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Notes & News- Winter 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

1983 GREAT PLAINS SYMPOSIUM: MAPPING THE AMERICAN PLAINS

JOSLYN MUSEUM OPENS CENTER FOR WESTERN STUDIES

AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY

PLAINS AQUATIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE

Review Of Town And City: Aspects Of Western Canadian Urban Development Edited By Alan F. J. Artibise, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Western Canada's settlement is neatly divided at the Rocky Mountain front. West of there, the population is urban and the scattered clusters of people are separated from one another by miles of wilderness; on the prairies to the east there is a network of farms, small towns, and cities dominated, in turn, by a handful of metropolises. This valuable collection of papers by sixteen Canadian urban historians and geographers treats urbanization in both of these western Canadian realms, providing a balanced geographical coverage and giving the reader a consistent view of town formation, ranging from the smallest of places to …

Review Of Professors, Presidents, And Politicians By George Lynn Cross, James C. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the major success stories of American higher education has been the development of a positive relationship between universities and the people who support them. That relationship protects the right of professors to teach and students to learn without undue political interference and at the same time provides for the exercise of a reasonable amount of public authority over the institutions. In Professors, Presidents, and Politicians, George Lynn Cross, who served as president of the University of Oklahoma from 1943 to 1968, traces the sometimes stormy relationship between state government and higher education in Oklahoma in a discussion …

Title & Contents- Winter 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1983 VOL. 3 NO.1

CONTENTS

INTERSECTIONS: STUDIES IN THE CANADIAN AND AMERICAN GREAT PLAINS Frances W. Kaye

DIPLOMATIC RACISM: CANADIAN GOVERNMENT AND BLACK MIGRATION FROM OKLAHOMA, 1905-1912 R. Bruce Shepard

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS AND FARM POVERTY ON THE NORTH AMERICAN PLAINS, 1933-1940 Harry C. McDean AMERICAN LITERARY IMAGES OF THE CANADIAN PRAIRIES, 1860-1910 James Doyle

COMPETITION FOR SETTLERS: THE CANADIAN VIEWPOINT James M. Richtik

BOOK REVIEWS

Town and City: Aspects of Western Canadian Urban Development

The Prairies and Plains: Prospects for the 80s

The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared

Ceremonies of the Pawnee, …

American Literary Images Of The Canadian Prairies, 1860-1910, James Doyle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1879, the prolific dime novelist Edward L. Wheeler produced a narrative entitled Canada Chet, The Counterfeiter Chief, set in "a location as hitherto quite neglected by the pen of the novelist and veracious historian-i.e., in the British possessions to the North-west of Minnesota." If, as Wheeler suggests, American writers were indifferent to the Canadian West in the nineteenth century, this lack of attention can be related to a number of considerations, the most obvious of which is the fact that Americans were sufficiently occupied by the undeveloped regions within their own border. The westward experience in the United …

Review Of Ceremonies Of The Pawnee. Part I, The Skiri. Part Ii, The South Bands By James R. Murie, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After sixty years the Smithsonian Institution has finally published James R. Murie's work on Pawnee ceremonies in a handsome set of two volumes, impeccably edited by Douglas R. Parks. Murie, part Pawnee and somewhat trained in the techniques of anthropological investigation, began serious study of his own tribe in the 1890s and completed it in 1921 shortly before his death. Through much of his career he worked with white anthropologists such as Alice Fletcher, George Grinnell, Owen Dorsey, and Clark Wissler, some of whom gave him scant credit for his assistance in their research and publications. These volumes were begun …

Review Of The Forgotten Frontier: Urban Planning In The American West Before 1890 By John W. Reps, Charles S. Sargent

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The title of this book is misleading. If the work carries one persistent message, it is that the cities of the American West were not planned at all. Conceived as speculations in land, yes; almost always designed in the form of a repetitive gridiron, yes; but planned in any twentieth-century sense of the word, definitely not. Only the southwestern Spanish towns and the Mormon towns of Deseret come close to being examples of "urban planning." City planning, after all, only came along early in the twentieth century, and Reps clearly illustrates that few towns were established after 1890. The term …

Review Of The Prairies And Plains: Prospects For The 80s Edited By John R. Rogge, R. Leslie Heathcote

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume contains the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Prairie Division of the Canadian Association of Geographers, held at Delta Marsh, Manitoba, in September 1980: six invited papers and two "student papers," the latter included for their "interest and because of their Prairie orientation."

