Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Cowgirls Of The Rodeo: Professional Athletes By Mary Lou Lecompte, Joan Wells

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book sets out to describe the lives and achievements of women wild west show and rodeo contestants from 1896 to 1992. Offspring of their culture, these cowgirls exhibited athleticism, ranching skills, competitive spirit, and perseverance. Historical chapters relate the quest of rodeo women to compete as equals in the exhibition of their athletic ability.

Early promoters recognized and supported the appearance of women in the sport of rodeo, admitting that their glamour, costuming, and skilled performances were necessary in selling rodeo as family entertainment. Cowgirls like Tad Lucas, Alice and Maggie Greenough, Lucille Mulhall, Florence Randolph, Mabel Strickland, Ruth …

Review Of Dangerous Passage: The Santa Fe Trail And The Mexican War By William Y. Chalfant, Duane A. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Chalfant, long time western historian and Hutchinson, Kansas, attorney, focuses on one period in the trail's history, the Mexican War phase of American "Manifest Destiny." His is the story of the military as it protects the trail and uses it as the invasion corridor to march to Santa Fe. The main story details the "troubled and often violent IndianWhite relations that plagued the trail during the war years" (p.xiii). Marc Simmons's foreword sets the scene and takes the reader into the narrative.

A wide variety of people will enjoy this study-those interested in military, Indian, transportation, and southwestern history …

Review Of Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader On The Northern Plains By Rachel Calof, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Along with the original narrative this volume provides an epilogue by Jacob Calof, Rachel's youngest child, and two essays, one by J. Sanford Rikoon, the other by Elizabeth Jameson. Jacob Calof's comments confirm the strength and courage we find in his mother's words.

The essays lend significant context to the narrative. Rikoon gives a concise and informative explanation of the history of Jewish families that left Russia and eastern Europe to settle on farms in the Heartland. Jameson's analysis places Rachel's narrative in historical perspective and emphasizes the importance of recognizing diversities of ethnicity, class, and gender in the interpretation …

Review Essay: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, And The Opening Of The American West By Stephen E. Ambrose, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From time to time, a serious book excites the imaginations of a vaster public than the audience of scholarly journals. Because the Center for Great Plains Studies has, over the past sixteen years, sponsored the reediting and publication of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, we could not help but notice the enormous popular success of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. To provide a focus on some of the scholarly concerns raised by this new text, we invited three prominent scholars to review the book from …

The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958-60, Ronald Walters

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1960, black youths conducted a "sit-in" in Greensboro, North Carolina to obtain the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. Others quickly replicated sit-ins throughout the South and, just as quickly, the press labeled Greensboro the "first" sit-in. Historian David Levering Lewis, for instance, said: "There were not a few white southerners, and probably a majority of white northerners, who would have wished to say to the first sit-in students, as did the woman in the Greensboro Woolworth's, 'you should have done this ten years ago.'" Even data-oriented social scientists such as Doug McAdams portray the sit-ins as …

Review Of Father Peter John Desmet: Jesuit In The West By Robert C. Carriker, Robert H. Keller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although DeSmet loved native people, believed in their innate goodness-even idealized them in the case of the Flatheads-and tolerated their cultures, he did not fully understand their life ways and failed to grasp how they perceived the easy Christianity he offered them. A belief that Indians could shed their culture and become fully "civilized" in twenty years proved exceptionally naive. Most of all, with the evidence right before his eyes, DeSmet seemed to miss the greatest irony in his life: that in attempting to save the Potawatomie, Osage, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Kalispel, Flatheads, Blackfeet, Crow, and Spokane he himself unwittingly …

Review Of Black Elk's Religion: The Sun Dance And Lakota Catholicism By Clyde Holler, John R. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Regrettably, Holler's own most original theoretical constructions suffer from what seems, anyway, the too-rigid (although unstated) metaphysics of the professional philosopher he once was. Black Elk Speaks gives John Neihardt's perspective, he judges, not Black Elk's. The reason? It is a work of art and therefore creative rather than faithful to Black Elk's message. The logic suggests that Holler has no available category or place for narrative realism as a means of being both creative and truthful. And at the end, he explains Black Elk's paired religious convictions by attributing to him an apparent non-cognitivist model of religious language. But …

