Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Notes And News- Winter 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

West River History

Western Literature In The Canadian Rockies

Defining The Prairies

Francophones In Western Canada

The American West, Promise And Prospect

Manuscripts For The Millennium

Manuscripts On The Indian Wars

Errata

Review Of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History Of Coups And Combat By Jean Afton, David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, With Richard N. Ellis, James Briscoe

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On 11 July 1869, the Fifth Cavalry attacked and destroyed Tall Bull's camp at Summit Springs, Colorado. A ledger book of Cheyenne drawings found in the village depicts a number of Cheyenne Dog Soldier exploits during the 1860s. The book passed from one of the troopers to a railroad surveyor named Ira LaMunyon. In 1903 LaMunyon donated the book, as part of his personal library and collections, to the Colorado Historical and Natural History Society, where it remained, mostly unnoticed, for the next ninety years.

Jean Afton, wife of LaMunyon's great grandson, took an interest in the ledger book and …

Review Of American Politics In The Gilded Age, 1868-1900 By Robert W. Cherny, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert W. Cherny's lively and economical survey of Gilded Age politics is a welcome addition to Harlan Davidson's American History series. American Politics in the Gilded Age will be especially valuable to undergraduate and graduate students and will also be of interest to general readers and to scholars. Cherny provides a very readable narrative of key political events and personalities, and he employs an array of useful concepts that are based on the most current scholarship.

American Politics in the Gilded Age is neatly divided into three chapters. In the first, "The Domain and Power of Party," Cherny begins by …

Review Of Rooted In The Land: Essays On Community And Place Edited By William Vitek And Wes Jackson, Tisha Gilreath-Mullen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Let me begin by stating that Rooted in the Land is not an anthology that deals exclusively with the Great Plains. It includes new and previously published essays dealing with a sense of place and community in states as far away from the Plains as Massachusetts, Vermont, and Kentucky. Nevertheless, as a work of environmental literature, Rooted in the Land should serve Great Plains scholars as an exemplary text, offering a variety of perspectives on dealing with the environmental impact of a consumptive society.

William Vitek and Wes Jackson are clear in their volume's goals: first, to address the assumption …

Review Of Women Of The First Nations: Power, Wisdom, And Strength Edited By Christine Miller And Patricia Chuchryk, With Maria Smallface Marule, Brenda Manyfingers, And Cheryl Deering, Jo-Ann Archibald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book fulfills one of two purposes emerging from the first National Symposium on Aboriginal Women of Canada: Past, Present, and Future, held in 1989 at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta: to bring together a collection of talks-as oral texts-and academic papers about various aspects of Aboriginal women's lives written by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women. Even though Aboriginal women point out the importance of traditional teachings about land, family, and community, they also raise economic, academic, social, and identity issues that spring from traditional and colonial frameworks. Emma LaRocque says it better:

Weare being asked to confront some of our …

Review Of Homicide, Race, And Justice In The American West, 1880-1920 By Clare V. Mckanna Jr, Lawrence Larsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Clare McKanna concludes in Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West that based on homicide statistics the West was more violent than the East. As defined by coroners, "homicide" means any killing of one human being by another not clearly identified as accidental. For comparative purposes, McKanna has rigorously and meticulously researched homicide records for what he considers three representative counties: urban Douglas, of which Omaha is the county seat, in Nebraska, and the rural mining counties of Las Animas in Colorado and Gila in Arizona.

Western homicides occurred for a wide variety of reasons, ranging all the …

Review Of The Buffalo Hunters By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Ken Zontek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bison history captures the American imagination. Robinson capitalizes on this interest here with an entertaining narrative about buffalo hunters. The book begins with a synopsis of Native American bison hunting practices both before and after the acquisition of the horse, an animal whose impact dramatically transformed and increased indigenous dependence on the buffalo. The author moves on to address the role Native Americans played in supplying bison beef to British-Canadian fur companies and buffalo robes to their American counterparts. The story then quickly moves on to Euro-American sport hunting which reached its heyday with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. …

Review Of Ella Deloria's Iron Hawk By Julian Rice, Kelly Morgan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Julian Rice organizes, critiques, and analyzes one of Ella Cara Deloria's lifetime achievements, the writing of a Lakota epic. His volume provides a brief history of Lakota linguistics as well as recognition of Deloria's contributions to maintaining oral traditions. Six critical essays follow the Lakota and English texts and are characteristic of Rice's ability to research and criticize Deloria's work from a linguistic perspective. What he has produced is a useful reference text for researching and teaching Lakota linguistics through the epic story of Iron Hawk.

