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Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"SAME HORSE, NEW WAGON": TRADITION AND ASSIMILATION AMONG THE JEWS OF WICHITA, 1865-1930 (Hal Rothman)

BREAKING THE SILENCE: HYMNS AND FOLK SONGS IN O. E. RØLVAAG'S IMMIGRANT TRILOGY (Philip R. Coleman-Hull)

SENSE OF PLACE IN THE PRAIRIE ENVIRONMENT: SETTLEMENT AND ECOLOGY IN RURAL GEARY COUNTY, KANSAS (Nina Veregge)

HUNT, CAPTURE, RAISE, INCREASE: THE PEOPLE WHO SAVED THE BISON (Ken Zontek)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture

Soils in Archaeology: Landscape Evolution and Human Occupation

The Loner: Three Sketches of the Personal Life and Ideas of R. B. Bennett, 1870-1947

The Sioux and Other Native …

"Same Horse, New Wagon" Tradition And Assimilation Among The Jews Of Wichita, 1865,1930, Hal Rothman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite the emphasis on ethnicity and crosscultural contact that permeates the New Western History, western historians have neglected the Jews of the American West. Often mislabeled as German ethnics because of their surnames or ignored altogether, Jews of the interior West in particular have been left out of the intellectual revolution sweeping the field. Their modern demographic distribution in coastal and urban areas has been mistaken for their historic presence, and their contribution to local and regional culture has been overlooked. As a result, the Jews of large urban areas in the West have received the vast majority of scholarly …

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 Pioneer Woman Educator: The Progressive Spirit Of Annie Webb Blanton By Debbie Mauldin, Claudine Barnes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Debbie Mauldin Cottrell has written a meticulously researched biography of the first woman to hold statewide office in Texas. Serving as state superintendent of public instruction from 1918-22, as well as President of the Texas State Teachers Association, Vice-president of the National Education Association, and a professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin, Annie Webb Blanton focused her life's work on the reform of rural education. She also labored tirelessly to promote the advancement and equality of women throughout professional education. By building on their traditional role as teachers, she opened new opportunities for women.

Review Of Singing An Indian Song: A Biography Of D' Arcy Mcnickle By Dorothy R. Parker, Robert F. Gish

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

D'Arcy McNickle occupies a position of relatively minor but increasing stature in American Indian history and literature. Dorothy R. Parker's volume is thus a welcome addition to the increasing number of monographs, critical studies, and general commentaries about this ordinary but successful individual.

Modern biography is characterized by a fascination with people who, although notable, are seldom as illustrious and "famous" as the figures who traditionally engaged the attention of earlier, particularly nineteenth-century, biographers. In this sense, McNickle is clearly a modern subject; and reader interest in him, although keen among enthusiasts, will probably be limited.

Review Of Into The Wilderness Dreams: Exploration Narratives Of The American West, 1500-1805 Edited By Donald A. Barclay, James H. Maquire, And Peter Wild, William J. Sheick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although some readers may wish for annotations to help with occasional obscure moments in the passages, over all they will find this well-produced book to be at once entertaining and instructive. Moreover, Into the Wilderness Dream provides academic specialists in early American studies with a substantial resource for furthering their current interest in appreciating better the cultural diversity of colonial encounters with North America. In many respects, then, the editors have compiled an exemplary anthology.

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 Cather, Canon, And The Politics Of Reading By Deborah Carlin, Christopher Nealon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There are moments when Carlin simply gives the novels to much credit for the value of their ambivalence, especially when concluding her chapters: on more than one occasion her final claim seems to be that Cather's late work was simply too complex and metafictional for earlier critics. Moreover, her feminism is more nuanced than her deconstructive technique: although extremely attentive to the complicated ways in which white women make use of black women in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, for instance, Carlin valorizes the way characters in Shadows on the Rock tell small stories in the midst of the …

Review Of Preserving The Great Plains And Rocky Mountains By Elaine Freed, Amil Quayle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The title is misleading. This is actually a book about preserving human-made structures and prehistory sites and artifacts in the region. There is no strong argument here against stopping the forces that lay waste to the landscape as the European onslaught continues to nullify the symbiotic relationships that Native American peoples practiced with their mother, the Earth, on this continent.

