Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of The Troll Garden By Willa Cather, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the introduction to this variorum edition of Cather's first collection of stories, James Woodress, distinguished American literature scholar and Cather biographer, points out that Cather regarded her short fiction as her literary apprenticeship and wrote few stories after she began publishing novels. One could also observe that Cather did not develop the genre significantly and accordingly is infrequently anthologized. At the same time, it should be pointed out that her stories are important because they anticipate the novels thematically and, perhaps more importantly, because they provide us with a venue for the development of her craft.

That interest is …

Title & Contents- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1984 VOL. 4 NO.4

CONTENTS

WILLA CATHER TODAY: AN INTRODUCTION Mildred R. Bennett and Susan J. Rosowski

WILLA CATHER AND THE SWEDES Mona Pers

WILLA CATHER'S AMERICAN GOTHIC: SAPPHIRA AND THE SLA VE GIRL Susan J. Rosowski

NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES John J. Murphy

CATHER'S LAST THREE STORIES: A TESTAMENT OF LIFE AND ENDURANCE Marilyn Arnold

LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE CATHER WORLD: A PERSONAL ESSAY Lucia Woods

WILLA CATHER'S NEBRASKA PRIESTS AND DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP L. Brent Bohlke

WILLA CATHER TODAY James E. Miller, Jr.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Troll Garden

Willa Cather: …

Willa Cather Today An Introduction, Mildred R. Bennett, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The essays in this volume were originally presented in June 1983 at the second national seminar on Willa Cather, "Willa Cather Today." For nearly a week, 125 people gathered in Hastings and Red Cloud, Nebraska, some coming from nearby homes and some traveling from twenty-eight other states, India, China, and Sweden. In doing so, participants had in substance one of the most basic ideas in Cather's writing, that place and movement are complementary. In coming to Webster County, participants affirmed the importance of not only place in Cather's writing but also the journeys that connect lives. In 1981, the theme …

Review Of Conversations With Wallace Stegner On Western History And Literature By Wallace Stegner And Richard W. Etulain, Kenneth C. Mason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Any new book by Wallace Stegner is a cause for celebration among students of the fiction and history of the American West, and this collection of ten interviews, conducted by Richard W. Etulain in 1980 and 1981, is an event of signal importance to all admirers of Stegner's work. The interviews begin with biographical clarifications, treat the fiction next (with separate chapters on The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose), and then turn to the Mormons, western literature, western history, and the western wilderness, with a concluding miscellaneous chapter.

The transcripts of the interviews were revised only …

Review Of Willa: The Life Of Willa Cather By Phyllis C. Robinson, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I dwell in possibility," one of Emily Dickinson's memorable fIrst lines, would be an appropriate epigraph for this biographical study, which titilates the reader with suppositions about Cather's attachments to other women. For example, Louise Pound was an early "infatuation" for two years, until Cather attacked brother Roscoe Pound because "he must have hurt her in a way she could not forgive .... Had he found himself attracted to her and been rebuffed? Had he lashed out and bullied her for preferring his sister to himself? Perhaps he made fun of her attachment to Louise? Perhaps he did more than …

Review Of Willa Cather: A Bibliography By Joan Crane, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Willa Cather: A Bibliography, Joan Crane has surpassed our fondest hopes for a bibliography that would establish and describe the Cather canon. This is a volume that will be invaluable to collectors and booksellers, textual critics, and literary scholars.

By following rigorous standards of analytical description, Crane provides the specialized information that booksellers, private persons, and librarians need to collect and preserve Cather's printed writing. Ordinarily, the needs of the collector, who focuses on physical characteristics, seem different from those of the literary scholar, who focuses on content. But this separation is neither so easy nor so clear …

Review Of Western American Literary Criticism By Martin Bucco, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Martin Bucco's Western American Literary Criticism is a tight, terse compendium of Western American literature and its criticism from the mid-1700s to the present. Beginning with an examination of the relative worth of the early criticism (and finding much of it "a byproduct of the bar and the pulpit"), he discusses the American preoccupation at various times with Western humor, regionalism, morality, and the effect of Marxist criticism on the literature.