This, Rice's second of three books on Lakota oral traditions since 1992, is …

Review Of Wild West Shows And The Images Of Native American Indians, 1883-1933 By L.G Moses, Timothy Troy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A chapter or two into this extraordinarily well-documented and illustrated work on one of the more bizarre but colorful topics in American and Native American history, I felt compelled to rummage through an old footlocker to find a personal journal from the 1960s when I lived and worked in Little Eagle, South Dakota, on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation as a community development worker and recruiter for the Job Corps. Moses's chronological account of the emergence of Wild West shows and their "Show Indians" from George Catlin's early Tableaux vivants to Buffalo Bill Cody's world-touring extravaganzas fascinated me because I …

Review Of The Wpa Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Edited By T. Lindsay Baker And Julie P. Baker, Angelo Costanzo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The editors of this rich work of research and compilation have done an outstanding job in bringing together the entire huge collection of previously published and recently rediscovered Oklahoma ex-slave narratives. These accounts resulted from interviews conducted during the late 1930s by field workers of the Oklahoma Federal Writers' Project, part of a national Depression-era employment program that fortuitously appeared while the decreasing numbers of elderly former slaves were still alive to tell their stories.

The unemployed writers and schoolteachers who served as reporters were both black and white, and there is no doubt that the responses given by each …

Review Of The Oglala People, 1841-1879: A Political History By Catherine Price, Matthew G. Hannah

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book is a thorough history of official relations between the Oglala Lakota and the US Government during the mid-nineteenth century, with a special eye to the impact of these relations on the political structures that had been characteristic of Oglala society before significant white contact. The book's structure is straightforward: an introductory chapter draws on early ethnographic data and related scholarship to layout the political anatomy of Oglala society in the early nineteenth century, while the following six chapters cover Oglala-white relations from 1841 to 1879. Each of the six historical chapters not only recounts important events but also …

Review Of Cheyennes At Dark Water Creek: The Last Fight Of The Red River War. By William Y. Chalfant, James Briscoe

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Chalfant presents a fairly detailed and objective history of the attack on Little Bull's encampment on Sappa Creek in 1875. Father Powell, an honorary Peace Chief of the Cheyenne Tribe and prominent Cheyenne historian, praises Chalfant's efforts in presenting an impartial and objective recounting of the events. More detached readers, however, will find a vein of sympathy in Chalfant's writing for the Cheyenne side of the story.

Chalfant provides a detailed background of the events leading up to and surrounding the Cheyenne involvement in the Buffalo or Red River Wars of 1872-74. This was a period of raiding and …

Review Of Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers And The Medal Of Honor, 1870-1898 By Frank N. Schubert, Cornel Pewewardy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln

Review Of Larry Mcmurtry And The West: An Ambivalent Relationship By Mark Busby, Clay Reynolds

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this thorough look at McMurtry's canon through 1995, Mark Busby asserts that the novelist deliberately escaped from his southwestern roots and Texas's mythic past, then made a spiritual and triumphant return to them. But Busby insists that the novelist's return to western themes and stories represents not a "coming home" but rather a continuing ambivalence that is worked out to some degree in every work he has completed, regardless of setting.

Beginning with McMurtry's youth in Archer City, Busby explores McMurtry's attempts to break out of the "minor regional novelist" mold. Busby begins with McMurtry's earliest writings, then searches …

Review Of Wounded Knee Ii By Rolland Dewing, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and Lakota supporters and their seventy-one day standoff against the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pine Ridge Reservation police provides a rich medium to study social movements, tribal politics, and federal policy. Its complexity, controversial nature, and relative temporal proximity have contributed to the "second Wounded Knee" receiving less attention than it deserves. In Wounded Knee II, Rolland Dewing has provided a serviceable foray into the event’s complexities. Dewing, Professor of History at Chadron State College in Nebraska, long-time resident of the …

Review Of Cherokee Outlet Cowboy: Recollections Of Laban S. Records By Laban S. Records, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Cowboy memoirs are not all that rare nor are they all that common. Thus, the reflections of Laban S. Records about his life working on the cattle trails and ranches of south central Kansas and northern Oklahoma during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century are of some inherent value. He worked as a freighter, a cowpuncher, a line rider, and a foreman. The book begins in the 1870s with memories of freighting on the Santa Fe Trail and concludes with Records converting to "the Gospel of Christ in its fullness" at a Methodist revival meeting in Kansas. It …

