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Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

THE PROGRESSIVE CONTEXT OF THE NEBRASKA CAPITOL: THE COLLABORATION OF GOODHUE AND TACK (Frederick C. Luebke)

THE 1992 SECESSION MOVEMENT IN SOUTHWEST KANSAS (Peter J. McCormick)

BISON ECOLOGY, BRULE AND YANKTON WINTER HUNTING, AND THE STARVING WINTER OF 1832-33 (Richmond Clow)

BOOK REVIEWS

An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians

The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners

On Turner's Trail: 100 Years of Writing Western History

The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley

Redefining the American Dream

Where the …

Review Of Soils In Archaeology: Landscape Evolution And Human Occupation Vance T. Holliday, William C. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Soils in Archaeology consists of papers representing the proceedings of the Fryxell Symposium held at the annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Phoenix during April 1988. This is a volume that deals with soil science applications to archaeology: the various papers discuss the application of soils science to reconstruction of past landscapes and their evolution, estimation of surface age and depositional episodes, and provide physical and chemical indications of human presence. The volume provides good examples of archaeological geology (geoarchaeology) as executed by four physical geographers, two geologists, an archaeologist and a soil scientist.

The 1992 Secession Movement In Southwest Kansas, Peter J. Mccormick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In May of 1992 the Kansas state legislature approved and Governor Joan Finney signed into law a new school finance formula that adversely affected several southwest Kansas counties. The new bill provided for a blanket mill levy of 32 mills ($32 in taxes for every $1000 assessed valuation) to be spread across the state. It also restricted funding to a maximum of $3600 per student. The effects in the southwest were drastic. Many districts there, accustomed to setting their own tax rates and to retaining all monies collected, spent upward of $5000 per student on tax levies below 20 mills. …

Review Of A Vast Amount Of Trouble: A History Of The Spring Creek Raid By John W. Davis, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What of the wider significance? Here Davis only meekly treads. The convictions seemingly changed the dynamics on the range, with the cattlemen subdued. But the trial did not do this alone. The changing power relationship had been a long time coming. Sheep had dominated the range for years before the raid, and in 1905 the Wyoming Wool Growers Association organized as an effective political agent. Davis touches on these points but does not stress them as vital to the success of the prosecution. At times, the sheriff and the county attorney seem to be battling everyone else in the county. …

Review Of The Wealth Of Nature: Environmental History And The Ecological Imagination By Donald Worster, Andrew C. Isenberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On its surface, Donald Worster's collection of forceful and eloquent essays appears to revisit the subjects and themes he has explored in his previous books. There are sixteen essays in Wealth of Nature. The first three and the last one explore the concerns and practice of environmental history. Five essays investigate the ecological consequences of American agriculture, particularly in the Great Plains. Worster explored this subject in his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Dust Bowl. The next three essays primarily concern the economic and ecological irrationalities of irrigation in the West, a subject that Worster previously investigated in his book, …

Review Of What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology At A Wahpeton Dakota Village By Janet D. Spector, Jennifer S. H. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Spector provides the basic information needed to help general readers understand the site and its people. She also does more, offering thoughtful reflections on issues that she has faced as a professional archaeologist and on the ethical problems that confront the field, given its past lack of communication and dialogue with the peoples whose histories it has excavated and appropriated.

This book may break the trail for a new genre of archaeological site report. Reading it, I was led to reflect on my own first summer field school experience, and on the report that our director ultimately published. I recall …

Review Of Prairie Populism: The Fate Of Agrarian Radicalism In Kansas, Nebraska, And Iowa, 1880-1892 By Jeffrey Ostler, Christina L. Wolak

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ostler's review and interpretation of political events in Iowa is convincing, and the tables he provides clearly show a marked difference in voting patterns on either side of the Nebraska/Kansas and Iowa borders. His treatment of the political situation in Nebraska and Kansas is not as thorough, however, since it focuses mainly on the doings of Alliance members and does not give as detailed attention to the Republican Party. Overall this book is engaging reading and accessible to a wide audience.

