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The Uses Of Biography: The Case Of Willa Cather, James Woodress

Great Plains Quarterly

In the first of his series of lectures on biography at the University of Toronto, Leon Edel observed that "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Edel was generalizing about the life of Henry James when he made that statement, for he was deep in the writing of the James biography to which he devoted about twenty years of his life. For a writer such as James this view of biography …

Title And Contents- Fall 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1982 VOL. 2 NO.4

CONTENTS

WILLA CATHER AND NEBRASKA: AN INTRODUCTION

THE USES OF BIOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF WILLA CATHER James Woodress

THE CHILDHOOD WORLDS OF WILLA CATHER Mildred R. Bennett

AN EXPLORATION OF CATHER'S EARLY WRITING Bernice Slote

o PIONEERS! THE PROBLEM OF STRUCTURE Bruce P. Baker II

MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIP IN MY ANTONIA David Stouck

ONE OF OURS AS AMERICAN NATURALISM JohnJ. Murphy

WILLA CATHER'S A LOST LADY: ART VERSUS THE CLOSING FRONTIER Susan J. Rosowski

BOOK REVIEWS

Historic Sites along the Oregon Trail

Army Letters from an Officer's Wife

Deadwood: The Golden Years …

The Childhood Worlds Of Willa Cather, Mildred R. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly

She was a good artist, and all true art is provincial in the most realistic sense: of the very time and place of its making, out of human beings who are so particularly limited by their situation, whose faces and names are real and whose lives begin each one at one individual unique center.

Katherine Anne Porter

Willa Cather, as Katherine Anne Porter realized, was a provincial or regional writer who could derive the universal from the specific, as the best artists do. For Cather, the specifics to which she returned throughout her career were the people, places, and things …

Review Of Mister, You Got Yourself A Horse Edited By Roger L. Welsch, Howard W. Marshall

Great Plains Quarterly

This fine new book indicates a welcome direction regional scholars are taking in attending to cultural traditions in particular states. The Great Depression of the 1930s altered America and left behind some troublesome problems; but those hard times led to the serious collection of regional folklife by members of the Federal Writers' Project (an arm of the Works Progress Administration under FDR), and we are still discovering and wondering over the materials passed to us by those WP A writers and collectors. Roger Welsch's collection is the result of a modern scholar's discovery of a body of WPA materials in …

Review Of Army Letters From An Officer's Wife By Frances M. A. Roe, Robert M. Utley

Great Plains Quarterly

Reminiscences of army wives constitute a distinct genre of the literature of the American West. About a dozen-among them Mrs. Custer, Mrs. Carrington, Mrs. Lane, Mrs. Summerhayes, Mrs. Viele, and Mrs. Boyd-offer perceptive, literate, and often graphic firsthand commentary on frontier army life and the people and conditions of the nineteenth-century American West. Near the top of the list-indeed, at the very top, in the opinion of this reviewer-stands Frances M. A. Roe's Army Letters from an Officer's Wife.

In 1871 Frances Mack married Fayette W. Roe, an infantry lieutenant newly graduated from West Point. During the next two decades …

Dark Adaptation With Interposed White Adapting Fields, Charles D. Bernholz, L. Spillmann, V. Daforno

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

It is proposed that dark adaptation following a moderate pigment bleach may nearly as well be carried out (and more conveniently) under low room lighting conditions as in complete darkness. To test this idea, dark adaptation curves were determined either immediately after the termination of a 3 min, 4.1 log td white preexposure field, or following 10 or 15 min of additional exposure to one of three low-level photopic (2.9, 2.4, 1.8 log td) backgrounds of white light. Dark thresholds measured after the additional exposure fell rapidly and reached the rod plateau of the normal dark adaptation curve with a …

Review Of The North Dakota Political Tradition Edited By Thomas W. Howard, Edward C. Blackorby

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is primarily designed to help North Dakotans understand their political institutions and traditions. Seven chapters by as many historians are readable summaries on basic themes of the state's history.

Robert Wilkins's study of Alexander McKenzie, reputedly the political boss of Dakota Territory and North Dakota, is the most thorough summation available. Wilkins points out that McKenzie's power was not absolute. In a desire to achieve fairness, Wilkins at times leans toward the position that ends justify means. However, McKenzie's record is provided in detail.