Review Of To Change Them Forever: Indian Education At The Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893- 1920 By Clyde Ellis, David W. Adams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A central element of late nineteenth-century Indian policy was the use of schools as instruments of forced acculturation. Toward this end, a three-tiered system of education emerged consisting of day schools, reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation boarding schools. In recent years historians have paid increased attention to the educational story, with most of the focus being on schools of the off-reservation variety. What has been missing is a first-rate study of a reservation school. Thanks to Clyde Ellis's exceptionally fine study of the Rainy Mountain boarding school, we now have one.

One of the most distinctive aspects of this book …

Review Of No End Of Grief: Indian Residential Schools In Canada By Agnes Grant, Celia Haig-Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Agnes Grant's work is a useful and interesting addition to the literature on residential schools in Canada. As a clearly written synthesis of a selection of existing works, it provides an introduction to the schools which would be useful as an undergraduate class reading. The book's thirteen chapters are divided into four sections: Introduction, History, Conditions, and Consequences. Each section is introduced with a tantalizing photograph of the former Birtle Residential School taken in 1990. These prompted me to make comparisons to schools that I know and left me wanting to know more about Birtle.

The text follows the increasingly …

Review Of Dancing On Common Ground: Tribal Cultures And Alliances On The Southern Plains By Howard Meredith, Victoria Lindsay Levine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Howard Meredith has produced an ambitious and thoughtful study of cultural interaction and exchange among Southern Plains tribes in Dancing on Common Ground. The project emerged from discussions in an American Indian Studies course taught at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Meredith demonstrates that the concept and practice of alliance-between individuals, between tribes, and between tribes and larger environmental and spiritual systems-has dominated Southern Plains cultural perspectives.

Using ceremonial dance as a metaphor for native systems of governance, the author examines the ideas of reciprocity and cooperative interaction in Southern Plains myth and religion. He even …

Review Of Fort Worth's Legendary Landmarks By Carol Roark, James Wright-Steely

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Few substantial cities in the United States can boast of such an impressive aggregate of preserved pre-Second World War architectural wealth as Fort Worth, Texas. Downtown "Cow town" is largely intact, featuring block after block of continuous shop fronts, brick streets, and terra cotta details scraping the sky. Business and nightlife abound in this vintage precinct, whose century-old courthouse still houses county courts. A secondary downtown at the Stockyards Historic District is past its prime as a sprawling slaughterhouse but today is the thriving destination for herds of tourists. Even close-in historic neighborhoods remain vibrant, although their occupants long ago …

Review Of Building South Dakota: A Historical Survey Of The State's Architecture To 1945 By David Erpestad And David Wood, Elaine Freed

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

South Dakota's architectural legacy bears close resemblance to that of other prairie and Plains states, with one colorful exception: the use of the region's reddish stones, quartzite and sandstone. These bright pink rocks bring a distinctive glow to communities in which they are concentrated, notably Dell Rapids, Sioux Falls, and Hot Springs. How fortunate that this material was locally available and affordable at a time of extensive building around the turn of the century when talented designers Wallace L. Dow and Henry Schwartz put their stamp on the region's architecture.

David Erpestad and David Wood begin their survey with several …

Review Of Roadside History Of Wyoming By Candy Moulton, Duane A. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Wyoming is a large state with a history, geography, and reputation to match. It takes a person with a great deal of vim and vigor to tackle a Roadside History of Wyoming. Third generation Wyoming native, writer, and journalist Candy Moulton took on the task with an enthusiasm and interest that comes out in almost every page of the book.

She covers the whole state, divided into five parts, with a mixture of history, legend, stories, and undoubted appreciation for her beloved Wyoming. The reader will meet a wide cast of individuals who have traveled through or lived there. …

Review Of Texas Oil, American Dreams: A Study Of The Texas Independent Producers And Royalty Owners Association. By Lawrence Goodwyn, George N. Green

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a history of the independent oilmen of Texas, whose money financed the book. The great oil discoveries in Texas-Anthony Lucas's at Spindletop, 1901, and C. M. "Dad" Joiner's in the East Texas field, 1930, among others-were made and developed by small operators because the major companies did not believe the oil was there. Many farmers' lands remained unleased until oil had already been discovered nearby. Thus oil production and royalties, especially in Texas, the author asserts, were "massively democratized."

