Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Views From Fort Battleford: Constructed Visions Of An Anglo-Canadian West By Walter Hildebrandt, J.R. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Walter Hildebrandt, a former Parks Canada historian, explains that his interest in telling the story of the Battleford area in west-central Saskatchewan originated in the unease he felt beginning work with the federal agency in the 1970s at its tendency to diminish the role of aboriginal groups and valorize non-Native "pioneers," such as the mounted police, at the Fort Battleford historic site. Views from Fort Battleford provides a case study of the way in which public history, especially at historic sites, is contested terrain on which different groups vie to have their story told, or sometimes to have it dominate …

Review Of Wounded Knee Ii By Rolland Dewing, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly

The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and Lakota supporters and their seventy-one day standoff against the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pine Ridge Reservation police provides a rich medium to study social movements, tribal politics, and federal policy. Its complexity, controversial nature, and relative temporal proximity have contributed to the "second Wounded Knee" receiving less attention than it deserves. In Wounded Knee II, Rolland Dewing has provided a serviceable foray into the event’s complexities. Dewing, Professor of History at Chadron State College in Nebraska, long-time resident of the …

Review Of Dancing On Common Ground: Tribal Cultures And Alliances On The Southern Plains By Howard Meredith, Victoria Lindsay Levine

Great Plains Quarterly

Howard Meredith has produced an ambitious and thoughtful study of cultural interaction and exchange among Southern Plains tribes in Dancing on Common Ground. The project emerged from discussions in an American Indian Studies course taught at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Meredith demonstrates that the concept and practice of alliance-between individuals, between tribes, and between tribes and larger environmental and spiritual systems-has dominated Southern Plains cultural perspectives.

Using ceremonial dance as a metaphor for native systems of governance, the author examines the ideas of reciprocity and cooperative interaction in Southern Plains myth and religion. He even …

Review Of Prayer To The Great Mystery: The Uncollected Writings And Photography Of Edward S. Curtis Text Edited By Gerald Hausman, Margaret A. Mackichan

Great Plains Quarterly

Most Americans today are familiar with at least a few of the bold yet intimate portraits of Native Americans made by Edward S. Curtis near the turn of the century. Aside from the many publications that have gleaned images from his massive twenty-volume The North American Indian, his work has been reproduced as posters, used in documentaries, and copied by amateur artists into every medium. The authors of Prayer to the Great Mystery have set out to bring photographs other than those they deem his "hit parade" to light. What is unusual about this collection is that ninety-three of …

Review Of Sod And Stubble: The Unabridged And Annotated Edition By John Ise, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly

Sod and Stubble is a classic of Kansas and western history. It ranks with Giants in the Earth and O Pioneers! in readability and memorability, but has the added feature of being an only slightly fictionalized version of the reality of the lives of the author's parents in Osborne County, Kansas. Filled with striking stories, it is only a question of whether one is moved most by the baby dying after Rosie scalds her nipples, the drama of the grasshopper invasion, Henry's slow death by cancer and Rosie's tender goodbye, her farewell to the farm and to childbearing, or the …

Title And Contents- Winter 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1998 VOL. 18 NO.1

CONTENTS

THE LUBBOCK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, THE NEW DEAL, AND THE ROPESVILLE RESETTLEMENT PROJECT William Clayson

THE GREAT DEPRESSION: TWO KANSAS DIARIES C. Robert Haywood

HUMANITARIANS ON THE FRONTIER: EXAMPLES FROM

NORTHEASTERN LOGAN COUNTY, OKLAHOMA TERRITORY Leslie Hewes

Book Reviews

Writings in Indian History, 1985-1990

Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost

The Oglala People, 1841-1879: A Political History ......... 48 Now the Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War

Custer and the Cheyennes: George Armstrong Custer's Winter Campaign on the …

Notes And News- Winter 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

West River History

Western Literature In The Canadian Rockies

Defining The Prairies

Francophones In Western Canada

The American West, Promise And Prospect

Manuscripts For The Millennium

Manuscripts On The Indian Wars

Errata

Review Of New Westers: The West In Contemporary American Culture By Michael L. Johnson, Charles E. Rankin

Great Plains Quarterly

You will either love this book or, well, dislike it. As one of the jacket blurbs puts it, it's all here-"movies and fashion, historians and architects, chili eating and two-stepping." The blurbist might have added: "and kitsch, travelogue, literature, poetry, cartoons, and a lot of unbridled gee whiz." Broad in scope, New Westers won't be remembered for analytical depth (though it may itself become an artifact of its time). What is not here, and what this reviewer sorely missed, is more of the author. In just over four hundred pages, Michael Johnson reveals precious little about what he thinks is …

Review Of Roadside History Of Wyoming By Candy Moulton, Duane A. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Wyoming is a large state with a history, geography, and reputation to match. It takes a person with a great deal of vim and vigor to tackle a Roadside History of Wyoming. Third generation Wyoming native, writer, and journalist Candy Moulton took on the task with an enthusiasm and interest that comes out in almost every page of the book.

