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African Americans And The Great Plains An Introduction, Keith D. Parker

Great Plains Quarterly

During 23-25 February 1995 the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln sponsored its nineteenth annual interdisciplinary symposium, "African Americans and the Great Plains." The conference, attended by more than 300 people from throughout the United States and Canada, sought to highlight African Americans' role in Great Plains culture by looking at their contributions in various areas such as agriculture, anthropology, archeology, art, biology, dance, education, history, literature, medicine, music, photography, religion, sports, theater, and urban studies. The four papers in this issue of the Great Plains Quarterly were selected to illuminate the diversity of roles …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION (Keith D. Parker)

THE GREAT PLAINS SIT-IN MOVEMENT, 1958-60 (Ronald Walters)

PRELUDE TO BROWNSVILLE: THE TWENTY-FIFTH INFANTRY AT FORT NIOBRARA, NEBRASKA, 1902-06 (Thomas R. Buecker)

FROMPIN' IN THE GREAT PLAINS: LISTENING AND DANCING TO THE JAZZ ORCHESTRAS OF ALPHONSO TRENT, 1925-44 (Marc Rice)

"WITH ONE MIGHTY PULL": INTERRACIAL TOWN BOOSTING IN NICODEMUS, KANSAS (Claire O'Brien)

BOOK REVIEWS

Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West

Girl on a Pony

Tough Daisies: Kansas Humor from "The Lane County Bachelor" to Bob Dole

Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas

Indians and the …

The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958-60, Ronald Walters

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1960, black youths conducted a "sit-in" in Greensboro, North Carolina to obtain the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter. Others quickly replicated sit-ins throughout the South and, just as quickly, the press labeled Greensboro the "first" sit-in. Historian David Levering Lewis, for instance, said: "There were not a few white southerners, and probably a majority of white northerners, who would have wished to say to the first sit-in students, as did the woman in the Greensboro Woolworth's, 'you should have done this ten years ago.'" Even data-oriented social scientists such as Doug McAdams portray the sit-ins as …

Review Of Girl On A Pony By La Verne Hanners, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

This small book is written in a straightforward, unassuming, conversational style with the result that it's deceptively simple, seeming at first to be just another reminiscence of pioneer days, although in a somewhat unusual place. It's the story of La Verne Hanners's childhood and young womanhood in the Valley of the Dry Cimarron of New Mexico, only a few miles from the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle and just south of the Colorado border. Here is a landscape of grandeur, of severe drought, of sudden, fierce hail and wind and snow storms, of walls of water unexpectedly racing down dry …

Review Of Catch Rope: The Long Arm Of The Cowboy: The History And Evolution Of Ranch Roping By John R. Erickson, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly

Erickson sets his account in the literature of cowboys and roping and supplies a short but useful annotated bibliography. There is nothing here of the "New Western History," however, and little about socio-economic conditions, gender issues, Indians, or African American cowboys. Sharply focused on catch roping, the book nevertheless communicates well the tribulations and satisfactions of life on the range. The many quotations and paraphrases of stories by fellow cowboys give Catch Rope its evocative sense of camaraderie: we feel like we're sitting around a campfire with the author and his friends. And it is a good feeling.

Review Of Talking Up A Storm: Voices Of The New West By Gregory L. Morris, Gerald Shapiro

Great Plains Quarterly

Morris's subjects include a handful of very well-known writers: Amy Tan, Thomas McGuane, Ron Hansen, and Richard Ford, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize. Mixed in with these are interviews with lesser known western writers such as James Crumley, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Mary Clearman Blew, and Ralph Beer. For readers interested in Western literature, an especially useful feature of Talking Up a Storm is the bibliography following each interview. As with any collection like this one, a reader is likely to be left with some questions: Why is this author included but that one left out? Why is the West seemingly …

Review Of Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns Of Kansas By Daniel C. Fitzgerald, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

The Kansas State Historical Society maintains a file on about six thousand failed towns in the state, a figure large almost beyond comprehension in this modern age of one town per county. Dan Fitzgerald helps to put urban development in proper perspective by offering thumb-nail sketches of one hundred and six of these nearly forgotten communities. It is history from the grass roots, well done, and written in an unpretentious style that should appeal to scholarly and general audiences alike. The sketches range in length from one to seven pages, usually accompanied by an old photograph or plat map, and …

