International and Area Studies Commons^™

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 …

Essay: Bison Restoration In The Great Plains And The Challenge Of Their Management, Judith L. Mcdonald

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Efforts to save remnant wild bison from extermination have resulted in the establishment of herds on private, public, and tribal lands. Ironically, their successful restoration has evolved into a profitable agricultural industry and a practical alternative to raising domestic cattle. Bison restoration actively managed by humans raises ecological, ethical, and evolutionary questions about whether we are compromising their native ability to function in a grasslands ecosystem. In this essay I examine current bison management practices, conflicting human values about land-use practices, and emerging land-use initiatives focusing on wild bison and ecosystem restoration in the northern Great Plains.

Review Of Texas Bug Book: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly By C. Malcolm Beck And John Howard Garrett, W. Eugene Hall

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Seeing the title of this book prior to reading it, I was a bit concerned about its content and possible negative outlook towards insects. Having worked as an entomologist the past sixteen years and possessing a lifelong appreciation for insects and other arthropods, I tend to think of all insects as "good," very few if any of them "bad," and none of them "ugly." Like it or not, every species of insect serves a positive or beneficial purpose in the great scheme of things within the natural world. Insects ruled this planet long before humankind became established, continue to dominate …

Latinos Along The Platte: The Hispanic Experience In Central Nebraska, Roger Davis

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This essay examines the arrival and growth of Latino population, principally Mexican American, into the Platte River valley region of Nebraska from 1890 to 1996. It outlines the history of the push and pull factors of immigration from Mexico and the various phases and characteristics of Latino settlement in the Midwest generally and in Nebraska specifically. It reviews demographic patterns over the 20th century and concludes with observations based upon census projections that indicate that the Nebraska Latino community will become the state's primary minority community by 2025.

Carbon Stable Isotope Analysis Of Bison Dentition, R. Mark Larson, Lawrence C. Todd, Eugene F. Kelly, Jeffrey M. Welker

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Understanding how bison behaved in the past can provide key insights for today's managers, ecologists, and anthropologists. However, the direct application of both historic documentation and modern field observations may not provide the necessary insights for understanding bison behaviors in archeological and paleontological contexts. In order to develop a better understanding of possible behavior within these contexts, we have developed individual foraging histories for 22 Bison bison from the Glenrock Buffalo Jump assemblage of the Plains Late Prehistoric period in Wyoming and four Pleistocene B. priscus from the Ukraine. Incremental stable carbon isotopic values of dental enamel were used to …

Review Of The Ecological Indian: Myth And History By Shepard Krech Iii, John C. Mohawk

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, anthropologist Shepard Krech III sets out to prove that the image of the indigenous peoples and cultures of the Americas so regularly invoked to demonstrate humanity's capacity to live harmoniously with nature is a misleading one, more the product of image building by modern ecologists than a reality of history. That image of the American Indian as ecologist was epitomized in a 1971 Keep America Beautiful, Inc. campaign against litter depicting actor Iron Eyes Cody as a Native American who shed tears over thoughtless acts of littering and pollution. It was an …

Review Of The Encyclopedia Of Native American Economic History Edited By Bruce E. Johansen, John Moore

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The publication of this reference work is well-timed to encourage a burgeoning new field of scholarship that cuts across the traditional disciplines of history, anthropology, economics, and political science. Since John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, economic history and political economy have occupied at least small sectors of these disciplines, but the field has been expanding in recent years thanks to the efforts of scholars who feel constrained by traditional disciplinary boundaries, scholars whose work is chronicled here.

Review Of The Smithsonian Book Of North American Mammals Edited By Don E. Wilson And Sue Ruff, Jerry Choate

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In his 1982 Journal of Mammalogy review of E. Raymond Hall's epic tome The Mammals of North America (1981), J. Knox Jones Jr. opined, "It is unlikely that any other American mammalogist would have undertaken, or will undertake again, such a gigantic task." That statement remains valid only because Hall produced useful maps.

The Smithsonian Book of North American Mammals is, in many respects, a companion volume to Wilson and Reeder's Mammal Species of the World: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (1993). That book, like the present one, was a collaborative effort with the American Society of Mammalogists and the …

Great Plains Research Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2001 News And Notes

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Contents:

Charles E. Bessey Award
Leslie Hewes Award
Great Plains Research Junior Science Award
Call for Papers

Where The Buffalo Roamed – Or Did They?, Richard Hart

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Grazing management on the Great Plains has been criticized for not more closely matching the presumed grazing patterns of bison. The critics assume that bison "flash grazed," that is, grazed heavily for a short time, then moved on, and did not return for months or even years. This assumption complements the traditional view of an annual north-south migration of the herds. However, evidence from explorers' and other travelers' journals contradict both flash grazing and annual north-south migration. In a few cases where prolonged continuous observations were made in the same favorable habitat, bison were seldom absent. In Canada, bison sometimes …

Review Of Parks For Texas: Enduring Landscapes Of The New Deal By James Wright Steely, Kenneth Hendrickson, Jr.

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This excellent study chronicles the growth of the Texas state park system from its beginnings in the 1880s to its maturity in the 1940s. Parks were established at first around historic sites from the Texas Revolution, and not until the 1920s did Governor Pat Neff envision the kind of modern park system that eventually developed. Even then, it was not until the 1930s that the system began to grow rapidly as a result of a federal-state partnership for Depression relief that provided the funds and labor to build fifty-two parks under the direction of the National Park Service.

Review Of The American Robin By Roland H. Wauer, Laura Erickson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Bookstore shelves bulge with bird books: field guides, feeding and birdhouse books, guides to hot spots, and books about individual families and species. One gaping hole in the body of bird literature has been a book about one of our most common and beloved songbirds, the American Robin. Robins nest in backyards and on buildings throughout much of the US and Canada and are one of the most familiar birds on the continent. A good book about them could fill an important niche.

Roland H. Wauer's lean volume is a start. Chapters include an overview of the robin's popularity, robin …

Review Of The Federal Landscape: An Economic History Of The Twentieth-Century By West. Gerald D. Nash, R. Douglas Hart

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Without question, the federal government created the twentieth-century West. It built dams and distributed water to farmers and urbanites, constructed federal highways that permitted the development of the region's natural resources, established navy, army, and air force installations, and provided contracts for the post-World War II military-industrial complex and aerospace industry. By so doing, the federal government made an indelible imprint on the Western landscape, in much contrast to the nineteenth century when individual enterprise gave the region its economic, social, and political identity.

A Commentary On Bison And Cultural Restoration: Partnership Between The National Wildlife Federation And The Intertribal Bison Cooperative, Stephen Torbit, Louis Larose

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In January 1997 the National Wildlife Federation and the InterTribal Bison Cooperative signed a memorandum of understanding formally recognizing our common goals of ending the slaughter of Yellowstone bison and working to repatriate buffalo to Native American reservations. It was the first time a formal relationship had ever been established between Native Americans and a national conservation organization. The partnership had two goals. The first goal was to reestablish management of North American bison as one of the premier wildlife species of the West, by restoring bison to those tribal and public land habitats capable of supporting their long-term survival. …

Review Of Theorizing The Bringing Back The Past: Historical Perspectives On Canadian Archaeology Edited By Pamela Jane Smith And Donald Mitchell, Raymond Le Blanc

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Bringing Back the Past consists of a collection of papers about the development of archaeology in Canada, most of them based on presentations delivered in sessions at three annual meetings of the Canadian Archaeological Association beginning in 1994. The first of these was organized by Pamela Smith and the late William E. Taylor Jr.; Donald Mitchell collaborated with Smith after Taylor's untimely death in 1994.