The Left And Labor On The Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This issue of Great Plains Quarterly is given up to two long articles that probe different facets of the history of the Left on the Great Plains. In "Workers, Unions, and Historians on the Northern Plains," William C. Pratt surveys unions in Nebraska and the Great Plains with an eye to what historians have written about them, what stories remain to be told, and what sources are available for the telling. Certainly he finds no dearth of material, though he is disappointed not to find integrative texts in the school of the "new labor history" for the northern Plains, the …

Review Of Catch Rope: The Long Arm Of The Cowboy: The History And Evolution Of Ranch Roping By John R. Erickson, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Erickson sets his account in the literature of cowboys and roping and supplies a short but useful annotated bibliography. There is nothing here of the "New Western History," however, and little about socio-economic conditions, gender issues, Indians, or African American cowboys. Sharply focused on catch roping, the book nevertheless communicates well the tribulations and satisfactions of life on the range. The many quotations and paraphrases of stories by fellow cowboys give Catch Rope its evocative sense of camaraderie: we feel like we're sitting around a campfire with the author and his friends. And it is a good feeling.

Review Of Lone Wolf V. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights And Indian Law At The End Of The Nineteenth Century By Blue Clark, Ramona Skinner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Clark's unique approach in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock allows him to go beyond the initial examination oflegal precedent to reveal a story of human dignity and a people's survival. The book presents an authoritative account of Kiowa band chief Lone Wolf's relentless attempts, through various legal channels, to halt the selection and assignment of his own allotment. In the end, he joined the Elk Creek Baptist church and lived on his allotment with his family. What Lone Wolf and his tribe hoped to gain from the lawsuit, how the Court bestowed on Congress unlimited power over Indian affairs, and the …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

THE LEFT AND LABOR ON THE PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Frances W. Kaye)

WORKERS, UNIONS, AND HISTORIANS ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS (William C. Pratt)

"WHO'S GOING TO DANCE WITH SOMEBODY WHO CALLS YOU A MAIN STREETER": COMMUNISM, CULTURE AND COMMUNITY IN SHERIDAN COUNTY, MONTANA, 1918-1934 (Gerald Zahavi)

REVIEW ESSAY

Ric Burns. The Way West: Episode I, Westward, the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1845-1864; Episode II, The Approach of Civilization, 1865-1869; Episode III, The War for the Black Hills, 1870-1876; Episode IV, Ghost Dance, 1877-1893. (Martin Blythe; Mia Graeffe; Sanna Heinsalo; Ossi Heinanen; Ari Helo; Kari Hirvinen; Piia Kiviniemi; Vello …

Review Of Vision Quest: Men, Women And Sacred Sites Of The Sioux Nation Photographs By Don Doll, S.J. Introduction By Vine Deloria, Jr., John E. Carter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Don Doll is not the first person of Euro-American ancestry to point the lens of a camera at American Indians. In fact, there is a long tradition of that dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. And neither is he the first person to produce a book of such photographs. That, too, is old hat. But Doll's work is quite different from that of his fellows, and his recent volume, Vision Quest, an assemblage of photographs of Sioux people (inclusive of all three major bands) and the lands that are sacred to them, is proof of that. It …

Review Of Girl On A Pony By La Verne Hanners, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This small book is written in a straightforward, unassuming, conversational style with the result that it's deceptively simple, seeming at first to be just another reminiscence of pioneer days, although in a somewhat unusual place. It's the story of La Verne Hanners's childhood and young womanhood in the Valley of the Dry Cimarron of New Mexico, only a few miles from the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle and just south of the Colorado border. Here is a landscape of grandeur, of severe drought, of sudden, fierce hail and wind and snow storms, of walls of water unexpectedly racing down dry …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (Frederick C. Luebke)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IN MEMORIAM (James Sinclair Ross)

Review Essay: Environmental History, Donald Worster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A summer ago I canoed down the Missouri River, along the wild pristine White Cliffs of Montana, with the Lewis and Clark journals in hand (the De Voto abridged edition). Like many others, I have felt strongly the pull of that famous expedition, the nostalgia for a lost West without cities, dams, or overgrazed pastures, when Indians still defined the place. But I was not prepared to like this retelling of the story, with its hagiographical and militaristic title spliced to its Wallace Stegner-ish subtitle. Was this to be Meriwether Lewis as the Colin Powell of another day? Or as …

