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Review Of Elliott Coues: Naturalist And Frontier Historian By Paul Russell Cutright And Michael J. Brodhead, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Vain, petty, vengeful, arrogant, and austere would be appropriate words to describe Elliott Coues. Yet, on occasion, he unselfishly aided a promising career and took up unpopular causes such as women's rights. Trained as a physician and employed as an army surgeon during much of his career, Coues nevertheless used much of his time to observe, study, read, and write about birds. Indeed, Coues (pronounced "cows") was one of America's outstanding ornithologists. He was also a prolific writer with more than six hundred titles to his credit, including a seminal work of taxonomic organization, Key to North American Birds (1872). …

Title And Contents- Fall 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1983 VOL. 3 NO.4

CONTENTS

ACROSS THE 49TH: THUNDERSTORMS IN THE NORTHERN GREAT PLAINS Alec H. Paul

WILLA CATHER AND THE POPULISTS Robert W. Cherny

ESCAPE FROM THE GREAT PLAINS: THE ICELANDERS IN NORTH DAKOTA AND ALBERTA Howard Palmer

BOOK REVIEWS

The Code of the West

The West as Romantic Horizon

Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist On the Oregon Trail

Magic Images: Contemporary Native American Art

Indian-White Relations in the United States: A Bibliography of Works Published 1975-1980

Yuwipi: Vision and Experience in Oglala Ritual

Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978: Symbols in Crisis of Authority

Slim Buttes, 1876: An …

Notes And News- Fall 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

GREAT PLAINS SYMPOSIA ANNOUNCED

GUIDE TO AMERICAN INDIAN RESOURCE MATERIALS PUBLISHED

NEBRASKA ARTISTS AND POETS

Review Of The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural And Social History By R. Douglas Hurt, Gilbert C. Fite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is the third book to appear recently on the Dust Bowl and the 1930s. Some readers may ask whether the subject deserves another study so closely on the heels of Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, and Paul Bonnifield's The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression, both published in 1979. But the fact is that scholars have been too long in filling this important historical void.

In The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History, R. Douglas Hurt has written a brief, clear, straightforward account of life and times on the southern plains …

Review Of Read This Only To Yourself: The Private Writings Of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910 By Elizabeth Hampsten, Julie Roy-Jeffrey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hampsten has written a rich, provocative book on the private writings of midwestern women between 1880 and 1910. As she points out, there has been a long tradition of studying working-class male authors but little interest in working-class women writers. To recapture women's consciousness, Hampsten suggests, one must do more than approach the sources as if they were written by men. Not only the content but also the omissions, the form, and the style of women's writings are significant.

The structure and style of working-class diaries and letters bear few resemblances to what was considered "good writing" by contemporaries. Hampsten …

Review Of Indian-White Relations In The United States: A Bibliography Of Works Published 1975- 1980 By Francis Paul Prucha, Roy W. Meyer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the shortcomings of any bibliography is that it is somewhat out-of-date by the time it is published. The more being written in its area of coverage, the sooner it needs to be updated. It is an indication of the current interest in Indian white relations that Francis Paul Prucha's compendious bibliographical guide published in 1977 has already had to be supplemented with a bibliography containing more than three thousand entries. In the single area of legal relations, for example, nearly three hundred fifty new titles have appeared in the years 1975-1980.

Users of Prucha's original guide will find …

Review Of The Red River In Southwestern History By Carl Newton Tyson, Forrest D. Monahan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this book Carl Newton Tyson recounts the role of the Red River in southwestern history from the time that Spanish explorers discovered the stream to the modern era. Flowing some twelve hundred miles from its origin on the Texas high plains, it drains about one-tenth of the continent before emptying its waters into the Mississippi. Claimed by Spain as a result of Coronado's marching across its upper reaches in 1541, it became a river in dispute from about 1700, when Frenchmen appeared along its lower reaches. In fact, it became a conduit for expanding the French empire westward. The …

Review Of Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978: Symbols In Crisis Of Authority By Loretta Fowler, William K. Powers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The thesis of this book is that the Arapahoe, who share the Wind River reservation of Wyoming with the Shoshoni, have somehow adapted better than other tribes to white domination through the creation and use of effective political symbols, particularly those values associated with traditional age grades, a distinctive feature of early Arapahoe society. Fred Eggan, in the Introduction, states that it is clear from the author's account "that the Arapahoe have made the most successful adjustment to white culture of any Plains tribe" (xv, italics added). It is a wonder why this intolerable statement was included. For many …

