Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Capturing Women: The Manipulation Of Cultural Imagery In Canada's Prairie West By Sarah Carter, Catherine Cavanaugh

Great Plains Quarterly

Capturing Women, an extended essay examining the role of Indian captivity narratives in racializing prairie society, is a welcome addition to prairie history, which has been particularly resistant to gender and race analysis. In this small volume Sarah Carter takes up both of these subjects in the context of nineteenth-century imperialism. Beginning with a close reading of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delany, she shows how captivity narrative was used to reestablish white male authority in the aftermath of what has become known as the Second …

Review Of Harvesting The High Plains: John Kriss And The Business Of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950 By Craig Miner, David B. Danbom

Great Plains Quarterly

Craig Miner uses the life and career of Cobly, Kansas-based megafarmer John Kriss to make two points. He argues first that, far from being the forbidding desert suggested by the Dust Bowl experience, the High Plains is an area where productive dry-farming of wheat can be undertaken profitably by intelligent and alert producers. And second, he contends that farming is a business to which planning, efficiency, and economies of scale can and should be applied, regardless of romantic notions about the mythic "family farm."

Kriss is the right sort of farmer to illustrate these points. Starting but as a farm …

Review Of Tejano Legacy: Rancheros And Settlers In South Texas, 1734-1900 By Armando Alonzo, Arnoldo De Leon

Great Plains Quarterly

Tejano Legacy depicts Mexican Americans in Texas-the subjects of the inquiry-as historical actors engaged in a process of adjustment to wrest a living from a rough physical setting and a constantly changing social environment. Their experience in the Texas Borderlands resembled that of other settlers in the trans-Mississippi West who confronted similar forces.

The author wishes to revise and update numerous long-standing interpretations of Texas-Mexican life in the Lower Valley of Texas (which includes those counties in deep South Texas that parallel the Rio Grande). He posits that Tejano history in the region begins with the first colonies founded during …

Review Of Billy The Kid: His Life And Legend By Jon Tuska, Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly

Jon Tuska is a leading authority on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. In fact, in the opening chapter of this reprinted book (originally published by Greenwood Press in 1994), Tuska exhibits his tenacious pursuit of nearly every fact about these much-researched subjects. This one-hundred-page section, illustrating Tuska's diligence, will be particularly useful to all specialists and general readers. Unfortunately, however, the author's flawed approach to his subject seriously limits the book's overall value.

Most of all, T uska attempts to provide a sound historical chronology of the major events of Billy the Kid's life and the Lincoln …

Review Of Comparing Cowboys And Frontiers By Richard W. Slatta, Thomas D. Hall

Great Plains Quarterly

The goal of this collection is to encourage the comparative study of frontiers and social history. The first part, six chapters, focuses on "Topics" for comparisons, while the second part, four chapters, discusses how to do comparative history and critically evaluates much recent work. Slatta begins with a comparative discussion of the Venezuelan Llanos, southern Chile, the Pampas, Brazil, and the Great Plains of North America, suggesting that a frontier is a membrane metaphor through which objects, people, and ideas pass in both directions.

Slatta then discusses how indigenous peoples quickly adopted feral (or sometimes stolen) horses, which led to …

Review Of Policing The Elephant: Crime, Punishment, And Social Behavior On The Overland Trail By John Phillip Reid, Lorna R. Mclean

Great Plains Quarterly

Policing the Elephant is a companion volume to John Reid's Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (1980). Through an incisive analysis of the diaries, journals, and letters of emigrants crossing from Missouri or Iowa to Oregon or California, Reid examines how overland travellers experienced and responded to anti-social actions and theii' punishment. Along the trail, emigrants watched for the elephant. "To see the elephant," Reid explains, "meant undergoing hardships, to learn the realities of a situation firsthand, or to encounter the unbelievable."

Reid skillfully adapts the symbol of the elephant to explore what average …

Review Of Updating The Literary West Sponsored By The Western Literature Association, Barbara Howard-Meldrum

Great Plains Quarterly

When A Literary History of the American West (LHAW) appeared in 1987, it legitimized the field of western American literary studies, defining a tradition and a canon. Yet even as that lengthy volume was completed, the indefiniteness of its title-A, not The-called for a sequel. Updating the Literary West (ULW) provides that necessary sequel, not simply updating but in significant ways reconstructing the West's literary history.