Sacramental Language Ritual In The Poetry Of Louise Erdrich, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

As an intensely personal genre, poetry intimately reveals Louise Erdrich's voice as her well-known fiction does not. Evident in that voice are elements of the mosaic of cultural experiences that comprise Erdrich's life: Catholicism, German ancestry, working class, university education, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Erdrich's poetry is her first published work, her own writing without the collaborative effort and editing of her husband, Michael Dorris (Modoc). While some of Erdrich's poems garner their cultural rhetoric from differing points of view and values, most exhibit the variety of experiences that result from marginalization inherent in the omnipresence of race in North …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

REVIEW ESSAYS

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE: RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH (P. Jane Hafen)

THE FRONTIER MEDICAL COMMUNITY OF LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS (Charles R. King)

WILLIAM McKINLEY HOLT AND THE INDIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION (Francis Moul)

THE MISSOURI RIVER BASIN ON THE 1795 SOULARD MAP: A CARTOGRAPHIC LANDMARK (W. Raymond Wood)

REVIEW ESSAYS

Stephan E. Ambrose. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (John L. Allen; Clara Sue Kidwell; Donald Worster)

BOOK REVIEWS

The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains

The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories

Stephen Long and American Frontier …

Review Essay: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, And The Opening Of The American West By Stephen E. Ambrose, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

From time to time, a serious book excites the imaginations of a vaster public than the audience of scholarly journals. Because the Center for Great Plains Studies has, over the past sixteen years, sponsored the reediting and publication of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, we could not help but notice the enormous popular success of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. To provide a focus on some of the scholarly concerns raised by this new text, we invited three prominent scholars to review the book from …

Review Essay: Native American Studies, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly

Being asked to review a book from a Native American perspective raises a basic question about the peer review process for academic journals. What constitutes historical objectivity in the review? Will a review identified as representing a particular perspective be received in the same way as a review by a historian who writes about American history?

Given that very few Indian voices are recorded in the journals that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark kept during their epic western explorations, and that Ambrose can record only snatches of their thoughts, we cannot recover fully the many different ways that people of …

Review Of O Little Town: Remembering Life In A Prairie Village By Harlo L. Jones, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

O Little Town is competently written in clear, concise prose which, despite some masterful description, on the whole doesn't quite reach the level of art. All of this makes for many of us a pleasant, undemanding read, but for others-historians, people of the future, and those who remember with fondness and nostalgia their childhoods in small town North America of the first half of this century-it is something much more: a valuable document of a-by this rendering, anyway-sweeter time, forever lost.

Review Of The Amazing Death Of Calf Shirt And Other Blackfoot Stories By Hugh A. Dempsey, Gregory R. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Every Native American society has elders who recount the traditions of their people. Some of these traditions are purely religious in nature, explaining their universe and their place in it. Other oral traditions often impart life's lessons, providing a cultural road map for living in a particular society. Still other accounts concern historical events involving prominent men and women. These traditions provide each member of a society with a sense of his or her own collective history and cultural identity. The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and Other Blackfoot Stories is such a collection of historical accounts, a compilation of …

Review Of Soul In The Stone: Cemetery Art From America's Heartland By John Gary Brown, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly

John Gary Brown, a professional photographer from Lawrence, Kansas, has collected over a period of time a variety of unique photographs documenting examples of cemetery art found in the central states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. The author, through his photographs and to some degree his text, illustrates the rich mixture of personal efforts that stone sculptors and vernacular artists have developed in this special art form. While cemetery art is public, the photographs Brown presents, through his use of a multiplicity of artistic images, often suggest particularly private stories. Brown begins …

Review Of An Indian In White America By Mark Monroe, David Murray

Great Plains Quarterly

Mark Monroe's autobiography, edited from his tape-recorded memories by Carolyn Reyer, joins a sizable body of Indian autobiographies resulting from a collaboration between white editors and Indian narrators. Where earlier accounts often catered to white fascination with traditional Indian life, the title here indicates different concerns. After a traditional childhood in North Dakota, Monroe moves ro Alliance, Nebraska, where he experiences small town racial prejudice. Unable to find work, he enlists and is wounded in Korea. Initially successful as a baker when he returns, he drifts into a gruelingly portrayed alcohol addiction, which wrecks many years of his life. On …

