Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

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 A Bibliographical Guide To The Study Of Western American Literature By Richard W. Etulain, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As Richard Etulain states in his preface, this is a comprehensive but not exhaustive bibliography of books, dissertations, and articles about western American literature. The bulk of the volume lists materials on more than 350 major western authors, including some major historians and nonfiction writers, but perhaps the most significant part of the book is the section dealing with seven important aspects of the field that suggest ways of arranging research to go beyond individual works and authors to overviews and generalizations.

Etulain's categories are: (1) local color and regionalism, (2) popular western literaturedime novels and the Western, (3) western …

Review Of The Matador Land And Cattle Company By W. M. Pearce, Richard A. Bartlett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The question that immediately comes to mind is: what justified a second printing in hardcover of this book first published eighteen years ago? The book is certainly well written, though it is not of great literary excellence; it is also very well organized and researched, yet not brilliantly so. The real contribution is clearly its subject matter.

In 1882 a group of businessmen, most of them from in and around Dundee, Scotland, purchased for $1,250,000 what became the Matador Land and Cattle Company. At the time, many other British and Scottish investors were also plunging into the American cattle business. …

Review Of The American Farmer And The New Deal By Theodore Saloutos, David E. Hamilton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This posthumously published study by Theodore Saloutos is an important addition to the burgeoning number of works on New Deal farm programs. The subject is enormous. Saloutos focuses on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's efforts to curtail production and to enact marketing agreements, the struggle to broaden farm relief to include both black and white farmers on the bottom half of the rural economic and social scale, the fight to bring electricity to rural America, Henry Wallace's quest to open up the clogged system of international trade, and the programs to rescue the farmers and ranchers of the Great Plains from …

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 Red Harvest: The Communist Party And American Farmers By Lowell K. Dyson, Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By surveying Communist efforts to organize farmers and farm workers, Lowell K. Dyson has done for agriculture what Bert Cochran did for the CIO in Labor and Communism-presented a full account of Communist activities uncolored by Red-baiting or apologies. Dyson begins by noting the paradox in Communist efforts: "Communists sought to change the very nature of the American agricultural system, but the programs which won them the broadest hearing among farmers were aimed at preserving the system" (p. xi). Maintaining an even-handed objectivity, Dyson nonetheless conveys a sympathetic understanding of how some farmers came to espouse radicalism.

In the …

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 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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 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 Western Oklahoma: A Photographic Essay Photographs By Daisy Decazes, Introduction And Text By William S. Banowsky, John E. Carter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Over the last several decades the photographic essay has gained more respect and understanding among serious students of culture. Western Oklahoma: A Photographic Essay falls abysmally short of the powerful potential of this medium. The work consists of seventy-five photographs by Daisy Decazes, a Sorbonnetrained photographer, and a brief introduction by William S. Banowsky, past president of the University of Oklahoma. The work begins with Banowsky's introduction, a simplistic time line of human evolution in Oklahoma, beginning with the Native American people's life and attempt to hold the land, followed by the onslaught of rugged pioneers, and culminating in the …

Review Of Westering Women And The Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 By Sandra L. Myres, John Mack Faragher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Professor Myres began the research for this survey of women in the American West, many historians believed that there were few manuscript collections documenting the experiences of nineteenth-century women, "Such is not the case," Myres concludes. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800- 1915, the first volume of the Histories of the American Frontier Series devoted to the history of women, treats us to what the late Ray Allen Billington called "one of the most remarkable bibliographies to materials in this new area." Myres summarizes her extensive reading in these documents in topical chapters: western women's views of …

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 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 …

Review Of Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes In Action By Lew L. Callaway, William L. Lang

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The image of a hastily gathered posse comitatus riding out of a fearfully paralyzed western town to administer swift and violent justice to a band of desperadoes is as firmly etched in the American mind as nearly any popular western scene. In one violent portrait, the remoteness of the frontier from civilization, the failure of established institutions, and the necessity of good men to protect their families and property are capsulized. The fascination with vigilantes is bred of the excitement of its violent solution and the inherent mystery behind it all. What drove men to take the law under their …

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 Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle By Sallie Reynolds Matthews & Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878 By Frances Mayhugh Holden, Sandra L. Myres

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Written as a memoir for her grandchildren, Sallie Reynolds Matthews's Interwoven was first printed in 1936 and reissued in 1958 in a handsomely designed edition by Texas's famous printer and designer Carl Hertzog with illustrations by E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz. As the reputation of the Matthews book grew, copies became harder and harder to find, and both the 1936 and 1958 editions are now rare and expensive. Happily this 1982 volume is an exact duplication of the 1958 Hertzog edition.

Born in 1861 in Stephens County, Texas, Sallie Reynolds grew up on the edge of the Great Plains, a harsh, …

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 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 Cowboy Life On The Texas Plains: The Photographs Of Ray Rector Edited By Margaret Rector, Charles S. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This slim volume is a happy combination of photographs from the Texas ranching country and a breezy but thoughtful essay about cowboys.

The introduction by John Graves dissociates itself from the specific time and place of the photos but maintains its Texas connection in its regional values and the color of its language. Graves gives broad consideration to economic change, technological development, the persistence of tradition and myth, and the impact of ecological change upon cowboy life. The cowboys he portrays came from rural places, participated in a legend they had already absorbed, and performed their jobs for fun and …

Review Of Texas Woollybacks: The Range Sheep And Goat Industry By Paul H. Carlson, B. Byron Price

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Paul Carlson presents readers with a comprehensive, well-organized, and easily read treatment of a subject comparatively neglected by historians of the American livestock industry. The first major synthesis of the Texas sheep and goat business in nearly forty years, Texas Woollybacks adds measurably in detail and focus to omnibus classics like Shepherd's Empire (1945) and America's Sheep Trails (1948), and to pioneering studies of the Texas business such as Winifred Kupper's The Golden Hoof (1945) and more recently Val W. Lehmann's Forgotten Legions (1969). The author, nevertheless, leans heavily on these and a variety of other supporting secondary sources. While …

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 …

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 …

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 Jewels Of The Plains: Wildflowers Of The Great Plains Grasslands And Hills By Claude A. Barr, Curtis M. Twedt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

After earning a degree from Drake University, author Claude Barr settled on a homestead just south of the Black Hills. In addition to his principal occupation as a rancher, Barr began to observe and propagate native plants in his small garden. One of his earliest ventures into writing about his avocation was an article in 1930 on the pasqueflower. He commented, "I was paid $20 for it, which seemed like a munificent price." This modest effort led to at least one hundred articles over the next fifty years.

Jewels of the Plains is not simply a compilation of plant characteristics …

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 …