She covers the whole state, divided into five parts, with a mixture of history, legend, stories, and undoubted appreciation for her beloved Wyoming. The reader will meet a wide cast of individuals who have traveled through or lived there. …

Review Of The Prairie Schoolhouse By John Martin Campbell, Sally Salisbury Stoddard

Great Plains Quarterly

John Martin Campbell, in this fine book consisting of sixty black and white, well conceived photographic plates and explicative text, has created an evocative picture of the prairie schoolhouses, the age from which they sprang, their environment, and the people for whom these formulaic structures fulfilled many functions. Older folks who grew up in the largely poor, rural areas of the vast American prairies will easily identify with Tony Hillerman's anecdote in the foreword, and they will surely experience a deep nostalgia and a profound sadness for the decay of the schoolhouse concept as well as the decay of the …

Review Of Wild West Shows And The Images Of Native American Indians, 1883-1933 By L.G Moses, Timothy Troy

Great Plains Quarterly

A chapter or two into this extraordinarily well-documented and illustrated work on one of the more bizarre but colorful topics in American and Native American history, I felt compelled to rummage through an old footlocker to find a personal journal from the 1960s when I lived and worked in Little Eagle, South Dakota, on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation as a community development worker and recruiter for the Job Corps. Moses's chronological account of the emergence of Wild West shows and their "Show Indians" from George Catlin's early Tableaux vivants to Buffalo Bill Cody's world-touring extravaganzas fascinated me because I …

Review Of Indian Territory And The United States, 1866- 1906: Courts, Government, And The Movement For Oklahoma Statehood By Jeffrey Burton, Raymond Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Attempts by state governments and the federal government to undermine Indian tribal sovereignty remain one of the major challenges Indian tribes face today. One of the best known attacks against Indian political and economic authority was the abolition of the tribal institutions of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory, which resulted in Oklahoma statehood.

Indian Territory and the United States, 1866- 1906, the first volume in the University of Oklahoma Press's Legal History of North America Series, is a detailed and fresh examination of the destruction of the Five Tribes' governments in Indian Territory resulting from federal judicial reforms …

Review Of Cherokee Outlet Cowboy: Recollections Of Laban S. Records By Laban S. Records, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

Cowboy memoirs are not all that rare nor are they all that common. Thus, the reflections of Laban S. Records about his life working on the cattle trails and ranches of south central Kansas and northern Oklahoma during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century are of some inherent value. He worked as a freighter, a cowpuncher, a line rider, and a foreman. The book begins in the 1870s with memories of freighting on the Santa Fe Trail and concludes with Records converting to "the Gospel of Christ in its fullness" at a Methodist revival meeting in Kansas. It …

Review Of The Buffalo Hunters By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Ken Zontek

Great Plains Quarterly

Bison history captures the American imagination. Robinson capitalizes on this interest here with an entertaining narrative about buffalo hunters. The book begins with a synopsis of Native American bison hunting practices both before and after the acquisition of the horse, an animal whose impact dramatically transformed and increased indigenous dependence on the buffalo. The author moves on to address the role Native Americans played in supplying bison beef to British-Canadian fur companies and buffalo robes to their American counterparts. The story then quickly moves on to Euro-American sport hunting which reached its heyday with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. …

The Great Depression Two Kansas Diaries, C. Robert Haywood

Great Plains Quarterly

During the decade of the 1930s the nation plunged from prosperity and great expectations into a sharp decline that adversely affected a greater percentage of people than any economic crisis before or since. During the Great Depression 25 percent of the nation's work force became unemployed. No state was unaffected, and both cities and farms suffered, although each section of the economy displayed a different set of problems. For most urban dwellers the extent and depth of the crisis was measured by employment. Studs Terkel found the clearest, most succinct definition of the Depression when a once unemployed laborer said: …

Humanitarians On The Frontier Examples From Northeastern Logan County, Oklahoma Territory, Leslie Hewes

