technical inventory of ritual terms and formulae and very little that could be dismissed as New Age spiritualist bromide. Instead, there is a replication of oral reminiscences as they are customarily delivered by Indian elders-seemingly wandering associations that are, paradoxically, so efficient in generating memorable images in the listener's mind.

Catches's recollections of prosaic childhood teachings from the uncle who raised him (such as, "Always make …

Review Of Feels Like Far: A Rancher's Life On The Great Plains By Linda Hasselstrom, Nancy Zuercher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Feels Like Far is a poignant autobiography. Linda Hasselstrom observes like a naturalist, contemplates like a philosopher, and writes like a poet as she pursues her central question: "Death washed away the solid bedrock of my life as I drove back and forth across the plains this year. ... Are these changes in my life vortical growth? Or the destructive confusion of a prairie twister ?" Flashbacks and reflections weave past and present together.

As she ponders her husband's death, her father's aging and death, her mother's decline, her best friend's death, her move from her ranch to Cheyenne, and …

Review Of Willa Cather: Queering America By Marilee Lindemann, Michele Aina Barale

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Arguing that for Willa Cather "the body that signifies the nation is a queer body indeed," a body that is always out of the control of the very subject inhabiting it, of its own symbolic meaning, of even its relationship to citizenship itself, Marilee Lindemann tracks the "queer" as a "deviant, disruptive figure" in Cather's early fiction and letters. In both, the prairie "is even more elaborately figured as the staging ground for several impossible struggles: between immigrant and native-born, the illicitly sexual and the erotophobic, the effeminate male and the too-powerful female, the home wreckers and the nation-builders." And …

Title And Contents- Winter 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 1 / Winter 2001

CONTENTS

MANAGING THE FARM, EDUCATING THE FARMER:

O PIONEERS! AND THE NEW AGRICULTURE

William Conlogue

THE PRICE OF PATRIOTISM: ALBERTA CATTLEMEN AND THE LOSS OF THE AMERICAN MARKET, 1942-48 Max Foran

WOMEN'S SENSE OF PLACE ON THE AMERICAN HIGH PLAINS Cary W. deWit

EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN TOPEKA, KANSAS, PRIOR TO THE 1954 BROWN CASE Jean Van Delinder

REVIEW ESSAY:

PLAIN TRUTHS AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN NEW CATHER CRITICISM Deborah Carlin A review of Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition and Willa Cather and the …

Review Of With Unshakeable Persistence: Rural Teachers Of The Depression Era By Elizabeth Mclachlan, Robert J. Carney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1905 the Canadian government separated several districts from the Northwest Territories to establish the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Both provinces continued the centralized education system of the Territories. The newly-formed Departments of Education were expected to provide schooling in the recently settled agricultural areas, but were often unable to persuade parents to erect school districts. In 1910 the situation was bleak; Alberta and Saskatchewan had the lowest school age enrollment figures in the country.

Over the next twenty years, both departments accelerated the establishment of school districts administered by locally elected trustees and funded by local property taxes …

Review Of The Piikani Blackfeet: A Culture Under Siege By John C. Jackson, Darrell R. Kipp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a member of the Amskapi Pikuni, or Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, I did not begin serious study of my tribe until 1983, when I returned home. Harvard educated and knowledgeable of the world, I turned my early ventures in learning about the tribe after years of separation into a rewarding obsession. Beginning with John Ewers's The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (1958), I quickly decided to make a serious effort to acquire knowledge of the tribe and within a few years had reviewed most of the standard, and sometimes obscure, texts and identified redundant pieces. Subsequent study became …

Book Notes- Winter 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stories of Young Pioneers: In Their Own Words

Chiricahua Apache Women and Children: Safekeepers of the Heritage

The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America

A Sharing Of Diversities: Proceedings Of The Jewish Mennonite Ukrainian Conference, "Building Bridges."

Angels on High: Márton Váró's Limestone Angels on the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas.

Review Of Birthing A Nation: Gender, Creativity, And The West In American Literature By Susan J. Rosowski, Janis P. Stout

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Susan Rosowski, best known for her authoritative work on Willa Cather, establishes in Birthing a Nation her status as an authoritative scholar of American literature and cultural history more broadly. In a series of concise chapters on Margaret Fuller, Cather, Jean Stafford, the Classic (masculine) Western, and Marilynne Robinson, Rosowski identifies the centrality of the West to American conceptions of national identity. Borrowing an evocative phrase from Jane Tompkins's West of Everything, she proposes what is "surely a better way" of thinking of its meaning than the terms made familiar by popular Westerns- violence' aloofness, masculine exclusivity.

The controlling …

Review Of Cather Studies 4: Willa Cather's Canadian And Old World Connections Edited By Robert Thacker And Michael A. Peterman, Merrill Maguire-Skaggs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections is the first of four new collections that have emerged from international colloquia held in different locales of Cather's work. To those whose Cather is primarily a Nebraska writer, they may provide a jolt. Nevertheless, Willa Cather now not only belongs to the world but is also being claimed by a growing number of its corners: first Quebec; then Pittsburgh; then Winchester, Virginia; later New York City; and, most recently, the Southwest. One explanation for the exponential growth in Cather scholarship is, in fact, these geographical pulls which position her newly and thus …

Review Of Little Gray Men: Roswell And The Rise Of A Popular Culture By Toby Smith, David E. Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If you are looking for a definitive summary on the latest scientific evidence for or against the occurrence of what has come to be called the "Roswell Incident"-the crash and government retrieval of a flying saucer and alien bodies near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947- then Toby Smith's Little Gray Men is not for you. The book is not a detailed analysis of the incident itself; in fact, Smith takes it as a given that the alien crash did not occur. Instead, the author places Roswell in a larger cultural and historical context, making the case that Roswell is an …

Review Of One Degree West: Reflections Of A Plainsdaughter By Julene Bair, Elizabeth Dodd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Readers will likely be familiar with the background dramas in One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, Julene Bair's collection of eleven personal essays. Life in western Kansas has changed dramatically since the 1950s; the farming communities that were scraped or nestled into dry land, shortgrass country have seen two migrations in the last half-century: from the farm into town, the course taken by Julene Bair's parents; and out of the region, the trajectory of her own life. Farming itself has changed so much that those who haven't left cannot maintain the shape and rhythm of the lives they …