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Notes And News- Winter 1997

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT SEMINAR

PUBLICATIONS A WARDS

Review Of They Call Me Agnes: A Crow Narrative Based On The Life Of Agnes Yellowtail Deernose By Fred W. Yoget, Assisted By Mary K. Mee, Marika Sandell

Great Plains Quarterly

They Call Me Agnes tells the life story of Agnes Yellowtail as narrated to anthropologist Fred Yoget and assisted in his work by Mary K. Mee. Yoget also includes information from other Crow informants and presents a chapter on Crow reservation culture based on Robert Lowie's classical ethnographical data. The last chapter discusses Crow traditional ceremonies and how they have changed during Agnes's life. In his introduction, Yoget gives details about where he has added material to each chapter and where it is Agnes's voice we are hearing.

Agnes Yellowtail was born in a tent during the Crow Indian Fair …

Review Of Born In The Country: A History Of Rural America By David B. Danbom, Michael W. Schuyler

Great Plains Quarterly

David B. Danbom, professor of history at North Dakota State University, Fargo, is widely respected as one of the nation's leading authorities on agricultural history. His purpose in writing this book, to provide a general history of rural America combining traditional political and economic history with the new social history, he accomplishes with admirable success. Born in the Country will quickly become a standard text in the field.

Danbom traces the history of agriculture from the nation's beginnings, when rural Americans dominated the nation, down to a present in which farmers and people living in rural areas have become a …

Black Soldiers At Fort Hays, Kansas, 1867-1869 A Study In Civilian And Military Violence, James N. Leiker

Great Plains Quarterly

Historians of the western army contend with many romanticized myths. Few of those myths, in recent years, have held the popular consciousness as has that of the army's first black regulars, known as "buffalo soldiers." By now, the origins of the segregated regiments are quite familiar. In 1866, with the nation's acting military force having dwindled to a fraction of its Civil War size, the Republican Congress encouraged the enlistment of newly freed slaves and northern free blacks. Assigned to remote western areas, black units played an instrumental role over the next few decades in opening the West for white …

Allotment, Alcohol, And The Omahas, Benson Tong

Great Plains Quarterly

"The welfare of the Omaha is close to my heart ... I am living among them and I know what I am writing about," wrote Noah La Flesche in a 1916 letter to the Superintendent of the Omaha School, the field official in charge of the Omaha agency. In a passionate tone, La Flesche went on to plead: "If we had a man who would take the drunken Indian, fine him, put him in jail till he sobered up, drinking would not be so bad. This is going to ruin the Omaha. I ask you to help us ... we …

Title And Contents- Winter 1997

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

WINTER 1997 VOL. 17 NO. 1

CONTENTS

BLACK SOLDIERS AT FORT HAYS, KANSAS, 1867 -1869: A STUDY IN CIVILIAN AND MILITARY VIOLENCE James N. Leiker

ALLOTMENT, ALCOHOL, AND THE OMAHAS Benson Tong

A SOCIOECONOMIC PORTRAIT OF PRINCE HALL MASONRY IN NEBRASKA, 1900-1920 Dennis N. Mihelich

THE EARLY GROWTH OF THE CONRAD BANKING ENTERPRISE IN MONTANA, 1880-1914 Henry C. Klassen

REVIEW ESSAY: THE EMPEROR ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER Susan A. Miller

A review of a traveling exhibition from the Newberry Library,

"The Frontier in American CuI ture," curated by Richard White.

BOOK REVIEWS

Becoming and Remaining a People: …

Review Of Voices Of The Plains Cree By Edward Ahenakew, Jennifer S. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

Voices of the Plains Cree was first published in 1973 by McClelland & Stewart. As it has been out of print for some time, the Canadian Plains Research Center has rendered useful service in once again making this important book available in a new edition with striking and attractive cover artwork by Allen Sapp.

In the 1920s, Edward Ahenakew, a Saskatchewan Cree ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 1912, quietly began to write down the memories and legends told to him by Chief Thunderchild (Peyasiw-awasis, also known as Kapitikow), then living on Onion Lake Reserve (Saskatchewan). Thunderchild, a follower of …

Review Of The Biographical Directory Of Native American Painters Edited By Patrick D. Lester, Richard Conn

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is a long-needed and critically important reference work sure to be welcomed by the many scholars, collectors, artists, and others who will consult it frequently. The last work of this nature, Jeanne Snodgrass's American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory, was published in 1968, hence the importance and timeliness of Lester's Biographical Directory.

