Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Army Letters From An Officer's Wife By Frances M. A. Roe, Robert M. Utley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Reminiscences of army wives constitute a distinct genre of the literature of the American West. About a dozen-among them Mrs. Custer, Mrs. Carrington, Mrs. Lane, Mrs. Summerhayes, Mrs. Viele, and Mrs. Boyd-offer perceptive, literate, and often graphic firsthand commentary on frontier army life and the people and conditions of the nineteenth-century American West. Near the top of the list-indeed, at the very top, in the opinion of this reviewer-stands Frances M. A. Roe's Army Letters from an Officer's Wife.

In 1871 Frances Mack married Fayette W. Roe, an infantry lieutenant newly graduated from West Point. During the next two decades …

Willa Cather's A Lost Lady: Art Versus The Closing Frontier, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When A Lost Lady appeared in 1923, readers immediately recognized Willa Cather's achiever ment. T. K. Whipple wrote, "with A Lost Lady, Miss Cather arrived at what can only be called perfection in her art'; Joseph Wood Krutch termed it "nearly perfect." Later readers continued the praise, calling it "perfectly modulated" and "a flawless classic" and generally judging it the finest of Cather's novels. While acknowledging its art, however, critics have stressed its themes in their interpretations, reading it as telling of the frontier's downfall, of the noble pioneer's passing, of materialism's onslaught, of woman's plight in a patriarchal …

An Exploration Of Cather's Early Writing, Bernice Slote

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather has been fairly well studied as a novelist of the Nebraska pioneer, a writer whose books have a lyric nostalgia for other times that were nicer than ours. This maybe an oversimplification. One might say, for example, that she wrote about Nebraska no more than she wrote about Rome; that it was not man's retreat that concerned her so much as man's extension into other planes, other powers; that she may belong not with Sinclair Lewis and Edith Wharton but with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. I suggest these possibilities after several years of fortunate exploration …

The Uses Of Biography: The Case Of Willa Cather, James Woodress

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the first of his series of lectures on biography at the University of Toronto, Leon Edel observed that "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Edel was generalizing about the life of Henry James when he made that statement, for he was deep in the writing of the James biography to which he devoted about twenty years of his life. For a writer such as James this view of biography …

Review Of The North Dakota Political Tradition Edited By Thomas W. Howard, Edward C. Blackorby

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume is primarily designed to help North Dakotans understand their political institutions and traditions. Seven chapters by as many historians are readable summaries on basic themes of the state's history.

Robert Wilkins's study of Alexander McKenzie, reputedly the political boss of Dakota Territory and North Dakota, is the most thorough summation available. Wilkins points out that McKenzie's power was not absolute. In a desire to achieve fairness, Wilkins at times leans toward the position that ends justify means. However, McKenzie's record is provided in detail.

Charles Glaab definitively describes the career of John Burke, the Democratic governor whose 1906 …

Nostalgic Reaction And The Canadian Prairie Landscape, Ronald Rees

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In psychology and psychoanalysis, nostalgic reaction refers to the behavior of people separated from familiar places and familiar pasts. Used professionally, the expression encompasses the entire range of behavior exhibited by the uprooted. It is used here in a limited sense to describe the efforts, both physical and imaginative, made by migrants from Europe and eastern North America to adjust t~ a difficult and unfamiliar landscape. Cut off from their homelands, migrants to the Canadian prairies and to the northern plains in general were forced to make a home of a new and, as one of them put it, "naked …

Notes And News- Summer 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

MAPPING THE NORTH AMERICAN PLAINS

RECENT APPOINTMENTS

OTHER CONFERENCES

Review Of The Ranchers: A Book Of Generations By Stan Steiner, Roger L. Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is a story in the Wyoming WP A files (for which I thank James Dow of Iowa State University) about some cowboys who collapsed in various sections of a country cemetery after a full-blown drunk. One of the celebrants had fallen into a two-foot depression of a collapsed grave and there slept off his condition. He woke up at the crack of dawn, sat up in the grave, surveyed his situation, and shouted, "Hurray! It's Halleluja Morning and I'm the first one here!"