Charles Glaab definitively describes the career of John Burke, the Democratic governor whose 1906 …

The Plains Landscape And Descriptive Technique, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly

The first European who traveled on the Great Plains was Alvar Nuiiez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spaniard who lost his way as he wandered through the southern plains about 1534. Culturally conditioned to value a varied landscape, he later complained, "We nowhere saw mountains." Several years later another Spaniard, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, traveled into the plains looking for gold but found only grass and bison. What is now Kansas was like nowhere else he had ever been. He was vexed to find that the only way he could keep his party together was by marking the way with piles …

Title And Contents- Summer 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN PLAINS INDIAN PAINTING Mary Jane Schneider

THE PLAINS LANDSCAPE AND DESCRIPTIVE TECHNIQUE Robert Thacker

NOSTALGIC REACTION AND THE CANADIAN PRAIRIE LANDSCAPE Ronald Rees

CITIZENS AND STRANGERS: GEOGRAPHIC MOBILITY IN THE SIOUX CITY REGION, 1860-1900 William Silag

BOOK REVIEWS

The Great Plains: Perspectives and Prospects

Red Crow, Warrior Chief

The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, and Comparative Study

The North Dakota Political Tradition

The Ranchers: A Book of Generations

NOTES & NEWS

Notes And News- Summer 1982

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

MAPPING THE NORTH AMERICAN PLAINS

RECENT APPOINTMENTS

OTHER CONFERENCES

Review Of The Great Plains: Perspectives And Prospects Edited By Merlin P. Lawson And Maurice E. Baker, Martin Bender

Great Plains Quarterly

Most policies and institutions that seem to be successful in the humid eastern United States have been and often still are inadequate for the Great Plains in dealing with the unpredictable changes in the rigorous environment and the external demands from outside the regions. These inadequacies were analyzed at the third annual symposium of the Center for ~reat plains Studies, held on March 2 and 3, 1979. In the papers that make up this book, participants identified available resources in the Great Plains and provided information that might assist policy-makers in anticipating future conditions. The papers treat the impact of …

Review Of Red Crow, Warrior Chief By Hugh A. Dempsey, John C. Ewers

Great Plains Quarterly

At a time when Plains Indians are eagerly seeking to learn more of the history of their own tribes, Hugh A. Dempsey, curator of history at the Glenbow-Alberta Institute in Calgary, has effectively interpreted the nineteenth- century history of the nearby Blackfoot and Blood tribes through careful study of the lives and policies of their greatest leaders. In 1976 he gave us Crowfoot, Chief of the Blackfeet. Now he offers Red Crow, Warrior Chief, who was the recognized head chief of the Blood tribe during the late years of the nineteenth century. Both books have been solidly grounded …

Nostalgic Reaction And The Canadian Prairie Landscape, Ronald Rees

Great Plains Quarterly

In psychology and psychoanalysis, nostalgic reaction refers to the behavior of people separated from familiar places and familiar pasts. Used professionally, the expression encompasses the entire range of behavior exhibited by the uprooted. It is used here in a limited sense to describe the efforts, both physical and imaginative, made by migrants from Europe and eastern North America to adjust t~ a difficult and unfamiliar landscape. Cut off from their homelands, migrants to the Canadian prairies and to the northern plains in general were forced to make a home of a new and, as one of them put it, "naked …

Citizens And Strangers: Geographic Mobility In The Sioux City Region, 1860--1900, William Silag

Great Plains Quarterly

An American literary and scholarly tradition upholds the Midwestern town as a bastion of social stability. In novels by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and a host of nineteenth century authors, comforting images of small town tranquility provide sharp contrast to scenes of urban turmoil in the age of industrialism. Even the town's critics, from Edgar Watson Howe to Sherwood Anderson, pay tribute to popular views of small-town folk as more sedentary and self-contented than the ambitious urbanites who crowded the streets of nineteenth-century New York and Boston and Chicago. These images were not restricted to works of fiction. America's …

Regional Differences In Plains Indian Painting, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

It may seem but a short leap from the earliest red, white, and black markings on rock walls to the sophisticated abstract expressionism of contemporary Native American art, and only a small· step from geometric designs painted on hides to hard-edge geometric forms on canvas, but the development of Plains Indian painting from prehistoric times to the twentieth century is a journey from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, from tribal to urban society. Plains Indian painting reflects the historical and geographical diversity of the region as well as the pluralistic culture of modern Native Americans. It is an …

Nebraska Farm Real Estate Market Developments In 1981-82, Bruce B. Johnson, Ronald J. Hanson

Nebraska Farm Real Estate Reports

Nebraska farm real estate values declined nearly 4 percent during the past year. The reasons are quite obvious -- low farm income, changing inflation expectations, and continued high interest rates. The combination of these fac­ tors has drastically altered what was a "bullish" land market up until 1980.