Eventually the small operators organized the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, whose policies sometimes deviated from those …

Review Of Willa Cather And The Myth Of American Migration By Joseph Urgo, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If we think of America simply as a land of migration and settlement, we are missing the broader picture, the one Joseph Urgo draws so clearly. Urgo analyzes more than a westward movement of settlers, concentrating instead on the concepts of the movement of ideas and cultures between a variety of old worlds and . new, and making the point that Willa Cather "is a comprehensive resource for the demarcation of an empire of migration in U.S. culture." As he explains, his interest in Cather's work lies in "the aesthetics of migration." Willa Cather certainly knew migration, from her move …

Review Of Ghost Settlement On The Prairie: A Biography Of Thurman, Kansas By Joseph V. Hickey, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

To label a book as local history is often to discredit it as solid scholarship. No one should make this mistake in the case of Joseph Hickey's fine study of a tiny settlement in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Hickey, in fact, displays here a remarkable combination of deep local knowledge and theoretical underpinnings. His work sheds important light on what William Least Heat-Moon has called "the perils of excessive individualism," that most American of processes in which community life is gradually undermined by the forces of large-scale capitalism. Concurrently, Hickey also provides critical new information on the evolution of …

Review Of Alias Frank Canton By Robert K. Dearment, Phil Roberts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Robert K. DeArment renders an engaging, readable portrait of Frank Canton. In the course of his research, he uncovered numerous previously unused sources which help to explain how this former Texas convict could "change sides" and become a legendary lawman in Wyoming and Oklahoma.

Born Joe Horner and sentenced to the Texas State Prison in Huntsville for robbery under that name in 1877, he escaped from a work gang after two years, turning up in Wyoming with a new name, Frank Canton, and soon a new occupation-lawman. After service as sheriff of Johnson County, Canton threw in with the so-called …

Review Of The Hog Ranches Of Wyoming: Liquor, Lust, And Lies Under Sagebrush Skies By Larry K. Brown, Rebecca Howard

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas by Larry L. King and Peter Masterson, the titled place of ill-repute was nicknamed the Chicken Ranch. In Wyoming locals referred to such places as Hog Ranches. Established to supply wine, women, and song to military outposts in the nineteenth century, the history of the Hog Ranches has received little attention until now. It is the story of these dens which Larry K. Brown pursues here. The book has the cover of a dime store novel and a title that draws immediate attention. For these reasons readers might approach the work looking for …

Review Of Our Hearts Fell To The Ground: Plains Indian Views Of How The West Was Lost Edited With An Introduction By Colin G. Calloway, Emily Greenwald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The latest entry in the Bedford Series in History and Culture combines primary documents with Colin Calloway's contextual commentary to produce a readable, informative glimpse into Plains Indians' experiences in the nineteenth century, easily accessible to the non-specialist. The documents (mostly textual with some visual sources) are drawn from a spectrum of observers from a wide variety of tribes. The volume lends itself nicely to teaching, particularly because Calloway ably instructs readers how to dissect complex historical sources.

Following a quick survey of Plains history, Calloway ends his introduction by discussing the various types of sources compiled in the book …

Review Of Our Landlady By L. Frank Baum, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is widely known that L. Frank Baum spent several years in South Dakota before moving to Chicago, where he wrote the Oz books that made him famous. And since the publication of Henry M. Littlefield's American Quarterly article in 1964 suggesting that the Populist movement of the 1890s inspired many of the characters and scenes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it has been widely assumed that Baum drew directly upon his South Dakota experience while writing his beloved popular classic. Yet no one until now has systematically investigated the attitudes and opinions that Baum held while in Dakota, …

The Great Depression Two Kansas Diaries, C. Robert Haywood

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the decade of the 1930s the nation plunged from prosperity and great expectations into a sharp decline that adversely affected a greater percentage of people than any economic crisis before or since. During the Great Depression 25 percent of the nation's work force became unemployed. No state was unaffected, and both cities and farms suffered, although each section of the economy displayed a different set of problems. For most urban dwellers the extent and depth of the crisis was measured by employment. Studs Terkel found the clearest, most succinct definition of the Depression when a once unemployed laborer said: …