In The Ranchers Steiner presents us with a long, fragmented, maudlin obituary for a culture just …

The Plains Landscape And Descriptive Technique, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The first European who traveled on the Great Plains was Alvar Nuiiez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spaniard who lost his way as he wandered through the southern plains about 1534. Culturally conditioned to value a varied landscape, he later complained, "We nowhere saw mountains." Several years later another Spaniard, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, traveled into the plains looking for gold but found only grass and bison. What is now Kansas was like nowhere else he had ever been. He was vexed to find that the only way he could keep his party together was by marking the way with piles …

Citizens And Strangers: Geographic Mobility In The Sioux City Region, 1860--1900, William Silag

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

An American literary and scholarly tradition upholds the Midwestern town as a bastion of social stability. In novels by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and a host of nineteenth century authors, comforting images of small town tranquility provide sharp contrast to scenes of urban turmoil in the age of industrialism. Even the town's critics, from Edgar Watson Howe to Sherwood Anderson, pay tribute to popular views of small-town folk as more sedentary and self-contented than the ambitious urbanites who crowded the streets of nineteenth-century New York and Boston and Chicago. These images were not restricted to works of fiction. America's …

Review Of Red Crow, Warrior Chief By Hugh A. Dempsey, John C. Ewers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

At a time when Plains Indians are eagerly seeking to learn more of the history of their own tribes, Hugh A. Dempsey, curator of history at the Glenbow-Alberta Institute in Calgary, has effectively interpreted the nineteenth- century history of the nearby Blackfoot and Blood tribes through careful study of the lives and policies of their greatest leaders. In 1976 he gave us Crowfoot, Chief of the Blackfeet. Now he offers Red Crow, Warrior Chief, who was the recognized head chief of the Blood tribe during the late years of the nineteenth century. Both books have been solidly grounded …

Title And Contents- Summer 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN PLAINS INDIAN PAINTING Mary Jane Schneider

THE PLAINS LANDSCAPE AND DESCRIPTIVE TECHNIQUE Robert Thacker

NOSTALGIC REACTION AND THE CANADIAN PRAIRIE LANDSCAPE Ronald Rees

CITIZENS AND STRANGERS: GEOGRAPHIC MOBILITY IN THE SIOUX CITY REGION, 1860-1900 William Silag

BOOK REVIEWS

The Great Plains: Perspectives and Prospects

Red Crow, Warrior Chief

The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, and Comparative Study

The North Dakota Political Tradition

The Ranchers: A Book of Generations

NOTES & NEWS

Regional Differences In Plains Indian Painting, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It may seem but a short leap from the earliest red, white, and black markings on rock walls to the sophisticated abstract expressionism of contemporary Native American art, and only a small· step from geometric designs painted on hides to hard-edge geometric forms on canvas, but the development of Plains Indian painting from prehistoric times to the twentieth century is a journey from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, from tribal to urban society. Plains Indian painting reflects the historical and geographical diversity of the region as well as the pluralistic culture of modern Native Americans. It is an …

Review Of The Great Plains: Perspectives And Prospects Edited By Merlin P. Lawson And Maurice E. Baker, Martin Bender

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most policies and institutions that seem to be successful in the humid eastern United States have been and often still are inadequate for the Great Plains in dealing with the unpredictable changes in the rigorous environment and the external demands from outside the regions. These inadequacies were analyzed at the third annual symposium of the Center for ~reat plains Studies, held on March 2 and 3, 1979. In the papers that make up this book, participants identified available resources in the Great Plains and provided information that might assist policy-makers in anticipating future conditions. The papers treat the impact of …

Review Of The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, And Comparative Study By David G. Mandelbaum, Warren C. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Canadian Plains Research Center has provj.ded a new and amended version of the Plains Cree, a classic of plains anthropology first published more than forty years ago. The earlier volume, available under the imprint of the American Museum of Natural History (Anthropological Papers 37, Part II, 1940), is a portion of a much more extensive work completed by Mandelbaum as a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University during 1936. The complete document is published here for the first time.

The earlier version is essentially a description of the "buffalo-hunting way of life ... of the Plains Cree" (xiii). It …

Review Of The Poles In Oklahoma By Richard M. Bernard, Maria Starczewska- Lambasa

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Richard M. Bernard has undertaken the challenging task of writing a history of Polish migration to Oklahoma. As he states in the preface, "The Poles of Oklahoma have not left a very easy trail to follow. They were never more than 4,000 in number according to U.S. census counts. And most Poles who lived in the state at one time or another eventually departed, leaving behind few traces of their sojourn in the area."