The Frontier Medical Community Of Leavenworth, Kansas, Charles R. King M.D.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the important elements in the development of a North American frontier community was a system of medical care. During the nineteenth century the work of all frontier professionals was dramatically facilitated by new means of transportation and communication. Mid-century frontier communities had direct contact with urban centers via the telegraph and could acquire supplies over railroads and improved roadways. The development of a medical care system in Leavenworth, Kansas, during the second half of the nineteenth century illustrates the important role that physicians and other health providers played in community building on the western frontier, as well as …

Review Essay:The Way West Written And Directed By Ric Burns, Martin Blythe, Mia Graeffe, Sanna Heinsalo, Ossi Heinänen, Ari Helo, Kari Hirvinen, Piia Kiviniemi, Vello Ruus, John Wright, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Way West, scripted and directed by Ric Burns, is advertised as the story of United States expansion into the American West from 1845 to 1893. Burns sets the series' temporal boundaries arbitrarily from a New York editor's first use of the term "manifest destiny" in 1845 to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 address on the significance of the frontier and his announcement of its close. The documentary's episodes actually focus on the struggle for control of the Great Plains, pitting the U.S. Army against the Sioux nation and its allies. Largely forsaking the challenge of providing a sure overview of …

Review Of Education For Extinction: American Indians And The Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 By David Wallace Adams, Rebecca Dobkins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Adams makes a number of important contributions, including raising several significant topics deserving further investigation: the local consequences of tension between centralization and decentralization in the boarding school system, the connections between the movement for compulsory education for Indians and for the U.S. school-age public at large, and the relationship between the schools' project of Indian assimilation and American nationalism of the time, particularly the drive to make citizens out of the immigrant "melting pot." In addition, Adams's research, building upon that of many other scholars, demonstrates that the Indian boarding school experience offers rich ethnographic and historical material for …

Recasting Epic Tradition The Dispossessed As Hero In Sandoz's Crazy Horse And Cheyenne Autumn, Lisa R. Lindell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although Mari Sandoz is perhaps best known for the biography of her Nebraska pioneer father, Old Jules (1935), her two other biographies, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942) and Cheyenne Autumn (1953), equally convey her distinctive historical vision of the American West. In these two works, Sandoz rewrites traditional epic formula, taking the perspective of the dispossessed Lakotas and Cheyennes and recounting not the growth and expansion of a culture, but its conquest. In spite of material defeat at the hands of dominant white society, her Native American leaders assume heroic stature, striving against all odds to …

Review OfLinoleum, Better Babies, And The Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marilyn Irvin Holt describes Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890- 1930 as a study of "the domestic economy movement and the rural women it targeted." Focusing on the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, she examines the many ways in which reformers worked to improve life on American farms through education and uplift programs for American farm women and their children. These efforts included the establishment of home extension programs, home economics education, and 4-H programs, among others. Their goals were the physical improvement of the farm home and the farm child, with the intent of keeping …

The Missouri River Basin On The 1795 Soulard Map A Cartographic Landmark, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The publication in 1814 of Nicholas Biddle's edition of the explorations of Lewis and Clark was accompanied by a remarkable map. This chart, drafted by Samuel Lewis from an 1810 manuscript map by William Clark, synopsized the expedition's many detailed route maps across the continent, plus significant post-expeditionary information. l This landmark document was the first to portray the Missouri River valley in a realistic configuration, and it set the stage for modern conceptions of the heartland of the continent.

Review Of Roadside History Of South Dakota By Linda Hasselstrom, Charles Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A decidedly non-traditional history, the work is organized into a series of short essays arranged geographically. Hasselstrom first details the history of a region, from before human occupation to the present, noting its general characteristics and its social and political tendencies. She does the same for each town and its local celebrities, successfully balancing a love of the past with an appreciation of the present. She does not limit herself to the South Dakota of the last half of the nineteenth century, but reaches for the entirety of the region's past, from Paleo-Indians to contemporary ranchers. What results is an …

Review Of Along Ancient Trails: The Mallet Expedition Of 1739 By Donald J. Blakeslee, James P. Ronda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the popular mind the names Pierre and Paul Mallet carry little or no weight. Coronado, de Soto, Champlain, and Lewis and Clark occupy our imaginative space, crowding out adventurers like the Mallets. Even scholars have paid scant attention to the Mallets' epic journey from the Missouri River to Santa Fe in 1739. Donald J. Blakeslee's Along Ancient Trails sets the record straight, properly noting the Mallet role in the European exploration of the southern Great Plains. In doing so, Blakeslee not only recounts one expedition but illuminates the complex history of the entire region.