The body of the work (the actual Directory) is organized alphabetically by artists' names, each entry including biographical data, tribal affiliation, name in tribal language, and lists of awards, commissions, and works in public collections. If an artist works in more than one medium, the …

Review Of Age Of The Gunfighter: Men And Weapons On The Frontier 1840-1900 By Joseph G. Rosa, Robert K. Dearment

Great Plains Quarterly

At first glance and a quick thumb-through, this large 10"x13" edition with its striking full color cover featuring W. C. Wyeth's dramatic painting of Wild Bill Hickok throwing down on a cheat at a gambling table might be considered just another slick picture book on the order of The Gunfighters, one of Time-life's Old West series of a few years back. But knowledgeable readers of factual gunfighter history, recognizing the author's name, would look further. Joseph G. Rosa has written a number of books dealing with Old West gunmen and their weaponry and is the uncontested authority on the …

Review Of Becoming And Remaining A People: Native American Religions On The Northern Plains By Howard L. Harrod, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly

Primarily this is a book about pre-reservation religions among the Hidatsa and Mandan, with a final chapter on the Cheyenne and Crow. Its purpose, an important one, is to reveal Hidatsa and Mandan culture as dynamic and transformative, nourished by religious values that provided social continuity as well as a symbolic language for adaptation and innovation. Unlike the many books dealing with northern Plains religions as static, or locked into unchanging cycles of religious ritual, Becoming and Remaining a People clearly shows how northern Plains religious experience and interpretations shaped new patterns of identity and social reconstruction while providing a …

Review Of Mediation In Contemporary Native American Fiction By James Ruppert, Catherine Rainwater

Great Plains Quarterly

James Ruppert discusses works by six Native American writers whom he believes "mediate" Indian and non-Indian world views. He argues convincingly that narratives by N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D'Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich are delivered from "an artistic and conceptual standpoint, constantly flexible, which uses the epistemological frameworks of Native American and Western cultural traditions to illuminate and enrich each other." These texts "create a dynamic that brings differing cultural codes into confluence to reinforce and recreate the structures of human life: the self, community, spirit, and the world we perceive." Often citing reader-response …

Review Of This Fragile Land: A Natural History Of The Nebraska Sandhills By Paul A. Johnsgard, Bob Ross

Great Plains Quarterly

This Fragile Land, though written for a popular audience, is not intended for children or for light bedtime reading. In language midway between academic discourse and good literary prose, Paul Johnsgard characterizes the plant and animal communities of the Sandhills thoroughly- and with humor and imagination.

Part One describes the "geology and historical geography" of the Sandhills region and its borders; it is the only part that might be tedious for some. In his preface, Johnsgard advises readers to begin with Part Two and skip-and-sample backward. In five chapters, he details the geographic relationships of species' habitats to one …

Review Of Indian School Days By Basil H. Johnston, Susan Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1939 Basil H. Johnston's mother told him he would soon be going on a short trip. The reasons for her seeming upset during preparations for his departure became clear to the ten-year-old Ojibway only when the agent came to collect him. Basil realized he was being taken to Spanish, a small village in northern Ontario and the site of the St. Peter Claver's Indian Residential School. Indian School Days renders the autobiographical remembrances of the author's years at the Jesuit boarding school.

Residential schools for Native American children were spread throughout Canada and the United States through the 1950s. …

A Socioeconomic Portrait Of Prince Hall Masonry In Nebraska, 1900-1920, Dennis N. Mihelich

Great Plains Quarterly

On 6 March 1775, a British military lodge of Freemasons initiated Prince Hall (his name, not a title) and fourteen other African Americans after the white colonial lodge at Boston had rejected their petition. Independence did not alter the attitude of white American Masons; thus, a separate black Masons' organization evolved. Hall secured a charter from the "mother" grand lodge in England and reconstituted his group as the African Grand Lodge of North America. Following his death in 1807 the fraternal order renamed itself in his honor.