Review OfLinoleum, Better Babies, And The Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly

Marilyn Irvin Holt describes Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890- 1930 as a study of "the domestic economy movement and the rural women it targeted." Focusing on the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, she examines the many ways in which reformers worked to improve life on American farms through education and uplift programs for American farm women and their children. These efforts included the establishment of home extension programs, home economics education, and 4-H programs, among others. Their goals were the physical improvement of the farm home and the farm child, with the intent of keeping …

Review Of Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence And Janet Frame By Lorna M. Irvine, Robert L. Ross

Great Plains Quarterly

In Critical Spaces, Lorna M. Irvine presents a complex body of material in clear prose and organizes that material in an accessible manner. Irvine not only examines the critical reaction to the fiction of Canadian Margaret Laurence and New Zealander Janet Frame but also reflects on the ways the writers' work and the response to it mirror the growing nationalism in the two countries.

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIUM

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD (Frederick C. Luebke)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IN MEMORIAM (James Sinclair Ross)

Marl Sandoz's Portrait Of An Artist's Youth Robert Henri's Nebraska Years, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

Robert Henri's life story would have appealed to Mari Sandoz even if he were not an important early twentieth-century American artist. Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad) came from a time, a place, and a family that at first glance seem unlikely to have produced an avant garde painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits; it was the sort of paradox Sandoz liked to explore. That Henri had spent much of his youth in her native Nebraska in a family headed by a magnetic and dominating man not unlike her own father also interested her. That the family left Nebraska in …

Table Of Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

AN INTRODUCTION (Barbara Rippey; John R. Wunder)

"SHE DOES NOT WRITE LIKE A HISTORIAN": MARl SANDOZ AND THE OLD AND NEW WESTERN HISTORY (Betsy Downey)

MARl SANDOZ'S SLOGUM HOUSE: GREED AS WOMAN (Glenda Riley)

RECASTING EPIC TRADITION: THE DISPOSSESSED AS HERO IN SANDOZ'S CRAZY HORSE AND CHEYENNE AUTUMN (Lisa R. Lindell)

MARl SANDOZ'S PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST'S YOUTH: ROBERT HENRI'S NEBRASKA YEARS (Helen Winter Stauffer)

BOOK REVIEWS

Prairie University: A History of the University of Nebraska

Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas

Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment , 1920,1990

Lakol Wokiksuye: …

Review Of Lakol Wokiksuye: La Memoire Visuel Des Lakota By Helga Lomosits And Paul Harbaugh, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly

A principal problem with this presentation is the technical quality of the pictorial reproductions, which is somber indeed. Moreoever, the world shown here is almost entirely male: the crowd scenes include comparatively few women, and only one woman's portrait (Annie Red Shirt's) is admitted. What does this reflect-the bias of the photographers, the realities of the age, or perhaps a combination of both? The presentation of the material, well organized and clear as it is, also would have profitted from numbered pages.

Although some statements here and there in the text are questionable-that the cost of the frontier wars, for …

Review Of Looking For History On Highway 14 By John E. Miller, Mark Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly

John E. Miller, a history professor at South Dakota State University, employs a blend of history, journalism, and travelogue in this enlightening book. He takes the reader on a tour of discovery across South Dakota's historic Highway 14, visiting fifteen roadside towns before ending in the Black Hills at Mt. Rushmore. Included in the tour are trips to Brookings (home to South Dakota's land grant university), De Smet (the "little town on the prairie" made famous by Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels), and Ft. Pierre (originally home to many Native American groups). Other towns visited include Elkton, Arlington, Manchester, Iroquois, Huron, …

Review Of The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities In The Modern West By Carl Abbott, Robert B. Fairbanks