Review Of Nebraska: An Illustrated History By Frederick C. Luebke, Michael W. Schuyler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Masterfully highlighting the contribution that individuals such as William Jennings Bryan, George Norris, and Norbert Tiemann have made to the state, Luebke is able at the same time to relate Nebraska's history to national and international developments. He also provides a sure account of the state's history during the past fifty years. The concluding essay, "Change in Contemporary Nebraska, 1970-1995," is especially helpful in understanding recent changes in population trends, agriculture, the economy, and Nebraska's relationship to the rest of the world. With the assistance of the staff of the Nebraska State Historical Society, to whom the book is dedicated, …

Prelude To Brownsville The Twenty~Fifth Infantry At Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, 1902~06, Thomas R. Buecker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Around midnight on 13 August 1906, gunshots suddenly rang out on the deserted streets of Brownsville, Texas. Unknown parties indiscriminately fired at a number of private residences, severely wounding a police officer, and into a nearby saloon, killing a bartender and slightly wounding a patron. Apparently all victims were Hispanics. When the ten-minute fusillade was over, witnesses claimed black soldiers from the Twenty-fifth Infantry stationed at adjacent Fort Brown were responsible for the outrage. Substantiation for their accusations seemingly came when civil and military authorities discovered expended military cartridges at the scene.

The Brownsville citizenry had not been happy when …

African Americans And The Great Plains An Introduction, Keith D. Parker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During 23-25 February 1995 the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln sponsored its nineteenth annual interdisciplinary symposium, "African Americans and the Great Plains." The conference, attended by more than 300 people from throughout the United States and Canada, sought to highlight African Americans' role in Great Plains culture by looking at their contributions in various areas such as agriculture, anthropology, archeology, art, biology, dance, education, history, literature, medicine, music, photography, religion, sports, theater, and urban studies. The four papers in this issue of the Great Plains Quarterly were selected to illuminate the diversity of roles …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Keith D. Parker)

THE GREAT PLAINS SIT-IN MOVEMENT, 1958-60 (Ronald Walters)

PRELUDE TO BROWNSVILLE: THE TWENTY-FIFTH INFANTRY AT FORT NIOBRARA, NEBRASKA, 1902-06 (Thomas R. Buecker)

FROMPIN' IN THE GREAT PLAINS: LISTENING AND DANCING TO THE JAZZ ORCHESTRAS OF ALPHONSO TRENT, 1925-44 (Marc Rice)

"WITH ONE MIGHTY PULL": INTERRACIAL TOWN BOOSTING IN NICODEMUS, KANSAS (Claire O'Brien)

BOOK REVIEWS

Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West

Girl on a Pony

Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor from "The Lane County Bachelor" to Bob Dole

Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas

Indians and the …

Review Of Indians And The American West In The Twentieth Century By Donald L. Parman, Leonard R. Bruguier

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Offering solid scholarship and impressive, fresh documentation, Parman contributes a tantalizing, sometimes scintillating overview of American Indian history as it unfolds through the twentieth century. Often rich in detail while describing Indian struggles for self-determination, the book also reveals the give and take tribes have experienced on their long trail of reasserting their place not only in the American West but on the national scene. All is not optimistic, but Indians and the American West draws a detailed map of the territory on which future disputes are likely to unfold; thoughtful citizens consulting it should be better prepared to make …

Review Of Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor From "The Lane County Bachelor" To Bob Dole By C. Robert Haywood, William Kloefkorn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Haywood calls Tough Daisies "a sampler" intended to illustrate that Kansans, contrary to a long litany of misconceptions, "have always had a sense of humor." He succeeds splendidly, chiefly because he gives the reader dozens of well-selected jokes, anecdotes, poems, and cartoons, and partly because the author himself has a wry sense of humor, one that wears well and unobtrusively complements his material. I finished the book wanting more-more jokes, more stories, more history, more Haywood.