The central core of the new volume provides most of the updating. Some of the authors given individual chapters in LHAW reappear with discussions of their recent works and reviews …

Review Of Profiles In Dissent: The Shaping Of Radical Thought In The Canadian West By Harry Gutkin And Mildred Gutkin, James Naylor

Great Plains Quarterly

The social explosion of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was the product of various combustibles, both material and ideological. In this collective biography of ten arrested strike leaders, Harry and Mildred Gutkin explore the ideas and experiences that led individuals to play prominent roles in the strike. This is an effective approach, allowing the authors to trace individually the various strands of social radicalism that crossed in the spring of 1919 and to follow their post-strike trajectories. Some of the subjects are familiar, such as future Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) leader J. S. Woodsworth. Others have received far too …

Review Of Many Wests: Place, Culture, And Regional Identity Edited By David M. Wrobel And Michael C. Steiner, Diane D. Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly

Anyone interested in any place west of the Mississippi will find some part of Many Wests valuable. Editors David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner have collected essays that, in content and style, confirm the variety in the over-used term the West. Divided into four sections, the essays concern "Environment and Economy," "Aesthetic Wests," "Race and Ethnicity," and "Extended Wests"-Alaska, Hawaii, and British Columbia. They range from historical surveys to engaging personal accounts like Bret Wallach's essay focusing on typical Oklahoma houses and the people who inhabit them. Some scholars concentrate on a unique aspect of a region. Ann Hyde …

Notes And News- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

In Memoriam

Indian Prose Award

Gpq's Home In Cyberspace

Communities Through Photographs

Montana Manuscript Prize

Life On The Great Plains

Cfp: Into The Next Millennium

Nebraska Research Grant

Great Plains Music, Dance, And ...Bison!

Introduction Imagining Literary Landscapes, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

In compiling this issue of Great Plains Quarterly, Charlene Porsild responds to issues at the heart of the rising "new regionalism." One premise of the renewed interest in regionalism is that learning to navigate the virtual world of cyberspace means needing to know place in the actual world, and understanding mapping means learning how to orient oneself, how to read a landscape, and how to move from one place to another. The four essays presented here offer complementary responses to that challenge.

One's stance in time undergirds one's relation to place, as Walter Isle demonstrates in "History and Nature: …

The "In Between" Landscapes Of Transformation In Ted Kooser's Weather Central, Mary Lou K. Stillwell

Great Plains Quarterly

"Etude," which launches Weather Central, Ted Kooser's most recent full-length collection of poems, is in many ways typical of the poet's work. The poem is what it professes to be: an etude, a study, a preview of all the poems that are to follow. It also defines the major poetic devices or characteristics that will be important throughout the 1994 volume: direct, plain-spoken language; use of interior and exterior landscape{s); and explicit metaphor that particularizes the poet's life.

Many of us who make our home on the plains recognize the Great Blue Heron in the cattails, the bubbles along the …

A Topographic Map Of Words Parables Of Cartography In William Least Heat,Moon's Prairyerth, O. Alan Weltzien

Great Plains Quarterly

In "Thought and Landscape," geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes an essential double perspective required for any comprehensive understanding of rural landscape. A geographer studies landscape "from 'above,'" for example, but "The side view ... is personal, moral, and aesthetic. A person is in the landscape ... from a particular spot and not from an abstract point in space. If the essential character of landscape is that it combines these two views (objective and subjective), it is clear that the combination can take place only in the mind's eye. Landscape appears to us through an effort of the imagination .... It is …

Title And Contents- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 19/ Number 2 / Spring 1999

Contents

Introduction: Imagining Literary Landscapes

History And Nature: Representations Of The Great Plains In The Work Of Sharon Butala And Wallace Stegner

The "In-Between": Landscapes Of Transformation In Ted Kooser's Weather Central

A Topographic Map Of Words: Parables Of Cartography In William Least Heat-Moon's Prairyerth

Essay On Place: The Map As Big As The World

Review Essay: Crime And Responsibility

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes And News

Book Notes- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

BOOK NOTES

Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853-1895. By William A. Dobak

The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse: A Source Book About a Tragic Episode in Lakota History. Volume XXI of the Frontier Military Series. Compiled and edited by Richard G. Hardorff

The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado. By Robert Adams

William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist. By L. David Norris, James C. Milligan, and Odie B. Faulk

Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher. By Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth

Of Earth and Elders: Visions and Voices …

Review Of The Social Gospel Of E. Nicholas Comfort: Founder Of The Oklahoma School Of Religion By Robert C. Cottrell, Leslie Hewes

Great Plains Quarterly

Early in the autumn of 1924, when I attended my first Saturday night open house at the First Presbyterian Church in Norman, Oklahoma, the newly appointed student pastor, Nick Comfort, made me feel at home by saying, "We are both freshmen." Next year, after I had satisfied most freshman requirements, I enrolled in a course on comparative religion at the University of Oklahoma taught by Rev. Comfort.