With so much territory to cover in so little space, Bucco cannot present a detailed study of the many individuals important to the field, but he manages adroit brief …

Review Of Many Tender Ties: Women In Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 By Sylvia Van Kirk, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The bittersweet story of women in the fur trade of the Canadian Northwest has been a long time in the telling. According to standard historical interpretations, trading furs was an exclusively male domain; related activity, particularly if it involved women, was seen as peripheral, and often as libertine. As Sylvia Van Kirk makes clear, however, that is a one-sided view at best; the previously dismissed social aspect of the fur trade was far more important than has generally been assumed.

The Hudson's Bay Company did its official best to prevent alliances from developing between its men and Amerindian women. This …

Review Of Prairie Mosaic: An Ethnic Atlas Of Rural North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Robert C. Ostergren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ethnic atlases appeal to the general public because they graphically verify long suspected or perceived patterns of local or regional cultural differentiation. They are useful to academia because the geographic pattern portrayed is a variable that is basic to a wide variety of scholarly inquiries. Unfortunately, good ethnic atlases are few in number because compiling the data necessary to accurately describe ethnic patterns at an appropriate scale is a difficult and time-consuming task that few are willing to undertake. Those who have the patience to do this kind of work deserve our admiration and thanks.

This atlas is the work …

Review Of The Thunderstorm In Human Affairs Edited By Edwin Kessler, Alec H. Paul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This magnificent book is copiously endowed with figures and photographs, with generous pages of eight and one-half by eleven inches. The book is organized and written in such a way that the interested layperson, the meteorology student, and the thunderstorm researcher will all benefit from it. The list of authors reads like an American "who's who" of specialists in the field of thunderstorms.

The book is a project of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and it has much to interest residents of the Great Plains although its geographic scope encompasses the entire United States. Kessler has produced …

Review Of The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico By David J. Weber, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This amply illustrated, fully documented and well-organized study is essentially a synthesis "built mainly on the work of other scholars" (p. xxii). However, David J. Weber also makes use of archival sources and primary materials in this overview of the Mexican borderlands. Part of the Histories of the American Frontier Series, this account sheds new light on "a dark age in the historiography of the Southwest" and differs from prior studies in two ways. First, it attempts to place this period "squarely within its Mexican context, without minimizing the significant activities of Anglo Americans and other aliens." Second, "the region …

Review Of Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, And Gerald Vizenor By Alan R. Velie, Charles L. Woodard

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Some of today's best writing is by Native American authors. That fact is not as widely known as it should be for two reasons: the majority culture tends to compartmentalize writing by and about Native Americans as "Indian" literature, and the traditions out of which such writing comes are different in many respects from European traditions, causing it to be undervalued and/or misunderstood. There is a strong need for bridge building between literary cultures in this country, and an equally strong need to break down the tendency to restrict Native American literature to ethnic categories.

Alan R. Velie's Four American …

The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I, Sylvia Lea Sallquist

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given …

Review Of Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks At The Wild And The Tame By Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, John W. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anthropologists have been slow to take up intensive fieldwork in American life, partly because their professional training has emphasized that "the exotic" is something found only in remote tribal societies, not in urbanized North America. But with the transformation of tribal cultures into developing nations, anthropologists have begun to turn to their own culture and have found it possible to see it as exotic. This book is an example of that new genre. The author has unusual equipment for the task: she was trained as a veterinarian and also as an anthropologist, and her study of rodeo grew out of …

Review Of Plains Indian Studies: A Collection Of Essays In Honor Of John C. Ewers And Waldo R. Wedel Edited By Douglas H. Ubelaker And Herman J. Viola, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A dual Festschrift is unusual, but here we have one celebrating a collective century of achievement by John Ewers and Waldo Wedel, two scholars of the first rank. Ewers and Wedel, long-time colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, are well known to historians and anthropologists with special interests in the plains of North America. Indeed, each has contributed to the basic structure of their respective disciplines: Ewers essentially to ethnology and Wedel to archeology. Neither scholar worked within a strictly academic setting and thus, neither had students in the usual sense, yet Ewers and Wedel have been remarkably influential and are …

Review Of Southwestern Agriculture: Pre-Columbian To Modern Edited By Henry C. Dethloff And Irwin M. May, Jr., Mary W.M. Hargreaves

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume, a collection of the papers presented at an Agricultural History Symposium held at Texas A&M University in May 1980, brings together the work of twenty-six discussants on a wide variety of topics designed to illumine the Southwest as "a distinctive region, neither south nor west, but a cultural amalgam that is greater than the sum of its parts" (p. 1). Like most symposia, the Texas sessions provided an assemblage of papers uneven in both the subjects covered and the quality of research.

