Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Notes And News- Spring 2005

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Great Plains Symposium 2005

Northern Great Plains History And The Society For Military History 2005 Conference

International Cather Seminar 2005

Call For Papers: Western History Association 2006 Conference

Western History Association 2005 Conference

Review Of Ghost Towns Alive: Trips To New Mexico's Past By Linda G. Harris, David Pike

Great Plains Quarterly

Not even ghost towns are exempt from progress. In New Mexico, some ghost towns are disappearing into the earth or being subsumed by ranches, while others are reincarnating themselves into outright tourist attractions. Accordingly, books about them are morphing from travel guides that tell us what we'll see, to coffee tables that show us what we missed. Ghost Towns Alive by Linda Harris is one of the former, but its artistic photos and clever, sensitive writing nod to the latter.

Harris offers her definition of "ghost town" as a place founded for a purpose, later to decline. By adding "accessible …

Book Notes- Spring 2005

Great Plains Quarterly

Book Notes

The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush Popping Cow Waddy

Jim Courtright of Fort Worth: His Life and Legend

Native American Literatures: An Introduction

Charles Fritz: An Artist with the Corps of Discovery

Saskatchewan Writers: Lives Past and Present

The Art of American Arms Makers: Marketing Guns, Ammunition and Western Adventure during the Golden Age of Illustration

Nebraska Simply Beautiful

Review Of The Great Sioux Uprising: Rebellion On The Plains, August-September 1862 By Jerry Keenan, Paul N. Beck

Great Plains Quarterly

With only eighty-nine pages of text, Jerry Keenan's The Great Sioux Uprising was not meant to be the definitive work on the Minnesota's Dakota War of 1862, but rather an overview of the conflict for the general public. As such, the book is a worthy effort. Keenan, the author of several volumes dealing with the Indian wars in the West, adequately covers the issues and events of the war.

Keenan, writing in an easy, reader-friendly style, first gives brief biographical sketches of the various individuals involved in the conflict, followed by a good general overview of the various reasons for …

Review Of Wilderness Journey: The Life Of William Clark By William E. Foley & William Clark And The Shaping Of The West By Landon Y. Jones, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

Following the Lewis and Clark expedition's return in 1806, almost a decade passed before the first official record of their journey was published by Nicholas Biddle and James Allen in 1814. Two hundred years later Gary E. Moulton's definitive thirteen-volume editing of the journals was completed. In the past two centuries dozens of books and thousands of articles have explored various aspects of the Corps of Discovery and its participants. Dozens of biographies have chronicled the lives of Meriwether Lewis, George Drouillard, York, and, especially, Sacagawea. Amazingly, William Clark has received little notice. One important exception was Jerome O. Steffen's …

Review Of How The Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage In The Western United States, 1868-1914 By Rebecca J. Mead, Karen E. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Rebecca Mead has crafted a detailed history of suffrage campaigns in the western states. While her accounts are particularly rich for California, her definition of the West also includes Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Each chapter of How the Vote Was Won focuses on one or a handful of states, tracing the factors Mead identifies as critical to success (or failure) of campaigns for woman suffrage. More than this, she provides vibrant descriptions of the backgrounds of state suffrage leaders, their relationships with prominent national suffrage activists, the content of state suffragists' …

Review Of High River And The Times: An Alberta Community And Its Weekly Newspaper, 1905-1966 By Paul Voisey, Bert Deyell

Great Plains Quarterly

Paul Voisey investigates the town's storyteller rather than the story of High River. Dismissing postmodernist media theories of communication as too abstract, Voisey opts for informal textual analysis: his personal interpretation. The pages of the High River Times, supplemented with personal papers of the proprietors and archives at the Glenbow Museum, evidence a cycle common to small town prairie history: boosterism, economic hardship, reappraisal, and reactionary rural idealism.

The Times initially declares the potential of High River in term of progress, says Voisey; the local weekly newspaper becomes a publicity agent for speculators, governments, and railways. But economic and …

Review Of Myths America Lives By By Richard T. Hughes, Kris Fresonke

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars of American culture can resist anything except temptation, and the ultimate temptation is to write a jeremiad. Like New England divines, suckled in a creed outworn, calling for reform from pulpits tenured and unnoticed, the contemporary academic observer of American life, as a matter of professional privilege, redrafts his raw material into a social gospel. Its formal features are fundamentalism and selective evidence. Its mood is unironic. It has one ending: decline and fall.