The invited papers provide several viewpoints on a core of overlapping themes: the future of agriculture in an environment where climatic and market uncertainties together with economic costs and price-squeeze pressures have thinned out the farming communities over the last sixty years; the environmental transformations resulting from the imposition of agricultural production systems upon …

Review Of Oklahoma Memories Edited By Anne Hodges Morgan And Rennard Strickland, Brad Agnew

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is something inherently suspicious about a work of nonfiction edited by two scholars that will not cure insomnia. When their book proves to be compelling, the reader assumes either that it has been ghostwritten or that the editors' credentials are specious. Since the pay of scholars would preclude their hiring a ghost and the academic credentials of Anne Hodges Morgan and Rennard Strickland are bona fide, the reader has little alternative but to accept Oklahoma Memories at face value and enjoy one of the most interesting books on Oklahoma published in recent years.

Anne Hodges Morgan, a Ph.D. in …

Review Of The Frontier In History: North America And Southern Africa Compared Edited By Howard Lamar And Leonard Thompson., Leslie C. Duly

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Taking an attractive approach to a study heretofore reviewed in only superficial terms, Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson provide a fascinating and at times profound basis for comparing processes within the American and South African frontiers. Especially pertinent is their jointly authored introduction in which, after reviewing the literature, they provide a definition of a frontier as a zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies. Their definition is made usable in the subsequent four sets of paired essays, with each set focusing upon a broad historical process associated with the two frontiers.

In the first and best pair, Robert …

Competition For Settlers The Canadian Viewpoint, James M. Richtik

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many aspects of Canada's relationship with the United States were summed up by Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau when he told an American audience in Washington, D.C., "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even tempered is the beast ... one is affected by every twitch and grunt." Canada has always lived next to this generally friendly elephant and Canadian policy makers have never been able to shake off the need to consider what has happened or may happen south of the border. Although the context was different …

O Pioneers! The Problem Of Structure, Bruce P. Baker Ii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her preface to the 1922 edition of Alexander's Bridge and in the 1931 essay "My First Novels: There Were Two," Willa Cather conveyed not only her dissatisfaction with Alexander's Bridge but also her awareness that with O Pioneers! she had touched matters closer to her "deepest experience," material that was distinctly derived from the Nebraska of her childhood. She had written the book with genuine enthusiasm: "O Pioneers! interested me tremendously because it had to do with a kind of country I loved, because it was about old neighbours, once very dear, whom I had almost forgotten in …

Marriage And Friendship In My Antonia, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Three events or circumstances in Willa Cather's life seem directly related to the writing of My Àntonia. In 1916, the year the novel was begun, Isabelle McClung married, and the great friendship of Cather's life was profoundly altered. Second, by 1916 Cather was in her forty-third year and had written five books; she was no longer enjoying youth and first success but entering middle age, with its attendant disillusionments and disaffections. Third, she spent much of that year at home in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she visited many of the people and places of her childhood. I think these …

Review Of The Modem Cowboy By John R. Erickson, Nellie Snyder Yost

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John R. Erickson researched The Modem Cowboy in a working laboratory that extended from horizon to horizon in his particular section of the Great Plains, the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. He writes from personal experience, gained in years of working as a cowboy on modern ranches. He makes plain the fact that the cowboy of today must master many skills unknown to the cowboy of the colorful open range before the era of tractors, vaccination, controlled breeding, and "calfpullers." The modern cowboy should be a mechanic and something of a veterinarian and horticulturist as well. Although he still rides horses …

Index- Fall 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Index-

Great Plains Quarterly- Fall 1982

Pages 255-261 (7 pages)

Review Of Deadwood: The Golden Years By Watson Parker, Gary D. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Watson Parker has devoted most of his professional career to writing the history of the Black Hills of South Dakota, and those interested in that history are richer for it. In this, his latest effort, he has focused on Deadwood, the mining town of fame and fable, and examines what he calls its "golden years" of 1875 to 1920. Parker states in his preface that he has tried "to present Deadwood as a whole, a compound of people, business, technology, society, whoopee, and promotion, all intermixed and interacting to produce a small but prosperous city which to this day remains …

Willa Cather And Nebraska: An Introduction, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The essays in this issue were presented at the seminar "Willa Cather and Nebraska" held at Hastings College and Red Cloud, Nebraska, June 14-20, 1981. The week-long program involved one hundred registered participants from twenty-five states and Canada in a series of discussions, lectures, films, and performances on the topic of Willa Cather's Nebraska fiction. Both the attendance and the reactions to the program were highly encouraging and indicate that Cather is a writer with universal appeal. Although I did not attempt to direct the lecturers except to indicate the general topics to be treated, their essays are complementary in …