The social gospel, as pointed out by Cottrell repeatedly, emphasized the "fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man." As espoused by Comfort, the gospel was egalitarian, without color barriers, non-violent, nonsectarian, and based …

Review Of Frontiers Of Historical Imagination: Narrating The European Conquest Of Native America, 1890-1990 By Kerwin Lee Klein, Alex Long

Great Plains Quarterly

In Frontiers of Historical Imagination, Kerwin Klein traces the changes in the historical discourse of the European conquest of Native America. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study synthesizes twentieth-century historiography, encompassing debates in history, anthropology, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. While Frederick Jackson Turner's writings serve as organizing texts for Klein's account, the changing interpretations and narratives of the American frontier provide the thematic focus.

Klein arranges his study into four books, each in turn, organized around a trope-a la Hayden White's Metahistory: metaphor ("The Language of History")' metonym ("From Spirit to System"), synecdoche ("Time Immemorial"), and …

Review Of El Llano Estacada: Exploration And Imagination On The High Plains Of Texas And New Mexico, 1536-1860 By John Miller Morris, Valerie M. Mendoza

Great Plains Quarterly

El Llano Estacado is located on the High Plains of eastern New Mexico and western Texas covering over 50,000 square miles of land, and may be, according to Morris, the "largest isolated non-mountainous area in North America." It is the creation of this landscape in the European mind that Morris proposes to study. In his words, "the landscape itself is the hero" of the story.

In this respect Morris succeeds. Through his use of Spanish and American exploration texts (letters, journals, official reports, reminiscences), he conveys the mental representations of this region. In addition to textual analysis, he also uses …

Review Of The Journals Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition, Volume 11: The J Oumals Of Joseph Whitehouse, May 14, 1804-April2, 1806 Edited By Gary E. Moulton, Kerry R. Oman, Fred R. Gowens

Great Plains Quarterly

This eleventh volume in the series of the Louis and Clark Expedition continues Gary Moulton's masterful work. Here the story of the journey is seen through the eyes of one of the enlisted men, Joseph Whitehouse, whose journal is the only surviving record of a. private on the expedition. In the introduction, Moulton briefly covers Whitehouse's life before and after the expedition, although there is little known of him during these times. He was one of the men who joined Lewis at Kaskasia, from Captain Russell Bissell's company of the First Infantry. The volume itself contains two versions of Whitehouse's …

Review Of Cowboy Fiddler In Bob Wills' Band By Frankie Mcwhorter, John Schmitz

Great Plains Quarterly

Reading this book, as written in Frankie McWhorter's own words, is like being out on the West Texas Plains, sitting around the campfire listening to a veteran cowboy tell his stories. It has an authentic bunkhouse feeling, deservedly so coming from a man who has spent almost fifty years as a working cowboy.

The book is written in two-part form. The first half deals with McWhorter's musical background and his time in the Bob Wills band. The latter half recounts McWhorter's experiences as a working cowboy. McWhorter's family lived in the Texas Panhandle town of Plaska, about twenty-five miles from …

Review Of The Brandon Teena Story Produced And Directed By Susan Muska And Greta Olafsdottir, June Perry Levine

Great Plains Quarterly

CRIME AND RESPONSIBILITY

The Brandon Teena Story, Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's recently released documentary, addresses the circumstances of a triple murder that occurred on the last day of December 1993 in a rural farmhouse in southeastern Nebraska. The crime received national media coverage because one of its victims, the principal target of the attack, was a young woman who had, for some time, been living as a man. The two other victims, a young man and woman, were killed because they were witnesses. The murderers were quickly apprehended and tried, one sentenced to life in prison, the other …

Romantic Women And La Lucha Denise Chavez's Face Of An Angel, Francine K. Ramsey Richter

Great Plains Quarterly

Denise Chavez's skillful and evocative Face of an Angel (1994) examines the inequitable and discomfiting, yet somehow powerful, place of women in New Mexico border culture.! Their lives are mainly devoted to the hard work of serving others, and Chavez connects the past and present of the women of the area through the life story of the main character Soveida Dosamantes (born in 1948). Much of what makes up Soveida's present, everyday existence has its origins over the border in Old Mexico, and the established customs and traditions have a great deal of impact upon Soveida and her family in …

Review Of Researching Western History: Topics In The Twentieth Century, Gerald D. Nash And Richard W. Etulain, Eds., Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

