Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Making Of Sacagawea: A Euro-American Legend By Donna}. Kessler, Gary E. Moulton

Great Plains Quarterly

The basis for this book is a good idea: to discover the factors that have made Sacagawea a legend and then examine the ways in which the legend has evolved. Indeed, the author has done an excellent job in tracing Sacagawea's changing image, but a series of missteps detract from her laudable intent. The book suffers from repetitiveness, questionable literary devices, and lengthy accounts of the obvious. Squeezing out the superfluous would have yielded a sturdier essay of appropriate proportions.

Sacagawea may be the best known member of the Corps of Discovery after Lewis and Clark. Although she served in …

Review Of Indian Depredation Claims, 1796-1920 By Larry C. Skogen, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

Hoping to avoid violent incidents and possible warfare along its frontiers, the fledgling United States government established in 1796 a system for dealing with depredation claims. It provided the machinery through which both Indians and pioneers could apply for indemnity for losses incurred as a result of their dealings with each other. Despite such benign goals, the machinery seldom operated as envisioned. The claims process, too slow to prevent recurring violence, was so fraud-ridden that even honest claimants had to run a gauntlet of suspicious officials to have their cases considered. As a result, Larry Skogen states, throughout its entire …

Review Of Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, And The Annexation Of The Southwest By Douglas C. Comer, Leo E. Oliva

Great Plains Quarterly

Douglas Comer, archaeologist with the National Park Service, offers unique interpretations about the relationships among Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian Americans at Bent's Fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River during the 1830s and 1840s in southeastern Colorado. Long on theory and short on fact, much of this volume is developed from speculation rather than solid evidence. It is more about the importance of ritual than the history of Bent's Fort.

Comer argues that various rituals, including those traditional to the cultures involved and those developed to enhance their trade relations, help explain Bent & St. Vrain Company's economic …

Review Of Son Of Two Bloods By Vincent L. Mendoza, Domino Renee Perez

Great Plains Quarterly

Vincent Mendoza's Son of Two Bloods, the 1995 winner of the American Indian Prose Award, is an honest and at times heart-wrenching autobiography. The son of a Mexican father and Creek Indian mother, Mendoza conveys his struggle to locate himself within either community. When Vincent was a child, his father moved the family away from a predominately Mexican neighborhood, and his mother allowed the boy to attend Indian school. Both circumstances contribute to the author's feeling "lost" about who he was: not quite Mexican or Indian. He is moved by the Mariachi music his father and uncle play, and …

Review Of Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example By D. Michael Quinn, H. Wayne Schow

Great Plains Quarterly

That cultural and temporal contexts continually reshape our perception of sexual reality is made abundantly clear in Michael Quinn's revealing contrast between the same sex dynamics of nineteenth-century America and those currently prevailing. Homosexuality (and consequently heterosexuality) as a concept of intrinsic personal identity has only relatively recently established itself in European and American cultural consciousness. Previously, the focus was simply on sex acts that were or weren't approved. Without "categories to define 'sexuality,'" Quinn asserts, "nineteenth-century Americans ... responded to homo-eroticism in ways that often seem restrained, even tolerant, today."

But homoeroticism was only one strand of a complexly …

Review Of Homeland To Hinterland: The Changing Worlds Of The Red River Metis In The Nineteenth Century By Gerhard J. Ens., D.N. Sprague

Great Plains Quarterly

Studies of the Red River Settlement, the Metis people, and their buffalo hunt are so numerous that historians in the wider fields of Aboriginal or western Canadian studies have become increasingly impatient with this phenomenon of "Red River myopia." The question a reader must ask of this book is what new perspective Gerhard Ens brings to the existing material.

According to Ens, Homeland to Hinterland situates the local experience in a "broader process of economic change." Authors of previous works, he claims, were political historians writing about "the rise of a 'new nation' without adequately explaining the social and economic …

Review Of One Nation Under God: The Triumph Of The Native American Church Compiled And Edited By Huston Smith And Reuben Snake, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1990 the United States Supreme Court made "what some consider the most infamous ruling in its history" in the case of Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith. Alfred Leo Smith, a Klamath member of the Native American Church, had been fired from his job for ingesting peyote-the sacramental substance at the core of his religious faith, but a controlled substance in the eyes of drug prevention officials. The Supreme Court upheld the State's right to interfere with peyotists' freedom of religion even without proving a "compelling state interest" to do so. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion called individual religious …

Review Of Texas Wanderlust: The Adventures Of Dutch Wurzbach By Douglas V. Meed, Cary D. Wintz

