Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Ghost Towns Of The Montana Prairie, By Don Baker., James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

Unfulfilled aspirations, a condition common to all human beings, are nowhere more tangible than in an abandoned town. They are the siren call of such places and why guides to ghost towns have become popular items on bookstore shelves, forming a highly varied genre both in quality and intended audience. Don Baker positions his entry on the far side of informality, which is fine, and of carelessness, which is not. The author, a Billings resident bringing enthusiasm to his subject, has produced a visually pleasing, large-format book contammg over eighty photographs. After short sketches of early railroads, the homesteading process, …

Review Of Dispersed City Of The Plains, By Harris Stone, With Joan Stone And J. William Carswell., W. Cecil Steward

Great Plains Quarterly

The book succeeds on several intellectual levels: it presents valuable historical references for the development of towns and cities on the Great Plains; it exposes the materiality and construction, and painful choices, in the restoration and rehabilitation of historic structures; and it lends a frame of values and iconographic references to the overlooked and little appreciated dispersed places and architecture of the middle territory of the United States.

Book Notes- Winter 2000

Great Plains Quarterly

Book Notes

Charlie Russell Roundup: Essays on America's Favorite Cowboy Artist

The Western Horse: A Photographic Anthology

In the Words of Elders: Aboriginal Cultures in Transition

The Competitive Struggle: America's Western Fur Trading Posts, 1764-1865

When Panthers Roared: The Fort Worth Cats and Minor League Baseball

The Exploits of Ben Arnold: Indian Fighter, Gold Miner, Cowboy, Hunter, and Army Scout

Features and Fillers: Texas Journalists on Texas Folklore

A Dispatch to Custer: The Tragedy of Lieutenant Kidder

The American West: The Reader

Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800-1945

Riders of the West: Portraits from Indian Rodeo

Review Of The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics And Politics, 700-1835 By David La Vere, Helen Hornbeck-Tanner

Great Plains Quarterly

The Caddos, to use their American-devised collective name, actually lived "from time immemorial" on the southeastern margin of the Great Plains. In the sixteenth century, their aboriginal territory of fifteen or twenty communities, with dispersed settlements, encompassed a vast area surrounding the middle course of the Red River in the present states of Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. As the most western and longest-surviving of the great Mississippian states, Caddos provide a vantage point for viewing Great Plains history over many centuries. La Vere's interpretation of this lengthy saga appears to emphasize the long-lasting chiefdoms whose end he correlates with …

Changing The Pitch Americanism, Athleticism, And The Development Of Legion Baseball In Nebraska, Kent M. Krause

Great Plains Quarterly

Since its inception in 1928, American Legion Junior Baseball has been popular in Nebraska. Although originally started to advance the Legion's ideological agenda of Americanism, the primary factor in the success of Junior Baseball has been an active level of support from the citizens and businesses in the state's communities. The Legion's program acquired and maintained such support because of the variety of functions it served in towns and cities across the state. First and foremost, Junior Baseball teams were important sources of civic pride to Nebraskans who enthusiastically backed their local boys. The program also provided local businesses with …

"The Boy's Mother" Nineteenth-Century Drug Dependence In The Life Of Kate M. Cleary, Susanne George Bloomfield

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning at age fourteen, Kate McPhelim Cleary published voluminously in turn-of-the century American periodicals and newspapers. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she was born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1863. Her father died when she was young, and her mother moved the family back to Ireland for a short time before immigrating to Philadelphia. In 1880 the McPhelim family-Kate, her mother Margaret, and her two brothers-relocated to Chicago where they supported themselves by writing. There, Kate McPhelim met and married Michael Cleary. In 1884 the newlyweds, along with Kate's mother, moved to recently established Hubbell, Nebraska, where they lived for …

Review Of To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination And Federal Indian Policy, 1960-1975 By George Pierre Castile, Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the 1970s self-determination has been the dominant theme of federal Indian policy. The general concept goes back to President Woodrow Wilson's proposed principles to govern the post-World War I world. In Indian affairs it has come to mean a government-to government relationship managed largely by the federal government's contracting with tribal governments to carry out many administrative functions.

This important new work traces the development of self-determination. It has something of an "insider" perspective because George Pierre Castile, an anthropologist, served in the Indian division of President Lyndon Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Castile finds the first stirrings …

Review Of Gilbert Hitchcock Of Nebraska: Wilson's Floor Leader In The Fight For The Versailles Treaty By Thomas W. Ryley, Harl A. Dalstrom

Great Plains Quarterly

As acting Senate minority leader in 1919- 1920, Gilbert M. Hitchcock worked for ratification of the Versailles Treaty, but the famous battle between President Woodrow Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge left him in the shadows. Thomas Ryley has attempted to explain Hitchcock's role in the Versailles drama.