Prior to the abolition of slavery Prince Hall Masonry spread slowly among the …

Review Of The Frontier In American Culture: An Exhibition At The Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995 Essays By Richard White And Patricia Nelson Limerick, Susan A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

THE EMPEROR ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

Richard White, the creator of the touring panel exhibition "The Frontier in American Culture," made his reputation promoting a product labeled "New Western History." He wrote a textbook on the topic, and one passage in that book reveals the conception that frames this exhibition: "People simply murdered Indians," he writes (It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own [University of Oklahoma Press, 1991], p. 338). If you are one of the people, perhaps that kind of statement seems acceptable, but from the point of view of one of the Indians it looks like …

Review Of The Nature Of The Place: A Study Of Great Plains Fiction By Diane Dufva Quantic, Melody Graulich

Great Plains Quarterly

Diane Quantic takes her title from Wright Morris: "Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion." Quantic's "opinion" is perhaps best conveyed on a t-shirt I once saw her wearing at a conference: "Kansas is the best kept secret in the United States."

I begin with this anecdote because Quantic has earned her authority by living her whole life in Kansas; I admire the way she establishes her relation to "place" in the book's first line: "My mother grew up in Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight …

Review Of The Dull Knifes Of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey By Joe Starita, Donald L. Parman

Great Plains Quarterly

Joe Starita's book centers on five generations of the Dull Knife family from the 1870s until the present. The original Dull Knife was a Northern Cheyenne who, with Little Wolf, led his people north from Indian Territory in 1878. The flight became one of the more famous episodes of the Indian wars. His son, George Dull Knife, born in 1875, probably came north to the Pine Ridge reservation several years later and identified with the Lakota rather than the Northern Cheyenne. George worked in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and later served as a tribal policeman. His son, Guy, Sr., …

Review Of Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real By Carol Miles Petersen, Barbara W. Rippey

Great Plains Quarterly

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Nebraska author (1881-1954), believed that if people want to do something badly enough, they will find the time to do it. Carol Miles Petersen, her biographer, tells us that Aldrich wanted so much to write that care of a husband, four children, and a home failed to deter her. The early death of Aldrich's husband added an economic impetus to her initial drive. She published a dozen books and numerous short stories and articles in meeting her artistic and family responsibilities. Moreover, during depression years, she aided her community substantially by offering quiet financial help to the …

Review Of The Drifting CowboyBy Will James I See By Your Outfit: Historic Cowboy Gear Of The Northern Plains By Tom Lindmier And Steve Mount, Richard W. Slatta

Great Plains Quarterly

Will James (1892-1942) served as living proof that prison can reform a man. Convicted of rustling in 1915, he used his writing and drawing ability in prison to prove his social worth and rehabilitation. By the time alcohol abuse ended his life, he had illustrated and written twenty-four entertaining volumes.

Most of James's books have been long out of print. Thanks to joint efforts by the Will James Society (PO Box 8207, Roswell, MN 88202) and Mountain Press Publishing, all of his works will be reprinted. The Drifting Cowboy, first published in 1925, joins his first book, Cowboys North …

Review Of Caddo Indians: Where We Come From By Cecile Elkins Carter, F. Todd Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Unlike the Native American tribes of the northern Plains-especially the Teton Sioux-the Indians of the southern Plains have been relatively neglected by historians. This is partially the result of these tribes' long, extensive dealings with the Spanish and French before interacting with representatives of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The nomadic buffalo hunting Comanches and Kiowas have had their share of chroniclers, due in part to the dramatic wars they fought in response to their being forced onto reservations following the Civil War. Only recently, however, has a historian, Stanley Noyes, written exclusively about the Comanches before 1845. …

The Early Growth Of The Conrad Banking Enterprise In Montana, 1880-1914, Henry C. Klassen

Great Plains Quarterly

In the year 1880 two brothers, William G. and Charles E. Conrad, organized the First National Bank at Fort Benton in north central Montana, capitalized at $50,000. They supplied at least $10,500 of this capital and gradually came to own a majority of the stock. From this modest start, the Conrad partnership expanded through involvement not only in the First National but also in other Montana banks until its emergence as a banking empire thirty-four years later with a paid-up capital of more than half a million dollars. The partnership grew by entering several geographical markets, becoming a regional partnership. …

The Left And Labor On The Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

This issue of Great Plains Quarterly is given up to two long articles that probe different facets of the history of the Left on the Great Plains. In "Workers, Unions, and Historians on the Northern Plains," William C. Pratt surveys unions in Nebraska and the Great Plains with an eye to what historians have written about them, what stories remain to be told, and what sources are available for the telling. Certainly he finds no dearth of material, though he is disappointed not to find integrative texts in the school of the "new labor history" for the northern Plains, the …

Review Of Along Ancient Trails: The Mallet Expedition Of 1739 By Donald J. Blakeslee, James P. Ronda

Great Plains Quarterly

In the popular mind the names Pierre and Paul Mallet carry little or no weight. Coronado, de Soto, Champlain, and Lewis and Clark occupy our imaginative space, crowding out adventurers like the Mallets. Even scholars have paid scant attention to the Mallets' epic journey from the Missouri River to Santa Fe in 1739. Donald J. Blakeslee's Along Ancient Trails sets the record straight, properly noting the Mallet role in the European exploration of the southern Great Plains. In doing so, Blakeslee not only recounts one expedition but illuminates the complex history of the entire region.