Richard T. Hughes's Myths America Lives By suggests that the United States has both created and been created by six national, and in some cases …

Review Of The Texas Indians By David La Vere, Thomas R. Hester

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is an overview of Texas Indian cultures from a historian's perspective. It suffers, in places, from both technical and interpretative errors often made by non-specialists trying to synthesize broad topics in anthropology and archaeology. For example, the author states that some Texas Paleo Indians used spear points with "blood gutters," a theory of the fluting on Folsom points that has not been seriously considered in the last sixty years. At the other end of the time scale, the author opines that miss ionized Texas Indians gave up stone tool use manufacture when they had access to (with "amazement …

Review Of Karl Bodmer's North American Prints Edited By Brandon K. Ruud, David C. Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly

The most authoritative study of Swiss artist Karl Bodmer's American prints to have been issued to date, this profusely illustrated volume represents the culmination of several years of exhaustive research by curators and others associated with the Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. A veritable catalogue raisonne of the eighty-one aquatints that comprise the artist's North American atlas (1839- 43), it does for the Bodmer series what previous compilations of this kind have done for the published works of John James Audubon and George Catlin.

The text for Karl Bodmer's …

Review Of Not Just Any Land: A Personal And Literary Journey Into The American Grasslands By John Price, Walter Isle

Great Plains Quarterly

John Price reads and travels his way into the grasslands, the prairies, in his fine new book. He reads four landscape writers-Dan O'Brien, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, and Mary Swander-who "commit to a place in such social and ecological peril" as the grasslands. Price also travels to each writer's "place" to talk and try to get a better sense of the ways each has "become native" to a particular geography. Those journeys are also Price's own immersion in the grasslands in hopes of discovering how he himself can be native.

In South Dakota, he reads Dan O'Brien's Equinox (1997) …

Review Of Cherokee Women In Crisis: Trail Of Tears, Civil War, And Allotment, 1838-1907 By Carolyn Ross Johnston, Rowena Mcclinton

Great Plains Quarterly

Johnston begins her book by sharing family stories passed down by her Cherokee female relatives whose narratives probably emanated from another ancestor, Caledonia, a victim of Cherokee Forced Removal (1838-1839). To quench her desire to learn more, Johnston seeks to furnish additional information about the sustaining power of women during times of extreme upheavals: forced displacement from the American South (1838-1839); the Civil War and its aftermath (1861-1877); and allotment in severalty of Cherokee lands (1887-1907). Following two other path breaking studies of Cherokee women, Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998) and Sarah H. Hill's Weaving …

Review Of Before Lewis And Clark: The Story Of The Chouteaus, The French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier By Shirley Christian, C. David Rice

Great Plains Quarterly

Shirley Christian's account of the St. Louis Chouteau family's activities and contributions on the trans-Mississippi frontier in the century between 1763 and 1865 breaks little new ground, but its publication does coincide nicely with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Historians will find much that is familiar combined with a sympathetic presentation of the principal figures of the Chouteau clan: Pierre Laclede; his successors, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau Sr.; and Pierre Chouteau Jr. and A. P. Chouteau of the third generation. The general reader will encounter a condensed version of the scholarly work of many decades and glimpse …

Review Of Ethnic Oasis: The Chinese In The Black Hills By Uping Zhu And Rose Estep Fosha, With Essays By Donald L. Hardesty And A. Dudley Gardner, William Wei

Great Plains Quarterly

The first thing readers should be made aware of is that the book's title is somewhat misleading. While the first two articles by Uping Zhu and Rose Estep Fosha focus on the Chinese in the Black Hills, the second two by Donald L. Hardesty and A. Dudley Gardner deal with the Chinese communities in Nevada and Wyoming, respectively. Perhaps more important, three of the four articles are actually about archaeology and what it reveals about the Chinese frontier experience rather than about the history and culture of the Chinese in the American West itself.

Billed as the background piece, Zhu's …

Adversaries And Allies Rival National Suffrage Groups And The 1882 Nebraska Woman Suffrage Campaign, Carmen Heider

Great Plains Quarterly

In September 1882, Nebraska was the setting for a significant moment in the history of the United States women's rights movement: the two rival suffrage organizations, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), both held their annual conventions in Omaha, an event Sally Roesch Wagner describes as "an unprecedented move." Furthermore, the AWSA and NWSA "act[ed] in conjunction with the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association" to schedule speakers during the 1882 campaign. Susan B. Anthony even participated in the AWSA thirteenth annual meeting held in Omaha in 1882. "I feel at home," she said, "on …

Table Of Contents- Spring 2005

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 25 / Number 2 / Spring 2005