Most of the first half of this book treats Hitchcock's life prior to 1919. Son of a Republican US Senator, Democrat Gilbert Hitchcock founded the Omaha World-Herald and served three terms in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. As a Senator, Hitchcock was sometimes at odds with the Wilson …

Review Of Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience Edited By John R. Wunder, Frances W. Kaye, And Vernon Carstensen, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly

Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience is a substantial compilation of primary and secondary materials related to the agricultural crisis of the 1930s. Begun in the 1960s by the late Vernon Carstensen, it has only recently been completed by his co-editors. The book contains a number of articles from the New York Times and other national publications related to various aspects of the farmers' plight during the Great Depression, as well as secondary articles reprinted from Great Plains Quarterly, North Dakota History, Annals of Iowa, Nebraska History, Agricultural History, South Dakota History, and Montana: The Magazine of Western History. …

Review Of Mangas Coloradas: Chief Of The Chiricahua Apaches By Edwin R. Sweeney, H. Henrietta Stockel

Great Plains Quarterly

Inch by inch Sweeney drags readers through the military life and times of one of the Chiricahua Apaches' most noted leaders Mangas Coloradas. With certain exceptions noted below, the author describes what quite possibly was every major event in this famous chief's life from cradle to grave. Here briefly are stories of his youth, the Native customs applied to children, the activities and the lessons all Chiricahua children learn in growing up. Here too are descriptions of later battles led by Mangas Coloradas and fought in two countries, the attempts to make peace, the successes and failures of those arrangements, …

Notes And News- Winter 2000

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

New Editor Of Great Plains Quarterly

Bison: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Great Plains

Plains Symposium

International Cather Seminar 2000

Summer Seminar For Teachers

Review Of The New Western History: The Territory Ahead Edited By Forrest O. Robinson, Cheryll Glotfelty

Great Plains Quarterly

"The New Western History is now old enough to have a history," observes Jerome Frisk, lead essayist of The New Western History: The Territory Ahead. Apparently it is also influential enough to interest scholars outside the discipline of history. The seven contributors to this volume, representing literary studies, American studies, and natural resource management, evaluate the core texts of the New Western History's "Gang of Four"; William Cronon, Patricia Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster. These historians are known for their objections to the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose "frontier thesis," they argue, told a one-sided story of …

Review Of The New Encyclopedia Of The American West Edited By Howard R. Lamar, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Yale historian Howard Lamar and published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company in 1977, was a pretty good book, bringing to the American public the first comprehensive single-volume treatment of the history of the West. But that reference work has now been superseded-and dwarfed-by this new rendition, also edited by Lamar. More than 1250 pages of three-column text, 1.5 million words in all, are given over to 2400 alphabetically ordered entries written by more than three hundred scholars. Long thematic entries, on the fur trade or railroads, for example, are interspersed …

Review Of Frontier Soldier: An Enlisted Man's Journal Of The Sioux And Nez Perce Campaigns, 1877 By Private William F. Zimmer, Wayne R. Kime

Great Plains Quarterly

The two journals of Private Zimmer presented here add substantially to the documentary record of Army operations on the Northern Plains during the final months of the Sioux War and its immediate aftermath. Zimmer's unit, Company F, Second Cavalry, took part in the Lame Deer fight against the Sioux on 7 May 1877, and the battle of Bear's Paw Mountains against the fleeing Nez Perce between 30 September and 5 October of the same year. The journals, dated 31 March-31 July and 1 August-31 December, 1877, include accounts of these engagements and of much else their author saw, reflected on, …

Review Of Montana Ghost Dance: Essays On Land And Life By John B. Wright, Larry Watson

Great Plains Quarterly

Late in the nineteenth century, Native Americans of the Plains attempted, through a sacred dance, to bring back a time before the bison all but vanished, before whites came with diseases, greed, and guns, before treaties evicted Indians from ancestral lands. When John B. Wright alludes to the Ghost Dance in his collection of essays, he knows his readers will make connections with that earlier, desperate attempt to restore the past. In Wright's version, however, that past would be before mining companies stripped mountains and polluted rivers and streams, before loggers denuded forests, and before developers converted wilderness to condominium …

The Influence Of Willa Cather's French-Canadian Neighbors In Nebraska In Death Comes For The Archbishop And Shadows On The Rock, Kathleen Danker