Great Plains Quarterly

Eight-year-old Emil Frederick "Dutch" Wurzbach arrived with his family in Galveston in early 1846 as one of the hundreds of German immigrants who sailed to Texas that year. He spent his childhood in central Texas, first at Fredericksburg, then in Austin, and finally on a farm outside Austin. At the age of eleven Wurzbach began a series of frontier jobs, largely with the army, herding livestock or working as a teamster supplying the scattered frontier posts south and west of San Antonio; he also served a brief stint in the Texas Rangers. He encountered legendary frontiersmen, fought Comanches and Apaches, …

Index- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

Index pp. 361-368 (8 pages)

Review Of For God And Mammon: Evangelicals And Entrepreneurs, Masters And Slaves In Territorial Kansas, 1854-1860 By Gunja Sengupta, Peter Knupfer

Great Plains Quarterly

This is the first detailed examination of conditions in Kansas Territory in almost forty years. Although library shelves are crowded with dramatic accounts of border warfare, until now few scholars have ventured into the manuscript and census materials to profile all the groups represented among migrants to the territory during this turbulent period. Gunja SenGupta has produced an intriguing and well researched portrait of life in the territory which will invite future scholars to delve even further into the subject.

SenGupta argues that the free state and slave state forces in Kansas acted out of mixed motives with mixed results. …

Review Of Unionizing The1ungles: Labor And Community In The Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry Edited By Shelton Stromquist And Marvin Bergman, Laura Lacasa

Great Plains Quarterly

Hacking through meatpacking's mass production jungle, historians Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman gather nine essays addressing twentieth-century Midwestern unionization and its impact on industrial and social relations within and beyond factory walls.

The work details the historical struggles inherent to the meatpacking labor movement. Racial, gender, and ideological differences, compounded by guarantees that all workers benefit equally from union membership, have been the most serious traditional obstacles to uniting employees. Wilson Warren's essay, for instance, argues that whites in the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) declined initiating anti-discrimination programs after World War II intentionally to limit African American advancement.

Review Of To Change Them Forever: Indian Education At The Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893- 1920 By Clyde Ellis, David W. Adams

Great Plains Quarterly

A central element of late nineteenth-century Indian policy was the use of schools as instruments of forced acculturation. Toward this end, a three-tiered system of education emerged consisting of day schools, reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation boarding schools. In recent years historians have paid increased attention to the educational story, with most of the focus being on schools of the off-reservation variety. What has been missing is a first-rate study of a reservation school. Thanks to Clyde Ellis's exceptionally fine study of the Rainy Mountain boarding school, we now have one.

One of the most distinctive aspects of this book …

Review Of Living Landscapes Of Kansas Text By O.J. Reichman, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly

Co-authors O.J. Reichman (text) and Steve Mulligan (photography) have produced a book illustrating the natural beauty of Kansas. This prairie state known to many through its rich history of outlaws and cattle towns has an equally rich but sometimes overlooked natural landscape. To the casual observer the landscape may appear "relatively flat and uniform," but Reichman has an appreciation for this "midrange" scale, more accessible perhaps than the monumentality of mountains or coasts. Reichman and Mulligan have surveyed the state selecting natural sights formed through a combination of earth, fire, wind, and water. Through Reichman's visual perception and impressive linguistic …

Review Of Our Hearts Fell To The Ground: Plains Indian Views Of How The West Was Lost Edited With An Introduction By Colin G. Calloway, Emily Greenwald

Great Plains Quarterly

The latest entry in the Bedford Series in History and Culture combines primary documents with Colin Calloway's contextual commentary to produce a readable, informative glimpse into Plains Indians' experiences in the nineteenth century, easily accessible to the non-specialist. The documents (mostly textual with some visual sources) are drawn from a spectrum of observers from a wide variety of tribes. The volume lends itself nicely to teaching, particularly because Calloway ably instructs readers how to dissect complex historical sources.

Following a quick survey of Plains history, Calloway ends his introduction by discussing the various types of sources compiled in the book …

Review Of The Ranch: A Modern History Of The North American Cattle Industry By Sherm Ewing, James Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the title of this book might be somewhat misleading-it has little to do with daily ranch life and is certainly not a systematic historical study-nevertheless its idiosyncrasies convey a wealth of fascinating information in an extremely readable format. The author, a former Canadian rancher who has since retired to the sunny south of Montana, spent three years traveling, discussing ranching with old friends and new acquaintances, taping interviews, and collecting his research into two thousand pages of single spaced typing.