Major gaps in the survey of southwestern agriculture are evident in the absence of studies of …

Review Of Wolves For The Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts And Auxiliaries With The United States Army, 1860-1890 By Thomas W. Dunlay, Clyde A. Milner Ii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Books on the U.S. military in the trans-Mississippi West abound. Yet surprisingly, no comprehensive study of the familiar but exotic Indian scouts has been published. Thomas W. Dunlay's work sets out to fill this void and is on the whole very successful. Dunlay approaches his subject in an analytic, thematic manner. He has a set of questions that frame the central chapters of his book. In general, he wants to understand why the U.S. military chose to include Indians in its western service and how these Indians were used. In addition, he seeks to understand the Indian point-of-view, the dynamics …

Review Of Gauchos And The Vanishing Frontier By Richard W. Slatta, Douglas W. Richmond

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Professor Slatta has written a solid social history of the Argentine countryside in the nineteenth century. Not only does he describe and analyze the life-style of the gauchos-in itself, a formidable task-but he also outlines changes in the economy and in the political structure.

Slatta's research is quite thorough. He avoids the tendency of many historians of Argentina to overlook primary sources, especially in the Archivo General de la Nacion. Moreover, the author has looked into provincial archives, particularly those at Tandil, and demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the relevant secondary sources.

Handsomely produced and graced by attractive illustrations as …

Notes And News- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

PUBLISHING AWARDS

NEW PUBLICATIONS

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

OPPORTUNITIES

Review Of Belle Starr And Her Times: The Literature, The Facts And The Legends By Glenn Shirley, Darlis A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Glenn Shirley, whose extensive writings on outlaws and lawmen include Heck Thomas, Shotgun for Hire, Temple Houston, and West of Hell's Fringe, informs us that more than one hundred books and pamphlets have been published describing the exploits of Belle Starr, "the most maligned and written-about woman in America." Shirley wants to set the record straight, believing that Belle Starr deserves vindication. "My purpose," he states, "is to provide at least one comparison of contemporary reports and official records with the folklore and legends."

For aficionados of the outlaw-West, Belle Starr and Her Times will make intriguing reading. Like …

Review Of This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas Of United States And Canadian Society And Cultures Edited By John F. Rooney, Jr., Wilbur Zelinsky, And Dean R. Louder, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What would you like to know about the cultural geography of the United States and Canada? Many aspects of society and culture in North America are displayed on the 387 maps and drawings in this fine atlas, which is a major landmark in the development of cultural geography.

The atlas is an outgrowth of the work of the Society for the North American Cultural Survey, which has as its long-term goal the production of a definitive atlas of contemporary American cultures based on fieldwork and surveys. This Remarkable Continent is an interim report that represents the extent of existing knowledge. …

Review Of The Platte: Channels In Time By Paul A. Johnsgard, Leslie T. Whipp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This little book about Nebraska's Platte River is an inch wide and a mile deep.

In both form and content, the book is an argument for the life of the Platte River Valley. The prose text is less than a hundred pages; weaving in and around it are verses from Pawnee songs; maps and aerial photos; photos of animals, birds, and plants. Appendices identify the many different species of life that flourish in the valley, their locales and seasons.

The text takes us from before time until our own time, then confronts us with tomorrow. The author associates the Platte …

Review Of The West Of Wild Bill Hickok By Joseph G. Rosa, Gary L. Roberts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Joseph G. Rosa's earlier book They Called Him Wild Bill is not only the definitive biography of the redoubtable James Butler Hickok but also a model for biographies of other western figures. The same qualities that marked Rosa's original biography of Hickok are evident in the present work. The West of Wild Bill Hickok is not a revision of the original biography (although it does present some new material not included in Rosa's 1974 revised edition), but rather, a thoughtful and detailed examination of the photographic record of the life and times of wild Bill Hickok. The purpose of the …

Review Of Inventing Billy The Kid: Visions Of The Outlaw In America, 1881-1981 By Stephen Tatum, Kent L. Steckmesser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Here is a sophisticated study of an individual who is both a "timeless conventional outlaw and a timely invented outlaw." Tatum traces the changes in the images of Billy the Kid over one century, relating them to concurrent social and cultural circumstances. The historical William H. Bonney is accorded one chapter, but the book's main concern is the multitude of interpreters who have created their own versions of his life in works ranging from dime novels and biographies to ballets and films.