During the 1970's, farmland values were appreciating rapidly. The average increase was approximately twice the rate of inflation. The real value (purchasing power)of farmland doubled during this decade. Financial leveraging was extremely profitable for farmland investors and land prices were quickly bid up.

The past year represents quite a contrast. Adding an …

Review Of The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, And Comparative Study By David G. Mandelbaum, Warren C. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

The Canadian Plains Research Center has provj.ded a new and amended version of the Plains Cree, a classic of plains anthropology first published more than forty years ago. The earlier volume, available under the imprint of the American Museum of Natural History (Anthropological Papers 37, Part II, 1940), is a portion of a much more extensive work completed by Mandelbaum as a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University during 1936. The complete document is published here for the first time.

The earlier version is essentially a description of the "buffalo-hunting way of life ... of the Plains Cree" (xiii). It …

Review Of The Ranchers: A Book Of Generations By Stan Steiner, Roger L. Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly

There is a story in the Wyoming WP A files (for which I thank James Dow of Iowa State University) about some cowboys who collapsed in various sections of a country cemetery after a full-blown drunk. One of the celebrants had fallen into a two-foot depression of a collapsed grave and there slept off his condition. He woke up at the crack of dawn, sat up in the grave, surveyed his situation, and shouted, "Hurray! It's Halleluja Morning and I'm the first one here!"

In The Ranchers Steiner presents us with a long, fragmented, maudlin obituary for a culture just …

An Analysis Of Howling Response Parameters Useful For Wolf Pack Censusing, Fred H. Harrington, L. David Mech

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

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) were studied from April 1972 through April 1974 in National Forest in northeastern Minnesota by radio-tracking and simulated howling. Based during 217 of 456 howling sessions, the following recommendations were derived for using howling as a census technique: (1) the best times of day are dusk and night; (2) July, August, and are the best months; (3) precipitation and winds greater than 12 km/hour should be avoided; (of 5 single howls should be used, alternating "flat" and "breaking" howls; (5) trials should 3 times at about 2-minute intervals with the first trial at lower …

A Comparison Of The Levels Of Competence Needed And The Levels Of Competence Possessed By Vocational Agriculture Instructors In Nebraska For Horse Production, James Bruce Wilson

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Civilian Space Policy And Applications, U.S. Office Of Technology Assessment

Space Law Documents

The United States orbited its first satellite in 1958, nearly a quarter century ago. In the intervening years, the United States has made great strides in developing peaceful and practical uses of space technology. However, in spite of the dramatic successes of the space program, among which are the recent flights of the Columbia shuttle orbiter, many informed observers express considerable unease about the future of our civilian efforts in space, particularly in light of increased foreign competition and stringent fiscal restraints.

Because of these uncertainties and also because of emerging new prospects for using the space environment, this assessment …

Review Of Sinclair Ross By Lorraine Mcmullen, Geraldine Anthony

Great Plains Quarterly

Devotees of Canadian and American prairie fiction will welcome this book, the first to treat the entire body of Sinclair Ross's work. Lorraine McMullen has done a creditable job of analysis and criticism. She begins with a biographical introduction and follows with a study of all of Ross's short stories and novels published from 1934 to the present.

The first critic to provide any details about Ross's life, McMullen illuminates the personality of this enigmatic prairie writer and, incidentally, corrects a few errors in Robert Chalmer's little book, Ernest Buckler and Sinclair Ross. Ross himself has maintained that creative …

Review Of Ethnicity On The Great Plains Edited By Frederick C. Luebke, Howard Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly

Ethnicity on the Great Plains is a collection of essays based on a conference sponsored by the Center for Great Plains Studies. The editor has selected some of the best papers from that conference; attempting to maintain a balance among different academic disciplines, ethnic groups discussed, and various subregions of the Great Plains. The focus of the symposia was on the question of the relationship between the physical environment of the Great Plains and the persistence or accommodation of ethnic culture.