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 Ogallala: Water For A Dry Land: A Historical Study In The Possibilities For American Sustainable Agriculture By John Opie, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Opie presents a compelling story of maladapt ion on the Great Plains, along with great sympathy and understanding of the region's people. He draws his conclusions from a keen understanding of those who have used, and presently use, the aquifer, of the land and aquifer themselves, and of the economics and ecology encompassing and enveloping the regior His thoroughly researched book will stand as model for others to emulate and expand upor,

Review Of The Most Promising Young Officer: A Life Of Ranald Slidell Mackenzie By Michael D. Pierce, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michael D. Pierce has produced a credible and nicely written interpretation of Ranald Mackenzie's life. By focusing on the frontier years and placing this officer's experiences within the broader context of military events, he provides the reader a good sense of time and place. Pierce also successfully utilizes the standard source materials and moves well beyond Robert G. Carter's somewhat unreliable On the Border with Mackenzie (1935). Unfortunately, the personal dimensions of Mackenzie's thoughts and deeds will never be fully known because he was an intensely private man who left little documentation about himself. Even his official reports tend to …

Review Of Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food On The Oregon Trail By Jacqueline Williams, Roger Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Williams uses original texts liberally-diaries, letters, contemporary published accounts, cookbooks-and a method I appreciate: voices from the past, rather than a modern voice telling us what voices from the past said. The book's illustrations and photos significantly add to the reader's understanding and appreciation of the severe demands of cookery on the Trail.

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 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 Sioux And Other Native American Cultures Of The Dakotas: An Annotated Bibliography Compiled By Herbert T. Hoover And Karen P. Zimmerman, Steve Potts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume is an excellent supplement to Hoover and Jack Marken's 1980 Bibliography of the Sioux, and the two volumes can be used together for a thorough treatment of the Sioux. The title of this volume, however, is somewhat misleading. Material related to Sioux origins in Minnesota is included and recent materials on the Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Ojibway are omitted; after the first chapter, most annotations are on the Sioux. The authors note in their introduction that this volume complements South Dakota History, a 1993 bibliography of the state's history, and the two volumes share a common …

Bluestem And Tussock Fire And Pastoralism In The Flint Hills Of Kansas And The Tussock Grasslands Of New Zealand, James F. Hoy, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The ghost of Lady Barker haunts public discourse on the question of burning tussock grassland in New Zealand. The image of this gentle English woman, author of the Canterbury classic Station Life in New Zealand, transformed into a pastoral pyromaniac professing "the exceeding joy of 'burning,'" is compelling. She contests with friends over who can set the most magnificent blaze, exults at solitary cabbage trees exploding into flame, and regrets that she was not there to see the first blaze rage across the plains. Of this ritual, she says, she and her friends "never were allowed to have half …

Not So Plain Art Of The American Prairies, Joni L. Kinsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the first European encounters with the grasslands of central North America, beginning with Coronado in the mid-sixteenth century, prairies have alternately confused, dismayed, overwhelmed, depressed, and inspired those who would contend with their contradictions. They have been described as being both nothing and everything, empty as well as vast, monotonous and endlessly varied. For those who saw them in their pristine state, prairies were often disorienting, a place to be lost, whereas today they have become the "heartland" where Americans look to find their truest identity. While such disparities have frustrated many writers who have attempted to convey something …

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 …

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 Kansas: A Pictorial History By Robert W. Richmond, Virgil W. Dean

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Like the first, which has been enjoyed and valued by students of Kansas history for more than three decades, this new and improved edition of Kansas: A Pictorial History is a must for the home or school library. We should be grateful to have it available once again.

