Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Homicide, Race, And Justice In The American West, 1880-1920 By Clare V. Mckanna Jr, Lawrence Larsen

Great Plains Quarterly

Clare McKanna concludes in Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West that based on homicide statistics the West was more violent than the East. As defined by coroners, "homicide" means any killing of one human being by another not clearly identified as accidental. For comparative purposes, McKanna has rigorously and meticulously researched homicide records for what he considers three representative counties: urban Douglas, of which Omaha is the county seat, in Nebraska, and the rural mining counties of Las Animas in Colorado and Gila in Arizona.

Western homicides occurred for a wide variety of reasons, ranging all the …

Review Of Sixty Miles From Contentment: Traveling The Nineteenth-Century American Interior By M. H. Dunlop, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the last unexplored areas of the globe, Dunlop explains, was the American interior. Unable to make the exotic journey to unexplored areas like the polar icecaps, world travelers set out for America. What they saw-what their impressions were-is the subject of Dunlop's book. She uses 300 travel records, most written by Europeans, as representative of the travelers' impressions. The study is thematically organized around such issues as impressions of Native Americans and reactions to the food and food service of the interior; it is rich in synecdoche and benefits from Dunlop's masterful weaving together of various similar and …

Review Of Dutch Farmer In The Missouri Valley: The Life And Letters Of Ulbe Eringa, 1866-1950 By Brian W. Beltman, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly

How large should an immigrant community be to shed light effectively on the wider immigrant experience? This is a subject of frequent debate. Here is an excellent study of immigration to the American Midwest based on a single person, a Dutch farmer, Ulbe Eringa. And for the better part of the book, Eringa himself speaks through memoir and letter, translated from the Dutch by a daughter.

The narration and reproduced texts recreate Eringa's life story. It begins with his birth in 1866 to a dairy farming family in western Friesland and continues through his early formative years in Calvinist schools …

Review Of Rooted In The Land: Essays On Community And Place Edited By William Vitek And Wes Jackson, Tisha Gilreath-Mullen

Great Plains Quarterly

Let me begin by stating that Rooted in the Land is not an anthology that deals exclusively with the Great Plains. It includes new and previously published essays dealing with a sense of place and community in states as far away from the Plains as Massachusetts, Vermont, and Kentucky. Nevertheless, as a work of environmental literature, Rooted in the Land should serve Great Plains scholars as an exemplary text, offering a variety of perspectives on dealing with the environmental impact of a consumptive society.

William Vitek and Wes Jackson are clear in their volume's goals: first, to address the assumption …

Review Of Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers And The Medal Of Honor, 1870-1898 By Frank N. Schubert, Cornel Pewewardy

Great Plains Quarterly

Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln

Review Of Like A Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz To Wounded Knee By Paul Chaat Smith And Robert Allen Warrior, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

The intense pan-Indian activism of the 1960s- 70s, most notably the work of the American Indian Movement (AIM), represents a crucial stage in the political development of Native America in this century. Yet it has received only minimal investigation by scholars. One reason for this is the uncertainty of some historians over when material ceases to be "current events" and evolves into a specimen inhabiting their domain. Consequently, Paul Chaat Smith and Paul Allen Warrior have broken new ground with their book, perhaps in part because neither is a historian and neither obsesses over such artificial pigeonholing. Warrior teaches English …

Review Of Alias Frank Canton By Robert K. Dearment, Phil Roberts

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert K. DeArment renders an engaging, readable portrait of Frank Canton. In the course of his research, he uncovered numerous previously unused sources which help to explain how this former Texas convict could "change sides" and become a legendary lawman in Wyoming and Oklahoma.

Born Joe Horner and sentenced to the Texas State Prison in Huntsville for robbery under that name in 1877, he escaped from a work gang after two years, turning up in Wyoming with a new name, Frank Canton, and soon a new occupation-lawman. After service as sheriff of Johnson County, Canton threw in with the so-called …

Review Of Re-Imagining The Modern American West: A Century Of Fiction, History, And Art. By Richard W. Etulain, Stacey Short

Great Plains Quarterly

Retrospectives on the twentieth century are becoming more and more common the closer we get to this century's close. The task of summing up an entire century's worth of ideas and art is daunting, to say the least, and while many of the works that attempt the task fall short, Richard Etulain's Re-Imagining the Modern American West manages to be comprehensive and inclusive, as well as fascinating. The book's quality and scope are not surprising: Etulain, director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico, is well-known through his numerous studies of the American West …