Frompin' In The Great Plains Listening And Dancing To The Jazz Orchestras Of Alphonso Trent 1925~44, Marc Rice

Great Plains Quarterly

This paper focuses on one of the most popular and influential of the territory band leaders, Alphonso Trent. From 1925 to the mid 1940s, his groups were acknowledged by listeners and by other musicians as among the very best of the jazz bands performing in the Southwest and Great Plains. In the cities and towns that they visited, their performances were always a special event, particularly in the African American communities. Trent's orchestras played an important role as musicians and entertainers of African Americans in the Great Plains States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Review Of Indians And The American West In The Twentieth Century By Donald L. Parman, Leonard R. Bruguier

Great Plains Quarterly

Offering solid scholarship and impressive, fresh documentation, Parman contributes a tantalizing, sometimes scintillating overview of American Indian history as it unfolds through the twentieth century. Often rich in detail while describing Indian struggles for self-determination, the book also reveals the give and take tribes have experienced on their long trail of reasserting their place not only in the American West but on the national scene. All is not optimistic, but Indians and the American West draws a detailed map of the territory on which future disputes are likely to unfold; thoughtful citizens consulting it should be better prepared to make …

Review Of Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor From "The Lane County Bachelor" To Bob Dole By C. Robert Haywood, William Kloefkorn

Great Plains Quarterly

Haywood calls Tough Daisies "a sampler" intended to illustrate that Kansans, contrary to a long litany of misconceptions, "have always had a sense of humor." He succeeds splendidly, chiefly because he gives the reader dozens of well-selected jokes, anecdotes, poems, and cartoons, and partly because the author himself has a wry sense of humor, one that wears well and unobtrusively complements his material. I finished the book wanting more-more jokes, more stories, more history, more Haywood.

Review Of Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader On The Northern Plains By Rachel Calof, H. Elaine Lindgren

Great Plains Quarterly

Along with the original narrative this volume provides an epilogue by Jacob Calof, Rachel's youngest child, and two essays, one by J. Sanford Rikoon, the other by Elizabeth Jameson. Jacob Calof's comments confirm the strength and courage we find in his mother's words.

The essays lend significant context to the narrative. Rikoon gives a concise and informative explanation of the history of Jewish families that left Russia and eastern Europe to settle on farms in the Heartland. Jameson's analysis places Rachel's narrative in historical perspective and emphasizes the importance of recognizing diversities of ethnicity, class, and gender in the interpretation …

The Frontier Medical Community Of Leavenworth, Kansas, Charles R. King M.D.

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the important elements in the development of a North American frontier community was a system of medical care. During the nineteenth century the work of all frontier professionals was dramatically facilitated by new means of transportation and communication. Mid-century frontier communities had direct contact with urban centers via the telegraph and could acquire supplies over railroads and improved roadways. The development of a medical care system in Leavenworth, Kansas, during the second half of the nineteenth century illustrates the important role that physicians and other health providers played in community building on the western frontier, as well as …

William Mckinley Holt And The Indian Claims Commission, Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly

When the bill to create the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was signed by President Harry Truman on 13 August 1946, he said it would provide "a final settlement of all outstanding claims" by the Indians against the United States. The process would foster the policy of assimilation, he said: "Indians can take their place without special handicaps or special advantages in the economic life of our nation and share fully in its progress." These hopes were not realized, however, as tribes faced three decades of difficult litigation, narrow opinions that reduced monetary claims, and many years when termination of tribes …

The Missouri River Basin On The 1795 Soulard Map A Cartographic Landmark, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly

The publication in 1814 of Nicholas Biddle's edition of the explorations of Lewis and Clark was accompanied by a remarkable map. This chart, drafted by Samuel Lewis from an 1810 manuscript map by William Clark, synopsized the expedition's many detailed route maps across the continent, plus significant post-expeditionary information. l This landmark document was the first to portray the Missouri River valley in a realistic configuration, and it set the stage for modern conceptions of the heartland of the continent.