Review Of The Code Of The West By Bruce A. Rosenberg, Henry Nash Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Custer: The Epic of Defeat (1975), Bruce A. Rosenberg analyzed more than a century of discussion of the massacre of the general and some two hundred cavalrymen under his command by Sioux Indians near the Little Bighorn River in 1876. The book demonstrates how in American popular culture this catastrophe was transformed into the heroic triumph of Custer's Last Stand. Rosenberg says that in his new book, The Code of the West, he has used the same method but expanded its "cultural implications." His table of contents does indeed present an attractive variety of topics. In addition to …

Willa Cather And The Populists, Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite the wealth of critical and analytical treatments of the life and work of Willa Cather, few have noted the relationship between her writing and the Populist movement of the early 1890s. Some have specifically described Cather as nonpolitical or even antipolitical. The two exceptions, John H. Randall III and Evelyn J. Hinz, base their conclusions on sources other than the Populist movement in Nebraska. Cather's writings, nonetheless, exhibit clear evidence of the impact of both Populism and its ideological successor, Bryanism. Cather did not like either variant of agrarian radicalism, and she expressed her distaste both explicitly and implicitly. …

Notes & News- Summer 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

LUEBKE APPOINTED CENTER DIRECTOR

BERNICE SLOTE DIES

NON-RESIDENT FELLOWS OF THE CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES

WEBB-SMITH ESSAY COMPETITION

Review Of Over The Chihuahua And Santa Fe Trails, 1847- 1848: George Rutledge Gibson's Journal Edited And Annotated By Robert W. Frazer, Raymond Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Born in Virginia in about 1810, George Rutledge Gibson studied law and later opened a law office in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1834. During the early 1840s he moved his practice to Weston, Missouri. Gibson also dabbled unsuccessfully as a journalist, but his two newspapers proved to be financial failures.

When the Mexican War started, Gibson volunteered and was elected a second lieutenant. He was part of Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West, which left Fort Leavenworth for the occupation of New Mexico in 1846. He later became assistant quartermaster and commissary and accompanied Colonel Alexander Doniphan's forces to …

Review Of Chief Left Hand: Southern Arapaho By Margaret Coel, Robert C. Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For more than two decades, since Alvin Josephy, Jr., wrote Patriot Chiefs (1961), biography has been a useful way to present American Indian history. In its most successful form, up to a dozen Native Americans are examined in a book of chapter-length studies. In a less successful format, whole books are devoted to the life of a single great tribesman. There can be value in these full-length profiles, but the hazards are many. Chief Left Hand falls into the latter grouping.

Left Hand was nearly thirty years of age when he became chief of the Southern Arapaho tribe. His frequent …

Nineteenth-Century Patterns Of Railroad Development On The Great Plains, Russell S. Kirby

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The North American Great Plains experienced rapid settlement and economic growth from 1870 to 1914. The advance of settlement and the development of local economy, while generally contiguous, were by no means uniform. Soil conditions, underground water supplies, the network of rivers and streams, rainfall, and growing season are all attributes of the physical environment that vary across the plains both longitudinally and latitudinally. In addition, the extent of effective settlement in the Mississippi River valley, the natural starting point for westward expansion onto the plains, varied considerably in 1865. Given these economic and environmental preconditions, it is not surprising …

Review Of The Gift Of The Sacred Pipe By Black Elk, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a beautiful coffee-table book. One wonders why a university press chose to publish it. Though the illustrations to the book are lovely and in the spirit of Black Elk's account of the major ceremonies of the Lakota people, they do not add to our scholarly understanding of those rituals. Furthermore, in editing Joseph Epes Brown's original text, Drysdale removed all footnotes and much of the technical detail concerning Lakota iconology that was included by Brown and Black Elk in the original Sacred Pipe (1953). As a consequence, this account of the ceremonies is readable but lacks the density, …

Pioneer Landscape Paintings In Australia And The United States, R. Leslie Heathcote

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The European invasion of Australia and the American West in the nineteenth century brought a massive transformation of landscapes in the two continents through conflict with the indigenous populations and by the introduction of new and more intensive systems of resource use. As historians and historical geographers have acknowledged, the invasion was generally well documented, not only by the more literate pioneers and contemporaries but also, more importantly for any statistical analysis, by the emerging bureaucracies that administered the transfers of lands and collected the facts of land settlement, which the new societies saw as evidence of the success of …

Review Of Indian Policy In The United States: Historical Essays By Francis Paul Prucha, Ronald N. Satz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For two decades, Francis Paul Prucha of Marquette University has produced a steady stream of scholarly publications on nineteenth century American Indian policy. Sixteen of Prucha's lectures and articles, including some never before published, are gathered together in this volume with brief head notes that indicate the circumstances under which they were written and some reactions to them.