Review Of A Force Upon The Plain: The American Militia Movement And The Politics Of Hate. By Kenneth S. Stern, Catherine Mcnicol-Stock

Great Plains Quarterly

Nine days before the 19 April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Kenneth Stern, an expert on hate groups for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), warned of just such an attack. In a Washington, D.C., press conference, Stern and other AJC professionals presented a six hundred page report entitled Militias: A Growing Danger warning of the "cauldron of disaffection, hate, conspiracy and violence brewing" around the country. They documented murders of federal workers and "anyone perceived as opposing the militia and therefore seen as doing 'the work of the government.'" Moreover, they suggested that …

Review Of Now The Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation In The Civil War By Christine Schultz White And Benton R. White, Rebecca Bales

Great Plains Quarterly

Opothleyahola, one of the most revered Muskogee leaders from the Upper Creek town of Tuckabatchee, led his people through many hardships during his lifetime. His people revered him for his wisdom, courage, and insight. Christine Schultz White and Benton R. White, authors of Now The Wolf Has Come: The Creek Nation in the Civil War, describe Opothleyahola as the Creeks' spokesman and their "shield against the outside world." Opothleyahola tried to maintain his people's traditional beliefs at a time when outside influence threatened the social structures and customs of all Native Americans. He led his people during the 1830s …

Review Of Yellow Woman And A Beauty Of The Spirit: Essays On Native American Life Today By Leslie Marmon Silko, Alanna Kathleen Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is a surprising pastiche of Leslie Marmon Silko's non-fiction. The work offers the reader a diverse range in the quality of thought, substance, and polish. As she, herself, notes: "As a child, I loved to draw and cut paper and paste things together. ... " This essay collection is an example of just that. Although subtitled Essays on Native American Life Today, the book is less a discussion of pan-Indian concerns than it is a reflection on Leslie Marmon Silko's processes as a writer, her need to have outsiders understand the …

Review Of A Hundred Years Of Heroes: A History Of The Southwestern Exposition And Livestock Show By Clay Reynolds With Marie-Madeleine Schein, Mark Busby

Great Plains Quarterly

This book by noted Texas novelist Clay Reynolds (with assistance by researcher Marie-Madeleine Schein) fulfills its subtitle's function and provides much more. Reynolds traces the famous show in Fort Worth from its beginning in 1896 through a series of changes including the addition of meat packing giants Armour and Swift in 1903, the new Livestock Exchange Building in 1908, the first indoor rodeo in 1918, the responses to the vicissitudes of the Depression, the flood and gasoline rationing of the 1940s, the move from the north to the west side of Fort Worth, the change from corporate to city sponsorship, …

Review Of Settling The Canadian-American West, 1890- 1915: Pioneer Adaptation And Community Building By John W. Bennett And Seena B. Kohl, Catherine Cavanaugh

Great Plains Quarterly

In Settling the Canadian-American West, anthropologists John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl focus on the common cultural legacy of what they describe as the "Canadian-American West Heartland"-an area roughly conforming to Paul Sharp's "Whoop-up Country" in southeastern Alberta, southwestern Saskatchewan, and the northern "Montana Hi-Line." The authors' question concerning the enduring influences of the frontier is an important one, and there are historiographical reasons for uniting the region. Unfortunately, this study ultimately disappoints.

The book's title is misleading since the study itself is less a binational approach to settlement than an exploration of the shared heritage of a …

Review Of Hired Hands: Labour And The Development Of Prairie Agriculture, 1880-1930 By Cecilia Danysk, Joe Cherwinski

Great Plains Quarterly

The argument is a tidy one indeed. By concentrating on the reactions of farm workers to changing labor-capital relations Danysk contends that the tens of thousands of people who came to toil in the farm fields of prairie Canada over half a century can be conveniently divided into two groups. The first, those who worked in agriculture during the homestead stage before World War I, worked primarily to learn agricultural practices and to acquire sufficient capital to apply to their own quarter section once they acquired it. With labor in short supply they were able to control their relationship with …

Review Of Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History Of Native Americans Since 1945 By James J. Rawls, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly

In the second chapter of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion(1973), Vine Deloria Jr. notes the dominant culture's persistent consumption of either villianized or romanticized images of Native Americans present in disputed histories such as The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox (1971). In Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native Americans Since 1945, James J. Rawls writes for primarily non-Indian readers who accept images such as Chief Red Fox as authentic representations of Native America and, therefore, "who may have some difficulty accepting Indians as contemporary beings." Rawls intends to reveal the falsity of …