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars have studied the frontier of Euro-North American settlement from a number of perspectives. James C. Malin and Allen G. Bogue, for example, have examined the turnover of population in the newer parts of the United States. Walter Prescott Webb considered the Great Plains a strange kind of country for most of its pioneers, branding them as woodsmen out of place in the western part of the great interior grassland. Paul W. Gates has emphasized speculation and an incongruous land system as marking the American new lands, while James K. Hastings has recognized cooperative endeavor, a kind of sharing, as …

Table Of Contents- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 18/ Number 4 / Fall 1998

CARNIVAL AND CEREMONY AT WRIGHT MORRIS'S LONE TREE HOTEL

GIANTS ON THE PLAINS: GRAIN ELEVATORS AND THE MAKING OF ENID, OKLAHOMA

SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND IDENTITY IN GREAT PLAINS HISTORY AND MYTH

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

INDEX

Review Of My Remembers: A Black Sharecropper's Recollections Of The Depression By Eddie Stimpson Jr., Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume recalls experiences during the 1930s and 1940s on farms in the Plano, Texas, area north of Dallas. Frances Wells, a local Plano historian, helped Eddie Stimpson organize into a book his written memories, intended originally for descendants. In the introduction James W. Byrd, a literary scholar, suggests the influence of African American folk culture on the writing style and on some activities described in the volume, such as yard sweeping. Popular culture phrases also appear occasionally, and the author's phonetic spelling has been retained throughout.

After an opening summary of his life, Stimpson presents short chapters on a …

Review Of The Devil Knows How To Ride: The True Story Of William Clarke Quantrill And His Confederate Raiders By Edward E. Leslie, James E. Sherow

Great Plains Quarterly

Edward E. Leslie has written a provocative book about one of the most notorious characters of the American Civil War. He has certainly achieved his goal of offering "an anecdotal history of William Clarke Quantrill, the guerrilla band he led, the enemies he fought, and the war they waged on the KansasMissouri border." This is one of the fullest treatments of Quantrill yet. Leslie's research is impressive; and he does an admirable job of shredding past myths about his subject. The first four chapters cover the ground of "Bleeding Kansas," a time when this "quiet schoolteacher" from Ohio came to …

Sexuality, Gender, And Identity In Great Plains History And Myth, Peter Boag

Great Plains Quarterly

Within just the last few years there has been an explosion in the interest in, and the publication of, gay and lesbian studies. One of the most vibrant fields in the discipline of history today is the history of sexuality. But with all the effort expended in this area of scholarship, there has not been much of an attempt to integrate gay, lesbian, and sexual history into regional history and regionalism. This essay is an attempt to introduce regional history to sexual history. It takes as its subject "non-heterosexuals" and tries to make sense of their history within the context …

Carnival And Ceremony At Wright Morris's Lone Tree Hotel, Reginald Dyck

Great Plains Quarterly

Gordon Boyd, a central character in Morris's Ceremony in Lone Tree, is a self-fashioning failure at American dreaming. He presents himself this way: "In the middle of life, Morgenstern Boyd had everything to live for, everything worth living for having eluded him. He was that rare thing, a completely selfunmade man." Failed writer among other failures, Boyd in many ways contrasts with, and is defined by, his friend and nemesis Walter McKee, a man who "like Babbitt, keeps faith; he does not question anything, especially his own life. " Set in the 1950s Midwest culture of respectability, Ceremony in …

Giants On The Plains: Grain Elevators And The Making Of Enid, Oklahoma, Blake Gumprecht

Great Plains Quarterly

Driving west from Interstate 35 on US Highway 64, the grain elevators of Enid, Oklahoma, first become visible when the town is still twenty miles away. Disappearing and reappearing behind gently rolling hills, it is initially unclear what they might be. Even when they are little more than white specks on the horizon, they are plainly too large and numerous to represent some distant farmstead. They are too long to suggest the form of a far-off skyscraper. Little by little they grow larger in the windshield, and as the stony hills begin to give way to the wheat-covered plains of …

Notes And News- Fall 1998

Great Plains Quarterly

1999 CATHER SYMPOSIUM

MISSOURI VALLEY HISTORY CONFERENCE

CLAY EXHIBITS

NEW FELLOWSHIP

RURAL WOMEN MEET

Review Of Women Of The First Nations: Power, Wisdom, And Strength Edited By Christine Miller And Patricia Chuchryk, With Maria Smallface Marule, Brenda Manyfingers, And Cheryl Deering, Jo-Ann Archibald