CONTENTS

"VANISHING" INDIANS?: CULTURAL PERSISTENCE ON DISPLAY AT THE OMAHA WORLD'S FAIR OF 1898

ADVERSARIES AND ALLIES: RIVAL NATIONAL SUFFRAGE GROUPS AND THE 1882 NEBRASKA WOMAN SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGN

WITHER THE FRUITED PLAIN: THE LONG EXPEDITION AND THE DESCRIPTION OF THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT"

REVIEW ESSAY: DIFFERENT WAYS OF VIEWING A MONUMENT

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered By Jesse Lamer & Great White Fathers: The Story Of The Obsessive Quest To Create Mt. Rushmore By John Taliaferro, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly

DIFFERENT WAYS OF VIEWING A MONUMENT

Wandering through Keystone an evening not long ago and looking above the trees, I could see Mt. Rushmore in the distance. Apparently the lighting ceremony had just ended, and as I looked at those faces of Washington, Jefferson, T. R., and Lincoln, I felt a tinge of excitement. But why? I had seen them many times before. In fact, I spent a summer working for the concessionaire at the monument, serving food in the old Buffalo Dining Room. Every day I stared at those faces as I asked people if they wanted fried chicken …

Review Of Writing Her Own Life: Imogene Welch, Western Rural Schoolteacher By Mary Clearman Blew, Linda Karell

Great Plains Quarterly

In the concluding pages of Mary Clearman Blew's newest contribution to western literature, she describes driving with her daughter to Tenino, Washington, where her Aunt Imogene taught school during World War II. The road they travel makes Blew feel "unsettled," perhaps because "it's not taking me where I expected to be." Readers familiar with Blew's earlier memoirs, All But the Waltz (1991) and Balsamroot (1994), are likely to find themselves similarly unsettled as they traverse territory both eerily familiar and strangely unexpected. While All But the Waltz and Balsamroot are haunting and sometimes starkly painful explorations of family resentments and …

Review Of Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks And The Rise Of The American Indian Movement By Dennis Banks With Richard Erdoes, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Erdoes has established a veritable cottage industry by co-authoring the autobiographies of prominent Indians from the 1970s. Beginning with 1972's Lame Deer (with John Fire Lame Deer), he has since helped to produce works by Mary Crow Dog, Leonard Crow Dog, and even a sequel with Mary Crow Dog (a follow-up to their 1990 best seller, Lakota Woman). His most recent effort couples him with one of the American Indian Movement's founders, Dennis Banks. In some respects, this one is different. For starters, it comes from an academic publisher instead of a mass-marketing commercial press. In other respects, …

Review Of Remington Schuyler's West: Artistic Visions Of Cowboys And Indians Compiled And With Preface And Introduction By Henry W. Hamilton And Jean Tyree Hamilton, Marie Watkins

Great Plains Quarterly

Henry W. Hamilton and Jean Tyree Hamilton's Remington Schuyler's West establishes their friend Remington Schuyler (1884-1955) in the annals of American illustration and introduces his long forgotten work to a new public. This amply illustrated book is a pleasant read for anyone who appreciates popular culture, particularly regarding Western subjects.

Organized into three parts, the book opens with the Hamiltons' brief biography of Schuyler (illustrator, writer, associate of the Boy Scout movement, and instructor of illustration). Although written for a general audience, more could have been added here since biographical details round out the picture of Schuyler in the context …

Review Of Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story Of Survival By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Norma C. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Allison Hedge Coke's intimate narrative details her journey through suffering to wholeness. Her story will inspire anyone who has faced adversity. Hedge Coke was the "extra girl" whom her schizophrenic mother said she had "hated since the day she was born." The author suffered depression and suicide attempts, drug and alcohol addiction, rape and physical assaults, discrimination and poverty.

At the same time, Hedge Coke's insight is luminous: "congenital memory that of belonging by nature to landscapes runs the deepest of all the rivers of the earth." Her book remembers many landscapes-from North Carolina, the Tsalagi (Cherokee) homeland, to Texas, …

"Vanishing" Indians? Cultural Persistence On Display At The Omaha World's Fair Of 1898, Josh Clough

Great Plains Quarterly

Nebraska's Indian population exploded in the summer of 1898, but it was not due to natural increase. More than 500 Indians representing twenty-three tribes came to Omaha as part of the United States Indian Bureau's exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. During their three-month stay at the world's fair, Indians engaged in dancing, feasting, visiting, and earned money performing sham battles. In doing so they demonstrated not only the vibrancy and resilience of Native American cultures, but also the ineffectiveness of the government's assimilation policy. The Indian Bureau spent $40,000 for the Indian Congress (as this gathering of Native peoples came …