Review Of Willa Cather And The Myth Of American Migration By Joseph Urgo, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly

If we think of America simply as a land of migration and settlement, we are missing the broader picture, the one Joseph Urgo draws so clearly. Urgo analyzes more than a westward movement of settlers, concentrating instead on the concepts of the movement of ideas and cultures between a variety of old worlds and . new, and making the point that Willa Cather "is a comprehensive resource for the demarcation of an empire of migration in U.S. culture." As he explains, his interest in Cather's work lies in "the aesthetics of migration." Willa Cather certainly knew migration, from her move …

Review Of Native Americans In The News: Images Of Indians In The Twentieth Century Press By Mary Ann Weston, Gary Garrison

Great Plains Quarterly

As a lay historian of the American Indian and a television producer specializing in programs dealing with Native American subject matter, I've lectured frequently at high schools and colleges on stereotypical images of Native Americans in film, television, and popular literature and on how these media have shaped and reinforced such images throughout our turbulent history of contact. Focusing only on entertainment in the past, I found Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century Press singularly informative in how the news media have also molded and solidified the general public's perceptions of Native Americans.

Mary …

Review Of No End Of Grief: Indian Residential Schools In Canada By Agnes Grant, Celia Haig-Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

Agnes Grant's work is a useful and interesting addition to the literature on residential schools in Canada. As a clearly written synthesis of a selection of existing works, it provides an introduction to the schools which would be useful as an undergraduate class reading. The book's thirteen chapters are divided into four sections: Introduction, History, Conditions, and Consequences. Each section is introduced with a tantalizing photograph of the former Birtle Residential School taken in 1990. These prompted me to make comparisons to schools that I know and left me wanting to know more about Birtle.

The text follows the increasingly …

Review Of Writings In Indian History, 1985-1990 Compiled By Jay Miller, Colin G. Calloway, And Richard A. Sattler, Joseph B. Herring

Great Plains Quarterly

Students of North American Indian history should applaud Miller, Calloway, and Sattler for producing this splendid reference guide. The volume extends the work of Francis Paul Prucha, who edited two bibliographies referencing thousands of books, journals, news articles, governmental documents, and other sources on Indian history and Indian-white relations. The tremendous growth in scholarship regarding the American Indian past would have been far less impressive without Prucha's contribution. The compilers of this new volume, working under the aegis of the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center, have made it possible for that growth in scholarship to continue.

Increasingly, as the compilers …

Review Of The Frederic Remington Studio By Peter H. Hassrick, Alexander Nemerov

Great Plains Quarterly

This short book concerns the Remington Studio Collection-a permanent installation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, featuring the artifacts Remington displayed in his New Rochelle studio, as well as some of the paintings he made late in his career. The author noted Remington scholar Peter Hassrick, discusses the studio and argues that the Studio Collection paintings, many of them small landscapes, transcend Remington's time and place to achieve a universal significance. In making this argument, however, Hassrick neglects to consider how the very category of the universal, insofar as it refers to American art, is itself a …

Review Of American Politics In The Gilded Age, 1868-1900 By Robert W. Cherny, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert W. Cherny's lively and economical survey of Gilded Age politics is a welcome addition to Harlan Davidson's American History series. American Politics in the Gilded Age will be especially valuable to undergraduate and graduate students and will also be of interest to general readers and to scholars. Cherny provides a very readable narrative of key political events and personalities, and he employs an array of useful concepts that are based on the most current scholarship.

American Politics in the Gilded Age is neatly divided into three chapters. In the first, "The Domain and Power of Party," Cherny begins by …

Review Of Larry Mcmurtry And The West: An Ambivalent Relationship By Mark Busby, Clay Reynolds

Great Plains Quarterly

In this thorough look at McMurtry's canon through 1995, Mark Busby asserts that the novelist deliberately escaped from his southwestern roots and Texas's mythic past, then made a spiritual and triumphant return to them. But Busby insists that the novelist's return to western themes and stories represents not a "coming home" but rather a continuing ambivalence that is worked out to some degree in every work he has completed, regardless of setting.