The first two essays concern the study and writing of the history of Indian policy. Prucha warns that the historian's task is neither activism nor special pleading, urges scholars to be more fully conscious of the historical context in which the events …

Review Of The West And Reconstruction By Eugene H. Berwanger, James A. Rawley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since 1967, historians of the Reconstruction era have turned away from the Confederate states and Washington to focus their attention on the Northern states. David Montgomery, Felice A. Bonadio, James C. Mohr, and others have studied labor, Ohio, New York, and the border states during Reconstruction. The present book adds to that body of literature a broad-gauged examination of the trans-Mississippi West during the years from 1865 to 1870, omitting the former slave states and Iowa, which are considered more middle western than western. The author of a previous work, The Frontier Against Slavery, Berwanger brings a distinguished background …

Title And Contents- Summer 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SUMMER 1983 VOL. 3 NO.3

CONTENTS

PIONEER LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS IN AUSTRALIA AND THE UNITED STATES R. Leslie Heathcote

WESTERN MYTH AND NORTHERN HISTORY: THE PLAINS INDIANS OF BERGER AND WIEBE Sherrill E. Grace

NINETEENTH-CENTUR Y PATTERNS OF RAILROAD DEVELOPMENT ON THE GREAT PLAINS Russell S. Kirby

TRANSPORTATION AND TRANSFORMATION: THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, 1857-1885 A. A. den Otter

BOOK REVIEWS

Indian Policy in the United States: Historical Essays

Chief Left Hand: Southern Arapaho

The Gift of the Sacred Pipe

Over the Chihuahua and Santa Fe Trails, 1847-1848: George Rutledge Gibson's Journal

The West and Reconstruction

NOTES & …

Western Myth And Northern History The Plains Indians Of Berger And Wiebe, Sherrill E. Grace

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

We have used up the mythological space of the West along with its native inhabitants, and there are no new places for which we can light out ahead of the rest. . . . [But 1 we have defined the "territory ahead" for too long in terms of mythologies created out of our meeting with and response to the Indians to abandon them without a struggle.

Fiedler,

The Return of the Vanishing American

I want to fashion good words forever, stretch my body into a continuous sentence, humiliate the air with speech, break the chronology of my people's despair, sew …

Transportation And Transformation The Hudson's Bay Company, 1857-1885, A. A. Den Otter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Transportation was a prime consideration in the business policies of the Hudson's Bay Company from its inception. Although the company legally enjoyed the position of monopoly by virtue of the Royal Charter of 1670, which granted to the Hudson's Bay Company the Canadian territory called Rupert's Land, this privilege had to be defended from commercial intruders. From the earliest days the company developed its own transportation network in order to maintain a competitive edge over its opponents. During its first century, when business ventured hardly beyond the shores of the Hudson Bay, the company perfected its transatlantic shipping. Later, when …

The Effect Of Variable Spring Water Conditions On Mallard Reproduction, Gary Krapu, Albert Klett, Dennis Jorde

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) breeding densities in the prairie pothole habitat of eastern North Dakota during 1961-1980 varied from 2.28 birds/km² in 1977 to 9.47 birds/ km² in 1963 and were correlated with pond abundance (r = 0.543, P < 0.05). The number of basins used by pairs declined with drought, as did home-range size. Nesting activity also varied with the number of ponds holding water/km², ranging from high (including substantial renesting) under favorable water conditions to low during extreme drought. The span between first and last nest initiations declined by 19 days from a wet to a dry year. With severe drought conditions during spring 1977 on the Medina Study Area, pairs returned to attempt nesting but were unsuccessful, and most …

Notes And News- Spring 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

WILLA CATHER SEMINAR

FRIENDS OF THE CENTER

L. J. BIBLE DIES

CENTER RECEIVES STARCH PAPERS

Review Of The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 By Arnoldo De Leon, Richard L. Nostrand