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's high regard for French traditions and culture is reflected in many of her writings, including the novels O Pioneers! (1913), One of Ours (1922), The Professor's House (1925), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Shadows on the Rock (1931), and her last, unfinished narrative set in Avignon. Of these works, readers sometimes think of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock as her French Catholic novels because of the heritage and faith of their main characters. Edith Lewis, Cather's long-time companion, recorded that, for Cather herself, writing the second of these two books served as …

Title And Contents- Winter 2000

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 20/ Number 1/ Winter 2000

CONTENTS

"THE BOY'S MOTHER": NINETEENTH-CENTURY DRUG DEPENDENCE IN THE LIFE OF KATE M. CLEARY Susanne George Bloomfield

CHANGING THE PITCH: AMERICANISM, ATHLETICISM, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEGION BASEBALL IN NEBRASKA Kent M. Krause

THE INFLUENCE OF WILLA CATHER'S FRENCH-CANADIAN NEIGHBORS IN NEBRASKA IN DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP AND SHADOWS ON THE ROCK Kathleen Danker

STATES OF BEING IN THE DARK: REMOVAL AND SURVIVAL IN LINDA HOGAN'S MEAN SPIRIT Eric Gary Anderson

BOOK REVIEWS

Ward Churchill A Little Matter of Gerwcide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present …

States Of Being In The Dark Removal And Survival In Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, Eric Gary Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1990, Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan published her first novel, Mean Spirit, a well-received and yet controversial account of the Osage oil boom of the 1920s and the subsequent rash of criminal conspiracies and murders that has come to be known as the "Osage Reign of Terror."² The story she tells is often grim and violent; it returns again and again to "states of being in the dark" (44), which Hogan depicts as a wide-ranging confusion and uncertainty that afflicts many of her characters and demonstrates the period's turbulence to her readers. But the story is also resolutely …

Review Of Fifty Years A Country Doctor By Hull Cook, Kathryn A. Bellman

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a book about an endangered, soon to be extinct species: the country doctor who was also a neighbor and friend and a familiar feature of rural life on the Great Plains in the earlier part of this century. Doctor Hull Cook became a physician in the early twentieth century and practiced medicine in Colorado, Texas, and Nebraska, where he served the residents of the Sidney area for many years.

Dr. Cook delivered babies at home, made house calls in all weather, and drove to some of those houses in a wagon, later in a Model T. He did …

Review Of The Plains Indians By Paul H. Carlson, Colin G. Calloway

Great Plains Quarterly

The enormous increase in ethnohistorical studies over the past generation or two has made room for a new overview of Plains Indian history. Paul Carlson's The Plains Indians provides an overview but falls short of filling the niche.

The book is dated in some of its approaches, stereotypical in some of its descriptions, and uneven in its incorporation of recent literature. Its title should include dates since the book concentrates on the period 1750-1890. Chapter one, "The People and the Plains," locates the various tribes in their nineteenthcentury positions, and chapter two, "First Arrivals," surveys ancient America via the standard …

Review Of Dimensions Of Native America: The Contact Zone An Exhibition At The Museum Of Fine Arts, Florida State University, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

The purpose of the Florida State University art exhibit and its accompanying catalogue is to offer an examination of "acculturated art forms made by both Native Americans and Euroamericans that deliberately converge with and often appropriate each other's cultural properties." This ambitious project was launched in Florida in the spring of 1998 with an amazing spectrum of representative works from pre-Columbian contact to the present. The listing of displayed works is a mere appendix to a broad range of essays that explore issues of "Artification of the Indigenous Artifact," "Blurred Boundaries," "Misconceptions," "Photographs," and "Contemporary Native and Non-Native Artists."

Co-curator …

Review Of Edward S. Curtis And The North American Indian, Incorporated By Mick Gidley, Martha H. Kennedy

Great Plains Quarterly

This important book by the leading authority on Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) has been awaited with high expectations. Gidley, a Professor of American Literature at the University of Leeds, has published extensively on many aspects of Curtis's work. In this outstanding new volume, he illuminates the multi-faceted nature of the photographer's enterprise, reprints original documents relating to the project, analyzes with insight some of the best known images and accompanying texts, and thereby places Curtis's opus within its complex historical context.