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 Historic Sites Along The Oregon Trail By Aubrey L. Haines, Merrill J . Mattes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Of all western themes, none quickens the pulse or captures the imagination more than "the Oregon Trail." The Santa Fe Trail was more exotic. The California Gold Rush Trail had more feverish excitement and carried ten times the traffic. But the Oregon Trail remains the preeminent symbol of American pioneer virtues, evoking the image of the young family in a covered wagon braving hardships and dangers to seek a new home in the fabled Northwest. Aware of the sales value of this theme, publishers have been grinding out "Oregon Trail" books ever since Francis Parkman's classic of that name, about …

The Childhood Worlds Of Willa Cather, Mildred R. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

She was a good artist, and all true art is provincial in the most realistic sense: of the very time and place of its making, out of human beings who are so particularly limited by their situation, whose faces and names are real and whose lives begin each one at one individual unique center.

Katherine Anne Porter

Willa Cather, as Katherine Anne Porter realized, was a provincial or regional writer who could derive the universal from the specific, as the best artists do. For Cather, the specifics to which she returned throughout her career were the people, places, and things …

Review Of Buffalo Bill And The Wild West By Peter H. Hassrick, Richard Slotkin, Vine Deloria, Jr., Howard R. Lamar, William Judson, And Leslie A. Fiedler, William H. Goetzmann

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In many ways this is a most useful catalogue. It features six essays by distinguished scholars all intent upon reassessing Buffalo Bill's place in American cultural history. It also includes a cornucopia of splendid pictures, illustrating virtually every phase of Buffalo Bill's life. In addition it has a valuable chronology of events amounting to a short biography of Cody, a useful chronology of Buffalo Bill on film, and a significant bibliography. The main thrust of the essays in this volume is to resurrect Buffalo Bill and, as it were, to rescue the old scout from the damage done to him …

One Of Ours As American Naturalism, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I n a comment to Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway ridiculed the war scenes in Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922) and implied the general inferiority of her effort: "Look at One of Ours," he wrote, complaining about the frivolity of the American reading public. "[Pulitzer] Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously. You were in the war weren't you? Wasn't that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere." …

Title And Contents- Fall 1982

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1982 VOL. 2 NO.4

CONTENTS

WILLA CATHER AND NEBRASKA: AN INTRODUCTION

THE USES OF BIOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF WILLA CATHER James Woodress

THE CHILDHOOD WORLDS OF WILLA CATHER Mildred R. Bennett

AN EXPLORATION OF CATHER'S EARLY WRITING Bernice Slote

o PIONEERS! THE PROBLEM OF STRUCTURE Bruce P. Baker II

MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIP IN MY ANTONIA David Stouck

ONE OF OURS AS AMERICAN NATURALISM JohnJ. Murphy

WILLA CATHER'S A LOST LADY: ART VERSUS THE CLOSING FRONTIER Susan J. Rosowski

BOOK REVIEWS

Historic Sites along the Oregon Trail

Army Letters from an Officer's Wife

Deadwood: The Golden Years …

Review Of Beef, Leather And Grass By Edmund Randolph, Michael P. Malone

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Edmund Randolph is a New Yorker and a Princeton graduate who came west in the 1920s and took up ranching in southeastern Montana. In Beef, Leather and Grass, he presents an autobiographical account of his partnership venture during the 1940s and early 1950s in a big-time ranching operation on the Antler spread, which lay on the Crow Reservation in the Little Big Hom Valley. The book, as the preface tells us, "deals with this situation in a unique manner, not as a fictional account of a ranch, a would-be 'Western' or an autobiography, but from personal observation. It is …

Review Of Mister, You Got Yourself A Horse Edited By Roger L. Welsch, Howard W. Marshall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This fine new book indicates a welcome direction regional scholars are taking in attending to cultural traditions in particular states. The Great Depression of the 1930s altered America and left behind some troublesome problems; but those hard times led to the serious collection of regional folklife by members of the Federal Writers' Project (an arm of the Works Progress Administration under FDR), and we are still discovering and wondering over the materials passed to us by those WP A writers and collectors. Roger Welsch's collection is the result of a modern scholar's discovery of a body of WPA materials in …

Review Of Populism, Progressivism, And The Transformation Of Nebraska Politics, 1885-1915 By Robert W. Cherny, David S. Trask

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert Cherny has made an important contribution to the social and political history of the Great Plains with his study, Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska Politics, 1885-1915. He not only explores the historiographic issues related to Populism and Progressivism, but also assesses changes within the Nebraska political system that were often the unintended by-products of the two movements. His approach relies on extensive statistical analysis including the use of collective biography.

The most optimistic Populists, according to Cherny, sought to establish a cooperative commonwealth in which the government owned the railroads and other corporations. Although they failed …

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 …

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 …