From this mass of information he has crafted an overview of twentieth-century ranching, most of it in the words …

Review Of The Hog Ranches Of Wyoming: Liquor, Lust, And Lies Under Sagebrush Skies By Larry K. Brown, Rebecca Howard

Great Plains Quarterly

In The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas by Larry L. King and Peter Masterson, the titled place of ill-repute was nicknamed the Chicken Ranch. In Wyoming locals referred to such places as Hog Ranches. Established to supply wine, women, and song to military outposts in the nineteenth century, the history of the Hog Ranches has received little attention until now. It is the story of these dens which Larry K. Brown pursues here. The book has the cover of a dime store novel and a title that draws immediate attention. For these reasons readers might approach the work looking for …

Review Of Ella Deloria's Iron Hawk By Julian Rice, Kelly Morgan

Great Plains Quarterly

Julian Rice organizes, critiques, and analyzes one of Ella Cara Deloria's lifetime achievements, the writing of a Lakota epic. His volume provides a brief history of Lakota linguistics as well as recognition of Deloria's contributions to maintaining oral traditions. Six critical essays follow the Lakota and English texts and are characteristic of Rice's ability to research and criticize Deloria's work from a linguistic perspective. What he has produced is a useful reference text for researching and teaching Lakota linguistics through the epic story of Iron Hawk.

This, Rice's second of three books on Lakota oral traditions since 1992, is …

Review Of The Myth Of The West: America As The Last Empire By Jan Willem Schulte Nordholdt And Herbert H. Rowen, Sheila Ruzycki O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly

As an Americanist, I needed to adjust my perspective as I was reading Nordholdt's The Myth of the West. Much of this book by a Dutch scholar is about European views of Empire, particularly about the various permutations of the heliotropic view of empire-the belief that empires progress from east to west. The subtitle America as the Last Empire is somewhat misleading, since much of the book presents how the European literati throughout the centuries viewed various empires within and near their own continent, though naturally the heliotropic view does lead west over the Atlantic. (It also leads west over …

Review Of Reuben Snake, Your Humble Serpent: Indian Visionary And Activist By Jay Fikes, As Told To By Reuben Snake, Paul A. Olson

Great Plains Quarterly

The Great Plains region has given us minority civil and cultural rights leaders out of all proportion to the minority population of the region: Crazy Horse, Quanah Parker, Gordon Parks, Dull Knife, Rudolpho Gonzales, Zitkala Sa, Suzette La Flesche, Earl Little (Malcolm X's father), Tomas Rivera, Ernie Chambers, and on and on. Biographical scholarship unfortunately has not given us many good accounts of these leaders. The gap is dramatized and at least partially filled by Fikes' book. Jay Fikes, working with Reuben Snake just before his death, has written a work that ultimately celebrates both the latter's humility and his …

Review Of Lost Bird Of Wounded Knee: Spirit Of The Lakota By Renee Sansom Flood, Joe Starita

Great Plains Quarterly

Most writers would be hard pressed to encounter a better story line, a deeper, richer vein of raw material, than the one in Sansom Flood's book: a baby girl miraculously found alive beneath the frozen corpse of her Lakota mother four days after the massacre at Wounded Knee; adopted as a "souvenir" of the battle by a brigadier general, later the assistant US attorney general, who initially ignored her, then sexually abused her, and finally disowned her; raised by a doting mother, a tireless, world-famous suffragist, who steadfastly refused to abandon either her deeply troubled Indian daughter or her philandering, …

The Lubbock Chamber Of Commerce, The New Deal, And The Ropesville Resettlement Project, William Clayson

Great Plains Quarterly

US Highway 62 crosses the town of Ropesville, population 480, between Lubbock and Brownfield on the South Plains of Texas. To the north and west of town, scattered among the suburban-style homes of contemporary farmers, stand several dozen small cottages of identical design. Some are still occupied, many nothing more than ruins, and a few have been added on to, stuccoed, or provided a screened porch. All are surrounded by cotton fields and most are accompanied by ramshackle outbuildings, rusted tractors, dormant windmills, and sealed irrigation wells. These farmsteads are the remains of a rural community project constructed by the …

Review Of U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives Edited By Oscar J. Martinez, Robert R. Alvarez

Great Plains Quarterly

U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is an addition to the Jaguar Books on Latin America Series coedited by W.H Beezley and C.M Maclachlan. In this volume, Oscar J. Martinez pulls together important essays written by outstanding US-Mexico Border scholars and journalists. Official and personal documents enhance the scholarly renditions that span border history and sociology beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and take the reader into current interpretations of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Significantly the book is written in a bilateral-border spirit, its contributors hailing from both Mexico and the United States.

