Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 The Louisiana Purchase And American Expansion, 1803-1898 Edited By Sanford Levinson And Bartholomew H. Sparrow, Raymond D. Screws

Great Plains Quarterly

Editors Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow are unequivocal about their book's mission: to use the territory of Louisiana, hence, much of the Great Plains, as a catalyst to study United States expansionism, particularly in regards to expansion's constitutionality.

With one exception, these essays were first presented at a symposium at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 by scholars representing such diverse fields as constitutional law, history, sociology, government, and political science. Besides the editors' wonderful introduction, which clearly explains that the purchase of Louisiana served as an example for further American expansion during the nineteenth century, there …

Review Of Becoming Western: Stories Of Culture And Identity In The Cowboy State By Liza J. Nicholas, Eric J. Sandeen

Great Plains Quarterly

Becoming Western presents representative moments in the development of Wyoming, among these the waging of the Johnson County War, the development of dude ranches, the memorialization of Buffalo Bill in his eponymous town site, the founding of an academic program at the University of Wyoming, and a campaign for state-wide office in the late 1970s. Along the way, we meet the writers, entrepreneurs, and artists one would expect to see in a cultural history of Wyoming. We see few of the contemporary scholars and critics, however, whose nuanced handling of the same material might have cautioned Liza Nicholas against the …

Review Of Getting Away With Murder On The Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings And Celebrated Trials By Bill Neal, Paul N. Spellman

Great Plains Quarterly

"Courthouses are supposed to be temples of justice, places where disputes are peaceably resolved by reliance on reason, logic, and law, places where violent crimes are punished-not perpetrated." So begins one of Bill Neal's chapters, a reasonable definition of the American seat of jurisprudence. But not so, the author quickly reminds his reader, at least not on the Texas frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only was there little resolution in a West Texas courtroom beyond a hung jury or a mismanaged trial and a killer set free, but often that room became the site of …

Deadwood And The English Language, Brad Benz

Great Plains Quarterly

In "The New Language of the Old West," Deadwood's creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language:

Language-both obscene and complicated- was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people .... It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, but the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable, and there was a reason for that which had to do with the very fundamental quality of their behavior. They were raping the land. They weren't growing anything. They weren't respecting the cycles of nature. They …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

Book Notes- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

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 Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life On The Cherokee Border By James W. Parins, Brad Agnew

Great Plains Quarterly

Few Native Americans are more enigmatic than Elias Cornelius Boudinot, a nineteenth century Cherokee mixed-blood who championed policies opposed by most members of his tribe. The motivation of this complex individual whose actions undercut tribal sovereignty continues to intrigue those familiar with his life. James Parins, professor of English and associate director of the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, traces the life of Boudinot and explores influences that shaped his character in a well written and carefully researched biography.

Controversy, a continuing theme in Boudinot's life, swirled around the interracial marriage of his parents in …

Review Of Next Year Country: Dust To Dust In Western Kansas, 1890-1940 By Craig Miner, Brian Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

In this delightful book, historian Craig Miner of Wichita State University narrates the history of western Kansas, a sixty-county region lying west of Highway 81. Written as a sequel to his 1986 West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890, this volume traces the area's history up to 1940. Constructing a richly detailed, lively, and thoroughly engaging narrative, Miner draws on extensive research in thirty-five local newspapers and over twenty manuscript collections in the Kansas State Historical Society.

Newspaper reporters and editors were some of the most trenchant observers of life in their communities. But they often …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

Review Of A Northern Cheyenne Album Photographs By Thomas B. Marquis. Edited By Margot Liberty, Jerry Mader

Great Plains Quarterly

When my copy of A Northern Cheyenne Album arrived, I was immediately taken back to a day more than thirty years ago when John Wooden legs handed a dirty shoebox filled with 497 negatives to me and Tom Weist and said, "Will you take care of these? I don't know what to do with old pictures." The collection, made by Thomas B. Marquis between 1926 and 1935, came to John as a gift for the Cheyenne people from Marquis's daughters. Soon thereafter it became my privilege to restore the collection for the Northern Cheyenne Research and Human Development Association. Over …

Review Of Sculpture From The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Edited By Karen O. Janovy, Joan M. Marter

Great Plains Quarterly

The sculpture collection that is the subject of this book is worthy of priority consideration. This is a truly remarkable holding of major artists of the twentieth century. Although certain sculptors are missing from its stellar list, the overall quality of the works makes the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska a major center for the study of modern sculpture in the Great Plains. The visitor will find representative examples of Alexander Calder's sculptural innovations, a remarkable painted steel giant by Mark di Suvero, and a powerful outdoor sculpture in cor ten steel by Richard Serra. The …

Review Of The Life And Times Of The Steamboat Red Cloud, Or, How Merchants, Mounties, And The Missouri Transformed The West By Annalies Corbin, Ken Robison

Great Plains Quarterly

From St. Louis to Fort Benton, the Missouri River served as a natural highway into the vast North American West. The Life and Times of the Steamboat Red Cloud extends our understanding of the upper Missouri during the decisive period of settlement and trade in the steamboat era from 1859 to the arrival of railroads in the mid- 1880s. This important book views the development of the American and Canadian Rockies from a maritime perspective.

Journalist-historian Joel Overholser earlier emphasized the importance of the Canadian trade to Fort Benton. Corbin develops that theme through the great St. Louis-Fort Benton trading …

Introduction: From The Weight Of Gold To The Weight Of History In Hbo's Deadwood, David Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly

In the opening scene of the first episode of HBO's critically acclaimed historical drama Deadwood, an ordinary gold miner, Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), walks into the Gem Saloon, owned by Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), and proclaims: "I may 'a fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand before you today, beholden to no human cocksuckers. And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim." Ellsworth has established a gold claim in the Black Hills of the future South Dakota, and his proclamation of autonomy flows from the power and freedom gold delivers, even in the lawless town of Deadwood. …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

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

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, …

Title And Contents- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Review Of Katherine Anne Porter: The Life Of An Artist By Darlene Harbour Unrue, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

In contradistinction to earlier biographies- Joan Givner's groundbreaking work (1982, second edition 1991), Thomas Walsh's narrowly focused book on Porter and Mexico (1992), and Janis Stout's account of Porter's intellectual growth (1995)-this book provides primarily a fact-filled narrative of an artist's life shaped into elegant prose. Engaging and readable, Unrue's book documents her subject's entire life, but it is exceptionally strong and informative on the early childhood years notoriously difficult to research. In particular, Porter's religious formation and the disaster of her first marriage have never before been so well documented. Her youth in Texas and her brief but important …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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

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

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 From Syria To Seminole: Memoir Of A High Plains Merchant By Ed Aryain, Philip Kayal

Great Plains Quarterly

My uncles on my mother's side were peddlers. I often wondered how they managed this with no English skills, only a few dependable institutions, and a scattered number of informal commercial ties. From Syria to Seminole finally answers that question. Though a specialist on Arab-Americans, this is the second book I have reviewed on Syrians in the Plains and Southwest, and again I learned a great deal.

Literature on Arab-Americans is divided into two historical periods. Works written before 1975 were about the early, turn of the twentieth-century emigrants from Syria and Lebanon. Later on the field expanded to emigrants …

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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: …

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

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

Great Plains Quarterly

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 …