Beginning with McMurtry's youth in Archer City, Busby explores McMurtry's attempts to break out of the "minor regional novelist" mold. Busby begins with McMurtry's earliest writings, then searches …

Review Of Ghost Settlement On The Prairie: A Biography Of Thurman, Kansas By Joseph V. Hickey, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

To label a book as local history is often to discredit it as solid scholarship. No one should make this mistake in the case of Joseph Hickey's fine study of a tiny settlement in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Hickey, in fact, displays here a remarkable combination of deep local knowledge and theoretical underpinnings. His work sheds important light on what William Least Heat-Moon has called "the perils of excessive individualism," that most American of processes in which community life is gradually undermined by the forces of large-scale capitalism. Concurrently, Hickey also provides critical new information on the evolution of …

Review Of Fort Worth's Legendary Landmarks By Carol Roark, James Wright-Steely

Great Plains Quarterly

Few substantial cities in the United States can boast of such an impressive aggregate of preserved pre-Second World War architectural wealth as Fort Worth, Texas. Downtown "Cow town" is largely intact, featuring block after block of continuous shop fronts, brick streets, and terra cotta details scraping the sky. Business and nightlife abound in this vintage precinct, whose century-old courthouse still houses county courts. A secondary downtown at the Stockyards Historic District is past its prime as a sprawling slaughterhouse but today is the thriving destination for herds of tourists. Even close-in historic neighborhoods remain vibrant, although their occupants long ago …

Review Of Home On The Range: A Century On The High Plains By James R. Dickenson, Dennis C. Williams

Great Plains Quarterly

After reading the introduction to this book, I expected a quaint family history joined with some attempt at relating the specifics of the author's family and personal experience to the larger context of Kansas and US history. I found that and much more. The first chapters set up a good model for family history-much better than most local histories or genealogies prepared by enthusiastic amateurs. But then James Dickenson is an accomplished journalist with over thirty years of journalistic experience including staffing the Washington Post; what should I have expected? By the half-way point, I realized that this is …

Review Of Black Elk And Flaming Rainbow; Personal Memories Of The Lakota Holy Man And John Neihardt, Julian Rice

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1931 fourteen year-old Hilda Neihardt accompanied her father and her sister Enid to the Pine Ridge Reservation for the interviews that became Black Elk Speaks. Now, sixty-four years later, she provides a "human-interest narrative" of previously unpublished anecdotes from that historically significant visit, as well as pointed revelations intended to correct "serious misunderstandings" of several unnamed but identifiable interpreters.

Some of the descriptions accurately reflect racial attitudes and stereotypes of 1931. One of the elderly witnesses to Black Elk's narrative, Chase-in-the-Morning, "was slim, hardened, and strongly built .... His aquiline face, twinkling eyes, and long hair completed for …

Introduction- Summer/Fall 1997, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

This special double issue of Great Plains Quarterly has been a long time in the making. Unlike the yearly special issues that showcase papers from our annual symposia, this number of the Quarterly contains four articles submitted at various times, revised and expanded, and collected together. All deal with EuroNorth Americans' misperceptions of indigenous peoples and the consequences of those misperceptions for all peoples of the Great Plains.

In "The Sacred Black Hills," Linea Sundstrom painstakingly contradicts the view many researchers have proposed that Cheyenne and Lakota beliefs and oral traditions about the sacredness of the Black Hills had been …

Review Of Voices Of The Plains Cree By Edward Ahenakew, Ann Leger-Anderson, Brian Mlazgar

Great Plains Quarterly

RESPONSE TO REVIEW

Jennifer S. H. Brown reviewed Edward Ahenakew's Voices of the Plains Cree (reprinted Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center) in the Winter 1997 issue of Great Plains Quarterly (volume 17, number 1). Because we believe her review misrepresents the book, however, we would like to explain why the Canadian Plains Research Center Publication Board made the choices that it did regarding its decision to reprint this volume.

The board considered the sorts of issues raised by Brown. Extensive discussion occurred, and the board concurred that a reissue of the original Voices of the Plains Cree was preferable to …

Index- Summer/Fall 1997

Great Plains Quarterly

Index (7 pages)

Summer/Fall 1997

Flooding The Missouri Valley The Politics Of Dam Site Selection And Design, Robert Kelley Schneiders

Great Plains Quarterly

In December 1944 the United States Congress passed a Rivers and Harbors Bill that authorized the construction of the Pick-Sloan plan for Missouri River development. From 1946 to 1966, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, with the assistance of private contractors, implemented much of that plan in the Missouri River Valley. In that twenty-year period, five of the world's largest earthen dams were built across the main-stem of the Missouri River in North and South Dakota. The size of these structures defies the imagination. Fort Randall Dam in southeast South Dakota is 160 feet high and 10,700 feet long. …