Review Of A Funny Bone That Was: Humor Between The Wars Edited By David C. Jones, Jeremy Wild

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jones provides useful historical contexts for Terril's humor; painful details about the Depression, for example, explain why most of the "jokes" about it are subdued. As Ma Joad says, however, "We're the people that live ... we go on," and they did so, partly through laughter. "The reason there were fewer wrecks in the old horse-and-buggy days was because the driver didn't depend wholly upon his own intelligence." "Fifteen percent of school children are below normal mentally, we are told. That's too high a figure. We don't need that many members of Parliament." In giving "new edges to old saws," …

Review Of The Orphan Trains: Placing Out In America By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Fred Erisman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most haunting stories of the American West is the legend of the "orphan trains." Relating the practice of taking homeless children from the teeming cities and resettling them in the nation's heartland where they could grow and prosper as youngsters should, the story tacitly invokes some of the most potent of American myths-the Turner safety-valve theory, the Horatio Alger tale of the self-made person, and, more darkly, the lingering traces of Social Darwinism. The Orphan Trains strives to set the record straightnot to debunk the legend, but to give it its proper niche in western history. Emphasizing …

Review Of Life At Four Corners: Region, Gender, And Education In A German-Lutheran Community, 1868-1945 By Carol K. Coburn, Lesley Ann Kawaguchi

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The strength of this work is Coburn's focus on the way in which boys and girls were socialized into the community and on the roles men and women played in sustaining their households, their community, and their ethnoreligious identity and culture. Furthermore, she has highlighted and offered insight into the German-Lutheran family, a neglected element in many German-American studies. The story of Block Corners's residents is particularly engaging when Coburn draws on individuals, recollections, and anecdotes that illustrate her points, such as first-generation midwife Gesche Mahnken Block and her ties to the informal networks established among the women.

Some Observations On The Labor Force Of The Canadian Ranching Frontier During Its Golden Age, 1882 .. 1901, Simon M. Evans

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It is more than a decade since scholars like L. G. Thomas and David H. Breen challenged the assumption that the Canadian ranching frontier was a straightforward case of technological and land-use diffusion from the United States. Breen argued that the Canadian government had played a significant role in bringing the range cattle industry into being within the North West Territories during the 1880s and went on to trace the manner in which the Department of the Interior overtly supported the ranchers for the next twenty years. Under this regulatory umbrella, upheld by the forceful presence of the North West …

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 …

Review Of A Naturalist In Indian Territory: The]Ournals Of S. W. Woodhouse, 1849-50 Eds.John S. Tomer And Michaelj. Brodhead, David J. Harter M.D.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Weare still very far from being aware of the dimensions and ramifications of our ethnocentric illusions." Although more than forty years have passed since Joseph Epes Brown penned these words in preface to The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, Americans still struggle to find a national identity that transcends our European heritage and its Judeo-Greco-Roman foundations. If one doubts just how pervasive (and sometimes counterproductive) the Eurocentric illusion could be, a reading of the Woodhouse Journals and a bit of introspection should suffice to convince. Woodhouse wrote a century before Brown. …

Review Of "A Funnie Place, No Fences": Teenagers' Views Of Kansas, 1867-1900 Edited By C. Robert Haywood And Sandra Jarvis, Carol Miles Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For some time we have had accounts written by men of the early years in a new state; then women's diaries began to be discovered recording events from a woman's perspective. With this book, we now have a sense of what it was like to be a teenager who had moved from New York or Iowa into a prairie land with little broken ground and "no fences." "A Funnie Place" adds an important dimension to both our historical and sociological understanding of daily life on the Kansas Plains.

Index

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Index 294-301 (8 pages)

"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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

So began Logan's long career in Sheridan County. The year was 1930, and she had just arrived from North Dakota, a fresh Cum Laude graduate of Jamestown College. The social and cultural walls that divided the community were at once unambiguously defined for her-with a simple list. The good Catholics and Lutherans of Plentywood made sure that the custodians of their children's minds would be well insulated from the riffraff of the town-the liquor distillers, the bootleggers, and, of course, the reds. The social center of the community, the Farmer-Labor Templethe "Red Temple" to local conservatives-was generally off limits …