Review Of The Cowboy: Representations Of Labor In An American Work Culture By Blake Allmendinger, Matt Hokom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Of all the mythologies Americans have constructed for themselves, that surrounding the cowboy is among the most influential and persistent. Blake Allmendinger's book attempts to correct this popularized myth by examining how cowboys represented themselves. The Cowboy argues that authentic cowboy culture is best defined as an expression of labor and its self-representation in art. While this is an interesting direction to take in itself, what especially recommends it is Allmendinger's interdisciplinary method. He skillfully combines traditional historical and literary approaches with an examination of folkloric and pop culture sources to create a complex picture of an evolving culture.

Review Of Whiskey Peddler: Johnny Healy, North Frontier Trader By William R. Hunt, Paul F. Sharp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This biography successfully traces the career of an Irish immigrant whose colorful life defines the realities of pioneering while at the same time providing the stuff of Western dime novels, movies, campfire storytelling, and adventure yarns. His remarkable range of experiences as frontier soldier, whiskey trader to Canadian Indians, and finally as a major player on the Alaskan frontier gives the author an opportunity to write a fast moving history of Montana, the Northwest Territories of Can ada, and Alaska.

Small Historic Sites In Kansas Merging Artifactual Landscapes And Community Values, Cathy Ambler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Kansas during the past two decades, county historical societies and local community groups have initiated a trend that deserves attention-the establishment and support of small historic sites. Conceived with little aspiration of becoming the next Williamsburg, Plimoth Plantation, or Conner Prairie, they are endeavors by small communities to preserve elements of their traditional built environment and identify themselves with their respective pasts. With the community itself as its essential audience, each site celebrates a historical identity of success, harmony, and stability. Kansas's small historic sites are assembled landscapes that represent local community values, but in which rural and urban …

Review Of American Indian Law Deskbook Edited By Julie Wrend And Clay Smith, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a complete reference tool, however, American Indian Law Deskbook is merely adequate. While significant case law is included, it is not as thoroughly analyzed in the body of the book as one might expect. Moreover, the bibliography of non-statutory law and noncase law is significantly shallow. Another weakness is found in the first five sections. They purport to offer a summary of the evolution of federal Indian policy; legal definitions of Indian, Indian tribe, and Indian country; and criminal law and civil law regulations. These sections are very limited, briefer than the treatment accorded them in Felix Cohen's Handbook …

Review Of Flat Water: A History Of Nebraska And Its Water Edited By Robert Kuzelka, Charles Flowerday, Robert Manley, Bradley Rundquist, And Sally Herrin, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Read this volume if you want to know anything, nearly everything, about the history of water development in Nebraska. Robert Manley first began this book as a centennial history of the Nebraska State Irrigation Association, but he persuaded the editors of the need for a more inclusive treatment of Nebraska, which incidentally is an Omaha or Oto word meaning "Broad, Flat Water." Over thirty contributors would write the articles, draw the maps, make the charts, and take the photographs that comprise this hefty undertaking. The production staff should take pride in everyone's efforts.

Review Of Painting Texas History To 1900 By Sam Deshong Ratcliffe, Pamela Walker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In discussing paintings about the Texas Revolution, Ratcliffe is at his most analytic. Generally, his text is more descriptive than analytic, reading much like an exhibit guide on a museum wall. Still, the work is interesting and informative, and it provides a basis for more comprehensive and critical studies of the relation between a particular period of Texas history and its art.

Review Of The Flag In American Indian Art By Toby Herbst And Joel Kopp, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The public appetite for American Indian crafts and artistic motifs can be traced back to the early part of this century, the same period of American cultural nativism that inspired the Arts and Crafts movement in midwestern industrial cities and a flight of young painters and sculptors to fledgling artists' colonies in the American Southwest. Before the Depression put an end to this bonanza for nativeborn talent, American Indians had been able to stake a large claim in media as diverse as miniature totem poles, beadwork, and basketry. While museums scoured the countryside for medicine bundles, pipes, and headdresses, the …

Review Of The Lance And The Shield: The Life And Times Of Sitting Bull By Robert M. Utley, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the past decade biography as a field within American history has made a strong comeback, and Robert M. Utley's study of the Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) leader Sitting Bull is an excellent contribution to the field. Writing the life story of an Indian leader who died more than one hundred years ago is difficult at best. For example, even the birth date of the subject is open to question. Nevertheless, the author has written a thorough, balanced, and informed book. In it Sitting Bull emerges as a rational person living within his culture, having recognizable goals, and experiencing both success …

Review Of Revolt Of The Provinces: The Regionalist Movement In America, 1920-1945 By Robert L. Dorman, C. Elizabeth Raymond