Initially, between 1881 and 1900, the Kid's biography was formulated as a "romance." As a "bad" badman, a …

Review Of The Cattle Guard By James F. Hoy, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For anyone who has traveled the back roads and trails of the range country in the Great Plains, the cattle guard is a familiar and welcome sight. It is an open gate that enables cars and trucks to pass through a fence but prevents livestock from getting out of pastures. Although many styles exist, the cattle guard essentially is a pipe, bar, or wooden grid laid over an open pit or trench. The bars are spaced so that livestock will not walk on them for fear their hooves will slip through. No one can say when the first cattle guard …

Title And Contents- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SUMMER 1984 VOL. 4 NO.3

CONTENTS

THE PRAIRIE MERMAID: LOVE-TESTS OF PIONEER WOMEN Robert H. Solomon

MAPPING THE INTERIOR PLAINS OF RUPERT'S LAND BY THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY TO 1870 Richard I. Ruggles

THE IMAGE OF THE HIRED GIRL IN LITERATURE: THE GREAT PLAINS, 1860 TO WORLD WAR I Sylvia Lea Sallquist

BOOK REVIEWS

Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers

Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle

Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878

Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915

Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes in Action

Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts …

Review Of The Great Kansas Bond Scandal By Robert Smith Bader, Patrick G. O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1933 Kansas was mired in the Great Depression, ravaged by the Dust Bowl, and afflicted by human cupidity. The biggest public scandal in Kansas history is the subject of this thorough and well-written monograph.

Ronald and Warren Finney, son and father, were the principal malefactors in the bond scandal. The state reverberated from the exposure of the "freewheeling, charismatic" Ronald's forging and deposit of bonds in the state treasury, brokerage houses, and banks to finance high living and business ventures. Even more disquieting was the knowledge of the culpability of his father, a respected, civic-spirited, influential businessman and banker …

Review Of Singing Cowboys And All That Jazz: A Short History Of Popular Music In Oklahoma By William W. Savage, Jr., Stephen Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A monograph defined by state boundaries must begin (and may very well end) as an inventory- even if the scholar intends by careful study of the particular to make a contribution to wider human understanding, perhaps, or to explain the ways of a state to itself. Enthusiasts of six powerful genres of American music will recognize Oklahoma as an apt subject for an inventory of popular music. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was first transcribed at a Choctaw boarding school in Oklahoma and sent to the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nashville, Tennessee, who made it among the best known of black …

The Prairie Mermaid Love-Tests Of Pioneer Women, Robert H. Solomon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In some fictional, historical, and autobiographical accounts of the lives of married women on the prairies of North America during the brief period between initial exploration and permanent settlement, there appears a rather widespread and complicated motif. In it the woman lives on an empty prairie, usually far from the edge of town; physically isolated with her husband, she is psychologically alone, too, and friendless, especially in terms of female companionship. Often her family is far away; always her husband is insensitive and unsympathetic, and, in general terms, unworthy of her devotion. Sometimes even before she is able to voice …

Review Of Oil Booms: Social Changes In Five Texas Towns By Roger M. Olien And Diana Davids Olien & Oil In West Texas And New Mexico: A Pictorial History Of The Permian Basin By Walter Rundell, Jr., Frederick W. Rathjen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Permian Basin covers about sixty-eight thousand square miles of west-central Texas and the adjacent southeastern corner of New Mexico. About two hundred million years ago the region lay beneath a salt sea that laid down a limestone floor upon which were subsequently deposited complex geologic formations that entrapped equally complex ecosystems. This combination of geological and biological evolution produced petroleum deposits that made possible a veritable marvel of the contemporary industrial world.

Before 1920, persons who considered themselves of sound mind found little attraction in the environment of the Permian Basin, for the region seems to present the worst …