Wither The Fruited Plain: The Long Expedition And The Description Of The "Great American Desert", Kevin Z. Sweeney

Great Plains Quarterly

The view from Pikes Peak is breathtaking. Situated where the Great Plains meets the Rocky Mountains, one feels as if the whole nation is laid out before you. It is the perfect vantage point from which to write an inspirational anthem to the environmental magnificence of the United States. In the summer of 1893, Katherine Lee Bates, a Wellesley College English professor, sat on the summit of Pikes Peak, inspired by the panorama to pen the words to "America the Beautiful." Her poem was set to the tune "Materna" by Samuel Augustus Ward two years later to become one of …

Book Review: Western Lives: A Biographical History Of The American West, Richmond L. Clow

Great Plains Quarterly

This is an eclectic collection of short biographical essays from the American West grouped from contact to1850, from 1850 to 1900, and from 1900 through the end of the twentieth century. The editor defines the American West as beginning at the Mississippi River and ending on the Pacific coast. His guidelines for each contributor were simple: "to deal with the lives of notable westerners" and "to demonstrate how each of these lives broke from the main currents of the region's history."

Book Review: Adventures With A Texas Humanist, Steve Davis

Great Plains Quarterly

An Alabaman by birth, James Ward Lee is well positioned to understand a basic fallacy about Texas's image as a "western" state. Despite popular notions of cowboys, cactus, and wide-open spaces, Lee reminds us that Texas was essentially "southern" for much of its history. Up until the 1950s, cotton far exceeded cattle as a measure of the Texas economy. The literary arts followed in those economic footsteps. While "western" writers such as Larry McMurtry and J. Frank Dobie are now seen as emblematic of the state, Lee argues that "the literary heart and soul of Texas used to be located …

Book Review: Rock Beneath The Sand: Country Churches In Texas, William E. Montgomery

Great Plains Quarterly

On the southern apron of the Great Plains, in McLennan and surrounding counties in Central Texas, a handful of country churches stand as relics of a long-ago time of family farms, tiny crossroads towns, and dynamic ethnic and racial diversity. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Cumberland Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Evangelical, and Catholic congregations provided spiritual and worldly comfort for white, old-stock settlers who arrived before the Civil War, African Americans who came as slaves and remained as free people, Germans, Czechs, and Norwegians who followed, and Hispanics who, in many cases, sought refuge from the Mexican Revolution. They all looked to …

Book Review: George Mcgovern: A Political Life, A Political Legacy, Jon K. Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly

George McGovern, the three-term South Dakota senator, transcends the two great political eras of the last half of the American century. He first succeeded in politics as an advocate of the New Deal order and Great Society liberalism. He was defeated in his 1980 reelection bid as the Reagan revolution undermined the era of Democratic dominance that began with FDR's New Deal.

Book Review: Rivers Of Change: Trailing The Waterways Of Lewis And Clark, Robert K. Schneiders

Great Plains Quarterly

Rivers of Change: Trailing the Waterways of Lewis and Clark is Tom Mullen's account of his five-month-long journey from St. Louis, Missouri, to the mouth of the Columbia River at Astoria, Oregon. Mullen's book is large-part quirky travelogue, small-part history, and even smaller-part personal philosophy. Its bulk contains Mullen's observations while traveling along the banks of the Missouri River from St. Charles, Missouri, to Three Forks, Montana. As a matter of fact, approximately two hundred and fifty of the book's three hundred and eighteen pages are devoted to the Missouri River's past, present, and tentative future. The other rivers of …

The Buffalo Commons: Great Plains Residents' Responses To A Radical Vision, Amanda Rees

Great Plains Quarterly

The American Great Plains has gained and shed various regional meanings since Euro-American exploration began. From a desert to a garden to a dust bowl to a breadbasket, this region's identity has shifted radically and dramatically over the last 200 years. In Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, he argues that this Plains state can be understood as empty and bare: "The blank landscape prompted dreams of a blank-slate society, a place where institutes might be remade as humans saw fit." Authors such as Jonathan Raban have characterized the Great Plains as a whole in this manner. Raban …

Book Review: Unaffected By The Gospel: Osage Resistance To The Christian Invasion, 1673-1906: A Cultural Victory, J. Frederick Fausz

Great Plains Quarterly

As he did in his 1992 The Osage: An Ethno-historical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, Willard Rollings expands and enhances our understanding of that historically significant, but often neglected, Native nation in this new study of Christian missions.