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since its brief flowering in the third and fourth decades of this century, regionalism has been generally dismissed as insignificant by students of American culture. While the U.S. intellectual mainstream rushed off toward both modernism and the movies, regionalists remained determined denizens of their various backwaters. Painter Thomas Hart Benton's rejection of New York abstraction for heartland folk murals in Missouri is both well known and emblematic. In his book, Revolt of the Provinces, Robert Dorman has reopened the subject of regionalism in thought-provoking fashion. Dorman claims for regionalism a wider significance than has been granted by many critics. …

Review Of A Guide To Kansas Mushrooms By Bruce Horn, Richard Kay, And Dean Abel, Wendell Gauger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One hundred fifty species of Kansas macrofungi are described in this welcome Guide. Each described species is accompanied by a photograph, a feature which, along with the authors' attempt to restrict the number of species included, adds greatly to the usefulness of this book. The quality of the photographs is uniformly excellent. The written descriptions are engaging, yet informative. Technical "jargon" is kept to a minimum. I found the book easy to read. For example the authors tell us that "Reports on the edibility of this species [Laccaria laccata] vary from mediocre to superb, which tells us …

Review Of Earth And Sky: Visions Of The Cosmos In Native American Folklore Edited By Ray A. Williamson And Claire E. Farrer, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a book for a wider audience than folklorists or anthropologists, though both will find substantive materials here for future research. It is a work that integrates a number of disciplinary perspectives-including ethnohistorical sources, archaeology, social theory, myth studies, religion and ritual, and astronomy- with remarkable economy and focus. The editors, Ray Williamson (from the United States Congress's Office of Technological Assessment) and Claire Farrer (an anthropologist at California State University at Chico), have illustrated the depth and complexities of Native American "Blue Archaeoastronomy" as a source for enhancing our understanding of diverse mythic worlds. The volume's essays range …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History And Literature Meet By John E. Miller, William Holz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder have many devoted readers, and the TV program based loosely on the books has generated many more enthusiasts who have never even read the books. One measure of such fans' interest has been their pilgrimages to the sites and settings of the books, and around these locations has grown up a considerable tourist industry of museums, pageants, and historical reconstruction. Here the faithful or the merely curious can find a certain kind of ratification of their fictional experience: the "fiction" is raised toward "history" and hence toward "truth" by conflating the stories …

Review Of Great Lakes Lumber On The Great Plains: The Laird, Norton Lumber Company In South Dakota By John N. Vogel, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The publication in 1991 of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West established a useful model for blending economic and environmental history. The book focused on three commodities grain, lumber, and meat-as they were harvested, transported and channeled through Chicago, processed, and marketed to consumers in the hinterlands. Looking at a different locale, Vogel takes the second of these commodities and shows how it was transformed from the abundant white pine stands of Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley to sawed boards ready for sale in lumber yards along the railroad in a dozen-and-a-half towns in Dakota Territory that sprang up …

Review Of Archaeology, History, And Custer's Last Battle By Richard Allen Fox, Jr., Vergil E. Noble

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is important to note, however, that arechaeological knowledge is largely a product of interpretation, neither as certain nor as monolithic as Fox might have his readers believe. Indeed, some of his conclusions are sure to be disputed by fellow archaeologists with differing views, as well as by those historians he confronts directly in the book. Still, Fox deveolops a compelling argument that will serve as a point of departure for future debates on the enduring and ever-controversial subject. Accordingly, there is little doubt that his book will garner a vast audience among historians and archaeologists, students of military tactics, …

Review Of Where The Sky Began: Land Of The Tallgrass Prairie By John Madson, Mikko Saikku

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Appendices include a useful list of prairie nurseries and seed sources and a directory of representative tallgrass prairies. Although the directory is by no means intended to be comprehensive, one can still complain about the omission of sites such as the Rockefeller Experimental Tract near Lawrence, Kansas. Where the Sky Began, possibly supplemented by a localized and biologically more detailed study (e.g., O. J. Reichman's Konza Prairie: A Tallgrass Natural History), will give the general reader a highly enjoyable introduction to the history and biota of the tallgrass prairie.