Between bookend pieces by Earl Pomeroy and Gene M. Gressley, this anthology of hopes comprises essays on economic history by Gerald D. Nash, environmental history by Thomas R. Cox, urban history by Roger W. Lotchin, political history by Robert W. Cherny, women's history by Glenda Riley, cultural history (mainly literature) by Richard W. Etulain, and mythic history (mainly film) by Fred Erisman. The authors vary in the degree to which they emphasize historiography (what already has been done) or the historical agenda (what they think ought to be done), but the formula is much the same throughout: scan the recent …

Review Of Thomas Jefferson And The Changing West: From Conquest To Conservation, James P. Ronda, Ed., John Lauritz Larson

Great Plains Quarterly

Thomas Jefferson would have liked the idea of this book (if not all the essays themselves) since the American West was a canvas on which he loved to paint. Obvious links to western history can be found in Jefferson's 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory and his central role in launching the subsequent expedition of Lewis and Clark. Of more subtle relevance was Jefferson's propensity to construct worlds in his imagination, usually filled with sturdy yeomen laboring virtuously on freehold farms carved out of a continental wilderness that he preferred to think of as empty and inviting. Hence the monument …

Review Of Too Good A Town" : William Allen White. Community. And The Emerging Rhetoric Of Middle America By Edward Gale Agran, Diane Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly

In "Too Good a Town" Edward Gale Agran demonstrates William Allen White's influence on Americans' view of themselves, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the "sage of Emporia" was a nationally recognized cultural arbiter. A reader interested in the history of community or middle-class culture, particularly in the Middle West, would find this study useful. but it is of less value to someone more interested in the Great Plains. Occasionally Agran focuses on White's hometown, Emporia, Kansas, as a distinct geographical location, but his primary purpose is to demonstrate White's embodiment of the town as a broader …

Review Of Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind The Legend By John E. Miller, Ann Romines

Great Plains Quarterly

Since Laura Ingalls Wilder's fictionalized biography, as the Little House series, has become one of the long-running hits of US popular culture, it is surprising for most readers to realize that the actual woman is a little-known figure. Reticent, determined, and deeply committed to propriety, Wilder had many friends in the small town where she lived for the last fifty-some years of her life, but few intimates beyond her husband and one daughter. Thus John E. Miller's scrupulous new biography of Wilder is a valuable and absorbing book. Miller's aim was to write "a biography describing and explaining the lived …

Review Of Religion In Modern New Mexico, Ferenc M. Szasz And Richard W. Etulain, Eds., Rev. Christine Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly

Ferenc Szasz and Richard Etulain begin their book by remarking that the history of the American West has mostly been studied and told without reference to the religious lives of the people who lived and settled there, and that this omission necessarily reduces our understanding of the region. To remedy the omission, the editors have gathered a group of fellow professors and graduate students to contribute essays on the especially rich variety of religious faiths and institutions of the people of New Mexico over 450 years. Various authors write of the several strains of Catholicism found here (Northern European, Hispanic, …

Review Of Texas Women: Frontier To Future By Ann Fears Crawford And Crystal Sasse Ragsdale, Rebecca Sharpless

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas Women might serve as a suitable introduction to elite white women in Texas, but will not serve a deeper purpose because of its lack of original research. (A number of the subjects, such as Ames, Porter, and Martin, have already been subjects of monographs, and others would make interesting full-length studies.) It is not suitable for classroom use because of its lack of multicultural inclusiveness, which could have been easily overcome. Perhdps heavily documented, deeply researched scholarly monographs are not for a popular audience. But popular writing can still reflect the richness of women's experience in Texas. Crawford and …

Review Of Loyal Till Death: Indians And The North-West Rebellion By Blair Stonechild And Bill Waiser, Christopher Hannibal-Paci

Great Plains Quarterly

In Loyal till Death, Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser retell the North-West Rebellion from the Indian perspective, an ambitious task not without precedent. Earlier revisions of the events of 1885, such as Rudy Weibe's novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1976) and Walter Hildebrandt's book of poetry Sightings (1991), deconstruct the historical narrative, so that "from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it," as Linda Hutcheon notes in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), "we now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and …

Review Of Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal Of The Native American In Film Edited By Peter C. Rollins And John E. O'Connor, Michael J. Hilger

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of essays, a number of which first appeared in a special issue of the journal Film and History, represents a variety of perspectives within the basic historical, cultural approach to film. Though the emphasis on the context and content of the films discussed may give pause to some film critics, the essays provide valuable ways to think about the meaning and impact of Hollywood's portrayal of American Indian characters.

One of the first, Ted Jojola's "Absurd Reality II," is notable for the tour of modern and contemporary film and TV its American Indian author offers the reader, …