The author recaptures the Polish experience in Oklahoma by utilizing bits of information scattered through archives and libraries throughout the state and by relying on oral …

Review Of The Chisholm Trail: High Road Of The Cattle Kingdom By Don Worcester, Joe A. Stout Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For two decades after the Civil War, Texas cowboys drove herds of wild longhorns up the Chisholm and other cattle trails from central Texas to Kansas railroads. This book is about the boring work of the trail drovers, the release of their energies at trail's end, and the successes and failures of the great ranches of Texas and other western regions. Don Worcester notes that the cowboys referred indiscriminately to all cattle trails north out of Texas as the Chisholm trail; he sees no reason to change this. Although he has titled this work The Chisholm Trail, it is …

Review Of Frontierswomen: The. Iowa Experience By Glenda Riley, Barbara Howard-Meldrum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Glenda Riley's book offers the reader an absorbing account of the life-styles of Iowa frontierswomen (1830-70). Drawing upon whatever sources are available (personal papers, official records, the work of other scholars), Riley' begins with the assumption that the history of women's experience is important and worth the trouble to search out, although earlier neglect has made the job difficult and in some instances impossible. Beyond this assumption, her account is as nearly nonsexist, nonjudgmental, and nonsentimental as one could ask for. She describes the women in the public eye: those few professional women and suffragists who were branded "strongminded." But …

Review Of Trails To Texas: Southern Roots Of Western Cattle Ranching By Terry G. Jordan, Sandra L. Myres

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians and social scientists have long been fascinated by the open-range cattle industry, its origins, spread, practices, economic significance, and eventual demise. Cultural geographer Terry Jordan's .volume is a significant addition to the growing body of literature on this subject.

Jordan begins with a cogent summary and critique of the major theories regarding the origins and diffusion of the "precursor of present-day livestock ranching" (p. 1) and then develops his own hypothesis of a southern Anglo origin. Jordan posits a "Carolina Hearth" or source for "large-scale Anglo-American cattle herding" (p. 38) and a diffusion via two routes -one along the …

Passion And Denial In Marl Sandoz's "Peachstone Basket", Fritz Oehlschlaeger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The future reputation of Mari Sandoz will undoubtedly rest primarily on her nonfiction, especially Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, and Old Jules. Although Sandoz published a considerable body of fiction, it has not generally received critical acclaim. Moreover, she consistently expressed doubts about the quality of her fiction and thought her own strongest achievement was in nonfiction. As Scott Greenwell has noted, Sandoz "viewed herself primarily as a historian who only aspired to be a literary artist, and was struck again and again by the inadequacy of much of her fiction." When Virginia Faulkner, the editor of Hostiles and Friendlies, …

The Arikara Indians And The Missouri River Trade: A Quest For Survival, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By the time the United States acquired most of the Great plains through the Louisiana Purchase, many Indians of the upper Missouri River valley had encountered French, British, and Anglo-American fur traders in their homeland. Most Native Americans in that region seem to have welcomed the manufactured goods these intruders brought, but at the same time some objected to the whites' disruption of earlier trade patterns. Nearly all of the Missouri Valley tribes appear to have disliked some aspects of the fur and hide trade, and many violent incidents occurred. As a village dwelling tribe located along the Missouri River …

Review Of Stephen Long And American Frontier Exploration By Roger L. Nichols And Patrick L. Halley, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The name of Major Stephen H. Long has been, for most western and frontier historians and geographers, linked inextricably with the "Great American Desert controversy." Fairly or unfairly, scholars have tended to see as Long's major exploratory contribution the creation of the myth of the barren interior which, it has been claimed, prevented settlement of the Great Plains for several decades. This opinion regarding his role and significance as an explorer is unfortunate. Long was by no means the first or only explorer in the West in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the Plains in negative …

Review Of Thomas Jefferson And The Stony Mountains: Exploring The West From Monticello By Donald Jackson, Robert Mccolley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Founding Fathers knew almost nothing of that huge segment of North America bounded by New Mexico, the Pacific Coast, the Arctic, and the Mississippi. It became Thomas Jefferson's task, eagerly embraced, to dispel that ignorance. Here, as in so many other fields, he moved with a major current of his age: thousands of Americans, Spaniards, Russians, Canadians, and other British were converging on the trans-Mississippi West. Jefferson's awareness of this competition grew with his knowledge of the area and increased his conviction that the United States, not Europe, should control North America.