Great Plains Quarterly

This important book initiates a new series on The Modern American West edited by Gerald D. Nash. In it the author not only documents the critical role cities have played in the development of the West since World War II, but claims that those cities really personify the three mythic images of the West as locus of democracy, opportunity, and individual fulfillment. Defining the West as all of the Great Plains and Pacific States, Carl Abbott examines mid-size cities as well as large, but concentrates on the impact of metropolises like Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston …

Review Of Cowboys And Kansas: Stories From The Tallgrass Prairie By Jim Hoy, Timo Heiskanen

Great Plains Quarterly

Do you think of cowboys when you think of Kansas? Few people do, but Jim Hoy, English professor and Kansas native and patriot, has set out to give the Kansas cowboy his rightful place in the history, arguably, of America's greatest folk hero. Hoy's main concern in Cowboys and Kansas is the real working cowboy, though he also touches upon the importance of the mythic cowboy on the American psyche. Both are genuine articles, although the two have little in common.

Review Of Elizabeth Bacon Custer And The Making Of A Myth By Shirley A. Leckie, Kimberly Jensen

Great Plains Quarterly

Throughout the book's detailed accounts of the campaigns, career, and posthumous reputation of George Armstrong Custer, Elizabeth Custer virtually disappears. At other times Leckie presents glimpses of Custer's life beyond her role of wife and professional widow that would, if explored in more detail, enrich the study considerably. A broader analysis throughout the chronological narrative-with the inclusion of a greater portion of recent work on the complexity of gender roles in the nineteenth century, the relationship of women to war and the military, women's paid work roles, the women's club movement, women as writers and readers, and the relationship between …

Review Of Dry Farming In The Northern Great Plains: Years Of Readjustment, 1920-1990 By Mary W. M. Hargreaves, David C. Jones

Great Plains Quarterly

There can be few quibbles with this masterwork. Perhaps the maps might be crisper; perhaps a few pictures might enhance the presentation, and a few more graphs might lay out complex and often serpentine trends. Possibly a few more farmers might speak so that in the end one knows that certainly behind the statistics dwell real people with real dreams. Generally, the more pleasing the presentation, the wider the audience-and this scholarship deserves a wide audience. Dry Farming is a superlative history of farm policy on the northern Plains by one of the most meticulous students of the phenomenon in …

Review Of Rooted In Dust: Surviving Drought And Depression In Southwestern Kansas By Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Thomas R. Wessel

Great Plains Quarterly

Few environmental disasters match the drought years of the 1930s. Drought extended well beyond the Great Plains for most of the decade, but was particularly intense in southwestern Kansas. Fiction writers and historians have generally concentrated on those who fled the drought stricken Plains, or written accounts condemning farmers and government programs for converting the southern Plains into a dust bowl.

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg transforms farmers from villains in a man-made environmental disaster into stubborn optimists with heroic perseverance. She acknowledges that many avoided the economic depression in Kansas, or at least the drought, by simply abandoning the state, but notes …

Review Of The Life And Legacy Of Annie Oakley By Glenda Riley, Donald Arthur Clark

Great Plains Quarterly

Riley proves an excellent writer, adeptly disclosing the personality of this private woman. Poverty ridden as a child, Oakley learned to hunt and became an expert markswoman. She married the first man she beat in a shooting competition, Frank Butler. Frank, perhaps the ideal husband, managed Annie and their engagements with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Throughout the years they maintained high moral standards; neither smoked, drank or cursed. Annie, ever the Victorian lady, always wore a dress and always rode side-saddle while proving herself a worldclass sharpshooter. She never forgot those less fortunate than herself, providing gifts to orphanages …

Review Of On Turner's Trail: 100 Years Of Writing Western History By Wilbur R. Jacobs, Mary Young

Great Plains Quarterly

When Frederick Jackson Turner retired, he took up residence at the Huntington Library in California. Turner left his papers to the Huntington, thus assuring that the Turner industry would flourish there. Wilbur Jacobs is among the resident senior scholars who have tended the flame. Jacobs is a long-time critic of Turner's imperialist celebrations of progress, dichotomous views of savagism and civilization, and anti-environmentalism. Turner ignored much of the development of social science in his own time and confused ruling theory with multiple working hypotheses. Jacobs repeats these criticisms in several contexts in the present volume, but champions Turner as a …