Review Of The Prairie In Nineteenth-Century American Poetry By Steven Olson, Mark Kamrath

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Prairie in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry is an important book about prairie and plains imagery in nineteenth-century American poetry. Situating his study among Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, and Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her, Olson argues that nineteenth- century American poets created a "new American poetry" (171) in the ways they describe the prairies and "symbolically incorporate people, imagination, ideology, and place in the United States" (vii).

Review Of Indian Water In The New West Edited By Thomas R. Mcguire, William B. Lord, And Mary G. Wallace, Lawrence C. Kelly

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There is not enough space in this brief review to comment adequately upon the various papers. Both the dangers and the advantages of negotiated settlements are explicated in this timely addition to the literature which is highly recommended to students of American Indians, the West, and water resource management.

Review Of The Northern Pacific Railroad And The Selling Of The West: A Nineteenth-Century Public Relations Venture By Sig Mickelson, William L. Lang

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

More troubling, though, are the author's misconceptions about the territory through which the Northern Pacific built its line. The author's evaluation that in 1870 there was "nothing in Montana east of the Belt Mountains" will surprise Montana historians, but his statement that "Idaho and eastern Washington were almost devoid of population" will dumbfound anyone who knows the history of WaHa Walla and Lewiston.

For readers who are curious about the Northern Pacific's land policies, Mickelson's book is a starting point, but there are numerous other, more modern treatments that are thorough and reliable.

Review Of A Reader's Companion To The Fiction Of Willa Cather By John March, Kari Ronning

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Literary archaeologists of the future may be able to reconstruct the outlines and many of the details of Cather's fiction just from this comprehensive and readable guide. John March spent nearly forty years compiling the materials, while editors Arnold and Thornton and their team spent nearly six more editing, verifying, and documenting. Easily obtained information is generally omitted; what remains, as Arnold's introduction emphasizes, is March's personal selection, and the length and emphasis of most of the notes reflect his interpretations.

Review Of Buckeye Blake: Art On The Western Front By Sarah E. Boehme, Martha H. Kennedy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This handsomely designed exhibition catalogue presents an overview of appealing work by Buckeye Blake, an important contemporary artist of the American West. Published by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in association with the University of Washington Press, the catalogue includes a preface by Center drector Peter H. Hassrick, introduction by Thomas McGuane, insightful essay by crator Sarah E. Boehme, and colored plates of 44 pieces by, or relating to, Blake.

The Front .. Gabled Log Cabin And The Role Of The Great Plains In The Formation Of The Mountain West's Built Landscape, Jon T. Kilpinen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Students of American material culture have often viewed the arid, largely treeless Great Plains as an innovative source region of various aspects of western culture, especially those that gained expression on the landscape. While barbed wire and sod construction are two familiar examples, another exists in the front-gabled log dwelling, the dominant traditional building form of the Mountain and Inter-mountain Western frontier. Because the front-gabled log dwelling was indeed common on the Plains and reputedly absent in the forested, eastern United States, scholars have identified the Great Plains as the source region of this vernacular floorplan. Recent field and secondary …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE LABOR FORCE OF THE CANADIAN RANCHING FRONTIER DURING ITS GOLDEN AGE, 1882-1901 (Simon M. Evans)

THE FRONT -GABLED LOG CABIN AND THE ROLE OF THE GREAT PLAINS IN THE FORMATION OF THE MOUNTAIN WEST'S BUILT LANDSCAPE (Jon T. Kilpinen)

SMALL HISTORIC SITES IN KANSAS: MERGING ARTIFACTUAL LANDSCAPES AND COMMUNITY VALUES (Cathy Ambler)

BOOK REVIEWS

Isolation and Masquerade: Willa Cather's Women

Willa Cather

Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading

Preserving the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains A Naturalist in Indian Territory: The Journals of S. W. Woodhouse, 1849-50

Earth and Sky: Visions of the Cosmos in …

Review Of North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, And Differentiation By Terry G. Jordan, Brad A. Bays

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this important companion to his earlier book, The American Backwoods Frontier, Terry Jordan has again taken the study of cultural diffusion into a new realm of inquiry and interpretation. Although mainly a synthesis of a vast and interdisciplinary literature, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers offers a revisionist explanation of the origins, spread, and patterns of cattle ranching in most of North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. This study will prove to be an even more innovative and controversial work than Backwoods, for the questions asked and the solutions provided are grand ones indeed. A cultural geographer, Jordan tailors …