Writing from a lifetime of work on the …

Review Of Town Life: Main Street And The Evolution Of Small Town Alberta, 1880-1947 By Donald G. Wetherell And Irene R.A. Kmet, David Breen

Great Plains Quarterly

Town Life is the first in a series of provincial centennial commemorative volumes intended to explore neglected aspects of Alberta history. It greatly expands the focus of Wetherell and Kmet's previous Alberta centered studies on the symbiotic relationship between leisure and provincial culture and on the evolution of domestic architecture. The authors justify their current study on the solid ground that town life is an important topic much neglected by historians and others hitherto preoccupied with urban and farm experiences. As they point out, the town, after all, has been "a meeting point for urban and farm lives," playing an …

Review Of Custer And The Cheyennes: George Armstrong Custer's Winter Campaign On The Southern Plains By Louis Kraft, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

Few western figures have received the attention George Armstrong Custer has. Since his death in 1876, his name and fame have alternately been attacked and defended by writers. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Louis Kraft's recent monograph falls into the latter camp. As Volume Five of the Custer Trail Series, Custer and the Cheyennes incorporates alternating points-of-view of both whites and natives, using extensive quotes to let the actors speak for themselves. In this manner, Kraft presents a chronological narrative of Custer's frontier beginnings on the Southern Plains of Kansas, Texas, and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) against the …

Review Of The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own: The West River Country Of South Dakota In The Years Of Depression And Dust By Paula M. Nelson, Jean Choate

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a story of a dream that died. Between 1900 and 1915 over one-hundred thousand people moved into western South Dakota, the area west of the Missouri River, hoping to settle the land and develop it so that it would become a thriving area of small farms and prosperous communities.

These settlers-farmers, ranchers, storekeepers, bankers, doctors, and lawyers-were pounded and buffeted by adversity, not once but three times in three separate periods. They faced a severe drought in 1910 and 19l1. Many settlers left then but those who stayed believed that "next year" things would be better. Encouraged by …

Review Of Wild Bill Hickok: The Man And His Myth By Joseph G. Rosa, Thomas Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly

James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill, became one of the great representative mythological figures of the American West in his own lifetime and remains so today, well over a hundred years after his death. Some decades ago Joseph G. Rosa wrote the definitive biography of the famous gunfighter and peace officer. His present book, not so much a biography as an examination of the myths that have grown up around the man, compares the different facets of the legendary Hickok with the facts so far as they are known.

Hickok first gained fame for his exploits as a …

Review Of A Guide To Kansas Architecture By David H. Sachs And George Ehrlich, Robert I. Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly

A Guide to Kansas Architecture by David H. Sachs and George Ehrlich selects representative examples of the built environment and landscape forms in each of Kansas's one hundred and five counties. This first-ever comprehensive guide book offers architectural examples in both the urban and rural areas of the state. Using a broad-based definition of architecture, the authors have included not only well-known buildings, but also vernacular elements such as bridges, dams, power stations, cemeteries, and fence posts. Such a selection provides a reasonable overview of what one might expect to see while traveling in Kansas. Both historical and architectural significance …

Review Of The Oglala People, 1841-1879: A Political History By Catherine Price, Matthew G. Hannah

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is a thorough history of official relations between the Oglala Lakota and the US Government during the mid-nineteenth century, with a special eye to the impact of these relations on the political structures that had been characteristic of Oglala society before significant white contact. The book's structure is straightforward: an introductory chapter draws on early ethnographic data and related scholarship to layout the political anatomy of Oglala society in the early nineteenth century, while the following six chapters cover Oglala-white relations from 1841 to 1879. Each of the six historical chapters not only recounts important events but also …

Review Of Native American Perspectives On Literature And History Edited By Alan R. Velie, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

In the introduction to this volume, Alan Velie and Gerald Vizenor claim that these essays, by both native and non-native authors, represent "American Indian perspectives." By making this claim they indicate that particular American Indian perspectives exist while acknowledging that they are not limited to tribal members. The volume brings together articles previously published in the journal Genre and Volume 19 of the University of Oklahoma's American Indian Literature and Critical Studies. This fine collection of essays presents scholarship that is sympathetic to Native experiences and foregrounds problems of American identity.

The essays cover a range of contemporary Native …

Review Of Our Landlady By L. Frank Baum, John E. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

It is widely known that L. Frank Baum spent several years in South Dakota before moving to Chicago, where he wrote the Oz books that made him famous. And since the publication of Henry M. Littlefield's American Quarterly article in 1964 suggesting that the Populist movement of the 1890s inspired many of the characters and scenes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it has been widely assumed that Baum drew directly upon his South Dakota experience while writing his beloved popular classic. Yet no one until now has systematically investigated the attitudes and opinions that Baum held while in Dakota, …