The resulting book is a satisfying and pathbreaking multidisciplinary achievement on a neglected topic. The study of rural ethnic …

David's Sabine Women In The Wild West, Rena N. Coen

Great Plains Quarterly

When one considers the body of mid-nineteenth- century paintings of the American West, one is struck by the place of women, especially white women, in them. In the large majority of cases, from George Catlin and Seth Eastman to Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, women are conspicuous by their absence. We know that many women did go west with their husbands, striving to maintain some semblance of the civilization they knew in the rough and primitive conditions of army posts and frontier settlements. But they were an anomoly in such environments; in the popular nineteenth-century view, women, at least "good" …

Review Of Stephen Long And American Frontier Exploration By Roger L. Nichols And Patrick L. Halley, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

The name of Major Stephen H. Long has been, for most western and frontier historians and geographers, linked inextricably with the "Great American Desert controversy." Fairly or unfairly, scholars have tended to see as Long's major exploratory contribution the creation of the myth of the barren interior which, it has been claimed, prevented settlement of the Great Plains for several decades. This opinion regarding his role and significance as an explorer is unfortunate. Long was by no means the first or only explorer in the West in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the Plains in negative …

Review Of Thomas Jefferson And The Stony Mountains: Exploring The West From Monticello By Donald Jackson, Robert Mccolley

Great Plains Quarterly

The Founding Fathers knew almost nothing of that huge segment of North America bounded by New Mexico, the Pacific Coast, the Arctic, and the Mississippi. It became Thomas Jefferson's task, eagerly embraced, to dispel that ignorance. Here, as in so many other fields, he moved with a major current of his age: thousands of Americans, Spaniards, Russians, Canadians, and other British were converging on the trans-Mississippi West. Jefferson's awareness of this competition grew with his knowledge of the area and increased his conviction that the United States, not Europe, should control North America.

This engaging history falls into three parts. …

Review Of The Oklahoma Petroleum Industry By Kenny A. Franks, Gerald D. Nash

Great Plains Quarterly

Anyone who undertakes to survey the economic history of the Great Plains in the twentieth century is struck by the fact that the literature on the subject is exceedingly sparse, particularly when measured against the importance of the field. Scholarly studies of agriculture, special industries, banking and credit institutions, and government regulation in these spheres at the federal and state level are still needed, even though the era of the Great Depression in the 1930s has received some special attention. This book, spawned by an increasing awareness of energy crises in the 1970s, provides a succinct survey of the petroleum …

Review Of Oklahoma Homes: Past And Present By Charles R. Goins And John W. Morris, H. Keith Sawyers

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent years rather dramatic changes have occurred in architectural historians' perspectives of the built environment in western and especially American culture. Their traditional scope of study, which heretofore focused on major historical eras and architectural monuments of national and international significance, has expanded to include a much more comprehensive range of periods, types, and values such as Victorian and vernacular architecture, regionalism, and ethnicity. As a result, long overdue recognition is being given to work that is significant at the regional, state, and local levels. Oklahoma Homes: Past and Present is a product of this phenomenon.

This large-format book …

Review Of The Poles In Oklahoma By Richard M. Bernard, Maria Starczewska- Lambasa

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard M. Bernard has undertaken the challenging task of writing a history of Polish migration to Oklahoma. As he states in the preface, "The Poles of Oklahoma have not left a very easy trail to follow. They were never more than 4,000 in number according to U.S. census counts. And most Poles who lived in the state at one time or another eventually departed, leaving behind few traces of their sojourn in the area."

The author recaptures the Polish experience in Oklahoma by utilizing bits of information scattered through archives and libraries throughout the state and by relying on oral …

The Landscape Of Ukrainian Settlement In The Canadian West, John C. Lehr

Great Plains Quarterly

To journey through parts of the western interior of Canada at the turn of the century was to experience the cultural landscapes of the peasant heartland of Europe. Nowhere was this more true than on the northerly fringes of the parkland belt and across the. southern reaches of the boreal forest pioneered by Ukrainian immigrants from the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna.

Between 1892, when the fIrst small group of seven Ukrainian families settled in Alberta, and 1914, when the outbreak of war in Europe terminated immigration from Austria-Hungary, more than 120,000 Ukrainians settled in Canada.1 Almost all of …