Great Plains Quarterly

This book fulfills one of two purposes emerging from the first National Symposium on Aboriginal Women of Canada: Past, Present, and Future, held in 1989 at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta: to bring together a collection of talks-as oral texts-and academic papers about various aspects of Aboriginal women's lives written by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women. Even though Aboriginal women point out the importance of traditional teachings about land, family, and community, they also raise economic, academic, social, and identity issues that spring from traditional and colonial frameworks. Emma LaRocque says it better:

Weare being asked to confront some of our …

Review Of Cheyennes At Dark Water Creek: The Last Fight Of The Red River War. By William Y. Chalfant, James Briscoe

Great Plains Quarterly

William Chalfant presents a fairly detailed and objective history of the attack on Little Bull's encampment on Sappa Creek in 1875. Father Powell, an honorary Peace Chief of the Cheyenne Tribe and prominent Cheyenne historian, praises Chalfant's efforts in presenting an impartial and objective recounting of the events. More detached readers, however, will find a vein of sympathy in Chalfant's writing for the Cheyenne side of the story.

Chalfant provides a detailed background of the events leading up to and surrounding the Cheyenne involvement in the Buffalo or Red River Wars of 1872-74. This was a period of raiding and …

Review Of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History Of Coups And Combat By Jean Afton, David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, With Richard N. Ellis, James Briscoe

Great Plains Quarterly

On 11 July 1869, the Fifth Cavalry attacked and destroyed Tall Bull's camp at Summit Springs, Colorado. A ledger book of Cheyenne drawings found in the village depicts a number of Cheyenne Dog Soldier exploits during the 1860s. The book passed from one of the troopers to a railroad surveyor named Ira LaMunyon. In 1903 LaMunyon donated the book, as part of his personal library and collections, to the Colorado Historical and Natural History Society, where it remained, mostly unnoticed, for the next ninety years.

Jean Afton, wife of LaMunyon's great grandson, took an interest in the ledger book and …

Review Of Journal Of An Expedition To The Grand Prairies Of The Missouri 1840 By William Fairholme, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

William Fairholme (1819-1868), a twenty-year-old Lieutenant of the British army, and six fellow officers shared a sporting expedition to hunt buffalo on the Kansas Plains in the summer and fall of 1840. They made one of only five parties to travel the Santa Fe Trail that year, its lowest incidence between 1822 and 1843. Fairholme's journal, therefore, provides an important record of the Great Plains for the year 1840 from a British officer's perspective, particularly in its vivid descriptions of cities and towns between lower Canada and the Missouri settlements.

Fairholme tells us a lot about traveling in the 1840s. …

Review Of The Wpa Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Edited By T. Lindsay Baker And Julie P. Baker, Angelo Costanzo

Great Plains Quarterly

The editors of this rich work of research and compilation have done an outstanding job in bringing together the entire huge collection of previously published and recently rediscovered Oklahoma ex-slave narratives. These accounts resulted from interviews conducted during the late 1930s by field workers of the Oklahoma Federal Writers' Project, part of a national Depression-era employment program that fortuitously appeared while the decreasing numbers of elderly former slaves were still alive to tell their stories.

The unemployed writers and schoolteachers who served as reporters were both black and white, and there is no doubt that the responses given by each …

Review Of Building South Dakota: A Historical Survey Of The State's Architecture To 1945 By David Erpestad And David Wood, Elaine Freed

Great Plains Quarterly

South Dakota's architectural legacy bears close resemblance to that of other prairie and Plains states, with one colorful exception: the use of the region's reddish stones, quartzite and sandstone. These bright pink rocks bring a distinctive glow to communities in which they are concentrated, notably Dell Rapids, Sioux Falls, and Hot Springs. How fortunate that this material was locally available and affordable at a time of extensive building around the turn of the century when talented designers Wallace L. Dow and Henry Schwartz put their stamp on the region's architecture.

David Erpestad and David Wood begin their survey with several …

Review Of Texas Oil, American Dreams: A Study Of The Texas Independent Producers And Royalty Owners Association. By Lawrence Goodwyn, George N. Green

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a history of the independent oilmen of Texas, whose money financed the book. The great oil discoveries in Texas-Anthony Lucas's at Spindletop, 1901, and C. M. "Dad" Joiner's in the East Texas field, 1930, among others-were made and developed by small operators because the major companies did not believe the oil was there. Many farmers' lands remained unleased until oil had already been discovered nearby. Thus oil production and royalties, especially in Texas, the author asserts, were "massively democratized."

Eventually the small operators organized the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, whose policies sometimes deviated from those …