This engaging history falls into three parts. …

Review Of Sinclair Ross By Lorraine Mcmullen, Geraldine Anthony

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Devotees of Canadian and American prairie fiction will welcome this book, the first to treat the entire body of Sinclair Ross's work. Lorraine McMullen has done a creditable job of analysis and criticism. She begins with a biographical introduction and follows with a study of all of Ross's short stories and novels published from 1934 to the present.

The first critic to provide any details about Ross's life, McMullen illuminates the personality of this enigmatic prairie writer and, incidentally, corrects a few errors in Robert Chalmer's little book, Ernest Buckler and Sinclair Ross. Ross himself has maintained that creative …

Title And Contents- Spring 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Spring 1982 Vol. 2 Number 2

CONTENTS

DAVID'S SABINE WOMEN IN THE WILD WEST Rena N. Coen

THE ARIKARA INDIANS AND THE MISSOURI RIVER TRADE: A QUEST FOR SURVIVAL Roger L. Nichols

THE LANDSCAPE OF UKRAINIAN SETTLEMENT IN THE CANADIAN WEST John C. Lehr

PASSION AND DENIAL IN MARl SANDOZ'S "PEACHSTONE BASKET" Fritz Oehlschlaeger

BOOK REVIEWS

Anthropology on the Great Plains

Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello

Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration

Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching

The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom

A …

Review Of Ethnicity On The Great Plains Edited By Frederick C. Luebke, Howard Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ethnicity on the Great Plains is a collection of essays based on a conference sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies. The editor has selected some of the best papers from that conference; attempting to maintain a balance among different academic disciplines, ethnic groups discussed, and various subregions of the Great Plains. The focus of the symposia was on the question of the relationship between the physical environment of the Great Plains and the persistence or accommodation of ethnic culture.

The resulting book is a satisfying and pathbreaking multidisciplinary achievement on a neglected topic. The study of rural ethnic …

Review Of Oklahoma Homes: Past And Present By Charles R. Goins And John W. Morris, H. Keith Sawyers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In recent years rather dramatic changes have occurred in architectural historians' perspectives of the built environment in western and especially American culture. Their traditional scope of study, which heretofore focused on major historical eras and architectural monuments of national and international significance, has expanded to include a much more comprehensive range of periods, types, and values such as Victorian and vernacular architecture, regionalism, and ethnicity. As a result, long overdue recognition is being given to work that is significant at the regional, state, and local levels. Oklahoma Homes: Past and Present is a product of this phenomenon.

This large-format book …

Review Of The Indians In Oklahoma By Rennard Strickland, Arrell Morgan Gibson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Indians of Oklahoma, a survey of the sixty-seven tribes residing in the state, explains the colonizing process that populated Indian Territory (the future Oklahoma) with Native Americans from all parts of the United States during the nineteenth century and interprets the striking cultural diversity of the Indian communities thus formed. The author separates the Native American experience in Oklahoma into four periods: "The Bright Autumn of Indian Nationhood"; "The Dark Winter of Settlement and Statehood"; "The Long Spring of Tribal Renewal"; and "The Spirit of a Modern Indian Summer." The point is made that in each period Indians have …

Review Of Pioneer Women: Voices From The Kansas Frontier By Joanna L. Stratton, Darlis A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The history of this book is as remarkable as the lives of the women it chronicles. While rummaging through her grandmother's attic, Joanna L. Stratton discovered in yellowing folders the personal memoirs of eight hundred Kansas pioneer women, some describing events that had occurred as early as 1854. Lilla Day Monroe, Stratton's great-grandmother, who was also the first woman to practice law before the Kansas Supreme Court, collected these narratives in the 1920s, asking women to write about their daily lives and experiences as early settlers. Monroe planned to publish their accounts in an anthology as a tribute to the …

Review Of The Oklahoma Petroleum Industry By Kenny A. Franks, Gerald D. Nash

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anyone who undertakes to survey the economic history of the Great Plains in the twentieth century is struck by the fact that the literature on the subject is exceedingly sparse, particularly when measured against the importance of the field. Scholarly studies of agriculture, special industries, banking and credit institutions, and government regulation in these spheres at the federal and state level are still needed, even though the era of the Great Depression in the 1930s has received some special attention. This book, spawned by an increasing awareness of energy crises in the 1970s, provides a succinct survey of the petroleum …