For nearly thirty years Curtis studied and photographed more than eighty tribal groups living west of the Mississippi and …

Review Of West-Fever By Brian W. Dippie, Joni L. Kinsey

Great Plains Quarterly

West-Fever is a large-format, glossy book published to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. In its first decade the Autry has emerged as a growing presence in western history and art through an impressive record of acquisitions. (Its collection now numbers some 40,000 pieces, including some truly major objects: John Gast's 1872 painting, American Progress, and Thomas Moran's Mountain of the Holy Cross, 1874, to name just two.) The museum has sponsored and participated in a variety of important exhibitions, and now, it seems, it aspires to enhance its reputation through a new …

Review Of A Little Matter Of Genocide: Holocaust And Denial In The Americas, 1492 To The Present By Ward Churchill, Susan A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Ward Churchill opens the X-Files of American history to examine the phenomenon of genocide in eight essays (some published previously) prefaced by a statement by David Stannard. In American historiography, discussions of genocide float unreally, separated and unanchored in any systematic, analytic context: discussion of the Nazi holocaust over here, denial of the American genocide over there, humanitarian bombings somewhere else. Churchill has prowled disparate literatures human rights, American frontier history, Native American history, history of the Nazi holocaust-to bring back the information relevant to American history and build it into a single comparative discussion set in a single analytic …

Table Of Contents- Fall 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

"The Silent Artillery Of Time": Understanding Social Change In The Rural Midwest

Community Dreaming In The Rural Northwest: The Montana Study, 1944-47

Romantic Women And La Lucha: Denise Chavez's Face Of An Angel

Whither Cowboy Poetry?

Book Reviews

Book Notes

From The Editor

Notes And News

Index

Review Of By Grit And Grace: Eleven Women Who Shaped The American West Edited By Glenda Riley And Richard W. Etulain, Ruth Ann Alexander

Great Plains Quarterly

The biographical essays in this volume present a spectrum of diverse women to illustrate the mythical as well as the actual image of women in the American West. Some are flamboyant and unconventional like Santa Fe's gambling businesswoman Gertrude Barcelo ("La Tules") in the 1840s or Martha Canary (Calamity Jane) whose real and imagined exploits in Dakota and Wyoming Territory thirty years later were the stuff of dime novels. Some sketches characterize more typically "pioneer" types. Seventeen-year-old Abigail Scott Duniway followed the Oregon Trail west from Illinois with her family in 1852. The harsh experience became the basis for her …

Review Of Indians In The United States And Canada: A Comparative History By Roger L. Nichols, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly

On the first page of this encyclopedic essay on North American Indian history, the reader learns that there were "no empires or kingdoms" among aboriginal Americans. This remark is difficult to reconcile with the growing archaeological evidence of regional territorial struggles among the Mississippian city-states that sheltered a majority of the continent's indigenous population. More importantly, it implies from the outset that history began when Europeans introduced complexity and conflict. Pre-Columbian ideologies, memories, and political alignments are therefore essentially irrelevant to an understanding of post-invasion events. Nichols's work is a minefield of similarly pat generalizations.

A comparative analysis of the …

Review Of Land Of Many Hands: Women In The American West By Harriet Sigerman, Margaret D. Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly

Harriet Sigerman attempts to synthesize recent scholarship on women in the American West into a narrative history. The product of her efforts is a visually attractive book that will undoubtedly appeal to general readers. For scholars, however, it falls short of offering a new interpretation of women's history in the American West.

In her opening chapter Sigerman discusses Native American women's traditional roles, the arrival of the Spanish into the West and their effect on the Native population, and the impact of Anglo-American settlement on Native American and Spanish/Mexican women. With so much to cover in one chapter, she tends …

Review Of Magic Lies-; The Art Of W.O. Mitchell Edited By Sheila Latham And David Latham, Ken Mitchell

Great Plains Quarterly

Western Canadian novelist W. O. Mitchell died in March 1998, dramatically punctuating the appearance of this handsome book that sets out to determine the significance of his life's work. For fifty years W. O. "Bill" Mitchell has been a dominant icon of writing in Canada. This thick collection of literary essays, reminiscences, and anecdotes attempts to redress the relative absence of critical commentary the writer has received.

The book is uneven and often contradictory, as one might expect from an assembly of academics, relatives, former students, and theater colleagues. But as the Lathams say in their introduction, "The popularity of …

Poetic Redress Her Body, Her House In The Fire, Dwellers, Debra Dudek

Great Plains Quarterly

Canadian women's position of being a colony within a colony enables women writers to be both separate from and united to a larger Canadian identity. Margaret Laurence's Manawaka texts, and The Fire-Dwellers in particular, construct feminist and nationalist myths that provide women with versions of themselves so they might recognize, and therefore strategize, methods of empowerment. Furthermore, The Fire-Dwellers is a novel that is concerned with issues of modernity. This novel contains a modernist aesthetic that is based upon a rejection of dominant structures and is defined by stylistic and ideological features which share concerns with feminist aesthetics in their …