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Persons of Spanish-Indian or Mexican descent who were incorporated into the United States in the nineteenth century belonged to one of three major subcultures: the Californio, the manito (Hispanos of New Mexico and Colorado), or the Tejano. Leonard Pitt has written a comprehensive social history of the Californio (1966), and now Arnoldo De Leon gives us a counterpart volume on the Tejano. De Leon's purpose is to capture the essence of the "ordinary" Tejano in Central, South, and West Texas between Texas Independence (1836) and the turn of the century, and he develops the theme that in …

Prairie Poetry And Metaphors Of Plain/S Space, Laurie Ricou

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

McAlmon's Chinese Opera, the most significant prairie poem from Canada since Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue and Eli Mandel's Out of Place, concerns "understand[ ing) modern writing" more than it does "the Mid-West." Indeed, it is only by the most expansive definition a prairie poem at all. Yet it is an appropriate source of epigraph, not only because it touches on metaphor, space, and poetry, but because its emphasis is characteristic of a shift in plains poetry and in its criticism, which prompts this essay. Furthermore, as a Canadian poet's tribute to a neglected American modernist, Scobie's poem might …

Review Of Clio's Cowboys: Studies In The Historiography Of The Cattle Trade By Don D. Walker, Jimmy M. Skaggs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Clio's Cowboys is an important book, the first truly analytical historiography of the glory days of the cattle trade. It will probably also be controversial, because it chastises three generations of western historians for mindlessly repeating sweeping generalizations about cowboys and cattlemen, for relying on questionable sources, and, worst of all, for disembodying the most colorful of the nation's epics with impersonalized economic and business histories.

Don D. Walker says that historians-for all their pretense of accuracy-do no better in capturing the essence of the American cowboy than do novelists, whom they superciliously dismiss as naive. Suggestive examples of Walker's …

The Origin Of Ranching In Western Canada American Diffusion Or Victorian Transplant?, Simon M. Evans

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a number of factors combined to promote the rapid advance of the ranching frontier throughout the Great Plains of North America. The demands of rapidly growing urban populations in the northeastern United States and north western Europe provided an apparently insatiable market for meat. The grasslands were linked to these markets by an expanding railway network and steamships that crossed the Atlantic on regular schedules. Rumors of the huge profits to be made from investments in mines, railways, and ranges lured a flood of risk capital to the West. The interplay of …

Review Of Mexican Emigration To The United States, 1897- 1931: Socio-Economic Patterns By Lawrence A. Cardoso, Felix D. Almaraz Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this book Lawrence A. Cardoso focuses attention on the flow of unskilled, low-paid Mexican workers who migrated north across the border between Mexico and the United States from 1897 to 1931. He traces the origins of the northward movement, beginning with the rapid changes in the land and labor systems of rural Mexico in the closing decade of the nineteenth century.

During Porfrrio Draz's long tenure in the presidency, Mexico's national policies favored foreign capital investment, the impact of which transformed the pastoral countryside. Prior to the inauguration of public-sponsored programs for economic development, rural inhabitants lived on communally …

Far Corner Of The Strange Empire Central Alberta On The Eve Of Homestead Settlement, William C. Wonders

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, what is now central Alberta was a region in transition. For centuries the area had been inhabited by native Indian peoples, but with the advance of homestead settlement, it became a marginal part of what Joseph Howard has called the "strange empire," a portion of the northern Great Plains that was marked by unrest at the end of one era and the beginning of another. The changes that affected the Red River Valley and later the Saskatchewan Valley had significant local repercussions in this far corner of the "empire," the valley of …

Title And Contents- Spring 1983

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY SPRING 1983

VOL. 3 NO.2

CONTENTS

RUSSIAN WOLVES IN FOLKTALES AND LITERATURE OF THE PLAINS: A QUESTION OF ORIGINS Paul Schach

THE ORIGIN OF RANCHING IN WESTERN·CANADA: AMERICAN DIFFUSION OR VICTORIAN TRANSPLANT? Simon M. Evans

FAR CORNER OF THE STRANGE EMPIRE: CENTRAL ALBERTA ON THE EVE OF HOMESTEAD SETTLEMENT William C. Wonders

PRAIRIE POETRY AND METAPHORS OF PLAIN/S SPACE Laurie Ricou

BOOK REVIEWS

Grasses and Grasslands: Systematics and Ecology

Clio's Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade

The Ambidextrous Historian: Historical Writers and Writing in the American West

Laird of the West

Mexican Emigration to …