Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Symbols Of German-Russsian Ethnic Identity On The Northern Plains, Timothy J. Kloberdanz

Great Plains Quarterly

During the past two decades, the subject of ethnicity has provoked popular interest and a proliferation of research. Scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds have described, analyzed, and reassessed the importance of ethnic identity in our modern society. Yet in 1980, following the long-awaited appearance of theHarvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, the basic question "What is ethnicity?" remained a perplexing one. The volume's editors admitted that "there is as yet no consensus about the precise meaning of ethnicity" since the distinguishing characteristics of ethnic groups seldom can be forced into neat conceptual categories. ¹ While certain …

Review Of Historical Atlas Of Oklahoma, Frederick C. Luebke

Great Plains Quarterly

This new edition, which draws upon the 1980 census, updates an excellent historical atlas that was first published in 1%5. It includes eighty-three maps, of which perhaps a dozen incorporate new data. Each map is accompanied by a page of text that elucidates the map and often presents additional information. Besides standard historical topics,other subjects such as physiography, natural resources, population, and education are treated cartographically.

Review Of Prairie: Images Of Ground And Sky, Margaret A. Mackichan

Great Plains Quarterly

Prairie is the unlikely yet rather successful marriage of what a prairie looks like to a scientist and feels like to an artist. The sixtytwo photographs, nine of which are black and white, are . square in format and superbly printed in Japan. The imagery is divided among scientific illustrations of native grasses, insects, or mammals; expanses of sky and cloud or expanses of earth seen aerially; and landscapes. In spite of the diversity of intent and viewpoint, a sense of continuity and flow is achieved.

Review Of Soldiers West: Biographies From The Military Frontier, Peter Maslowski

Great Plains Quarterly

The American West and the Old Army's role in it remain of enduring interest. For example, Edward M. Coffman's The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898 (1986) is a collective study of the officers and enlisted men and their dependents. Now, as an unintentional but superb companion piece, Soldiers West examines individual officers who were influential in exploring, policing, and developing the frontier. Two important themes emerge from these mini-biographies. First, as military historians have long recognized, the army played a vital role in national development. Second, and less well understood but especially fascinating, was …

Review Of Selling The Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860 To 1960, Leslie T. Whipp

Great Plains Quarterly

The title of this book is misleading for anyone who hasn't read the book. The book is not about the ways in which popular western fiction served to promote the West, nor even about the ways in which popular western fiction perpetuated the myth of the Wild West. The book is instead about the way the marketing of western formula fiction impinges upon the fiction; it argues that the conditions of composition, publication, and marketing exercise a shaping force on the details of the writing, and, more particularly, that the conditions of authorship for writers of popular western fiction often …

"The Greatest Thing I Ever Did Was Join The Union": A History Of The Dakota Teamsters During The Depression, Jonathan F. Wagner

Great Plains Quarterly

During the Great Depression the Dakota Teamsters established themselves as the most important union on the northern Plains. ¹ Their success involved struggle and sacrifice, with a full complement of setbacks and losses as well as advances and gains. From the 1930s on, the union has reflected certain of the general characteristics of the parent body, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America. Like the International, the Dakota Teamsters was always basically a truck drivers' union, but also something more. As with the International, the concept of jurisdiction was elastic. "In our teamsters union," the Minot, …

Song Texts And Their Performers: The Centerpiece Of Contemporary Lakota Identity Formulation, R. D. Theisz

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1960s and 1970s both American Indians and non-Indians showed intense interest in and awareness of the Indian world, and many traditional activities became more popular. This boom atmosphere has waned in the late 1980s, and Indian youths and young adults have therefore changed the focus of their search for identity formulation. In this article, I have been concerned with an aspect of Lakota traditionalism that is being granted more and more significance in the Lakota scheme of things-traditional song and dance. I have based the article on my readings in ethnomusicological literature, my informal observations over many years …

Notes & News (Great Plains Quarterly 7:2 [Spring 1987])

Great Plains Quarterly

IN MEMORIAM Margaret Laurence

Twelfth annual conference, to be held 16-18 March 1988, will be "The Arts on the Plains: The Role of Institutions."

Western Literature Association will hold its annual meeting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln 15-17 October 1987

Baylor University will hold a national symposium entitled "Regionalism: Concepts and Applications" 1-3 October 1987.

Many back issues of Great Plains Quarterly are still available

ERRATA -- Prairie Politics and Society: Regionalism in Decline, by Roger Gibbins, was attributed to the wrong publisher in a review

Plains Indian Agrariaism And Class Conflict, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly

Relatively little has been done to trace the political structures of American Indians through the years 1890 to 1940, when reservation economics were undergoing their most dramatic changes. That failure has left the false impression of a fifty-vear institutional vacuum. In fact, the middle years were times of complex reJisrrihutions of power ;md the emergence of indigellous socioeconomic classes. It was also perhaps the earliest period in which Plains Indians enjoyed anything like an Americanstyle, decentralized elective democracy. Federal programs shifted the control of the Indians' food supply. From being skilled hunter- organizers they became recipients of gc)\"ernnwnt patronage, heelme …

The Indian Reorganization Act And The Loss Of Tribal Sovereignty: Constitutions On The Rosebud And Pine Ridge Reservations, Richmond L. Clow

Great Plains Quarterly

The rhetoric of the Indian New Deal has directed scholars to study tribal political activities only after the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Graham D. Taylor expressed the prevailing opinion when he claimed that "the tribal governments established under the Indian Reorganization Act constitute a totally new and unfamiliar level of organization for many Indian groups.'" Although the flurry of new tribal constitutions adopted after 1934 overshadowed previous constitutional activities, Taylor and others overstate the case. Indian tribes had always had the right to determine their own form of government, and many tribes, beginning with the Cherokee in 1827, had …

Leadership Selection In Canadian Indian Communities, Reforming The Present And Incorporating The Past, J Anthony Long, Menno Boldt

Great Plains Quarterly

With improving prospects of achieving a greater measure of political autonomy for their governments, native Indian leaders in Canada are beginning to look seriously at reforming internal tribal/band political structures. Their objectives arc to establish band governments that meet the present social and economic needs of Indian peoples as well as reflect traditional political values. A "hand" is a legal entity specified in the Indian Act, a federal statute that has governed Indians in Canada since shortly after Confederation. In most instances the band corresponds to traditional tribal social and political organization, and these concepts are now often used interchangeably. …

In The Land Of Th Indian Woslata: Plains Indian Influences On Reservation Whites, Timothy J. Kloberdanz

Great Plains Quarterly

If one climbs the high grassy hill that overlooks the town of Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation in south-central North Dakota, the scene that gradually unfolds is an engaging one. Fort Yates is bordered on practically all sides by the expansive waters of Lake Oahe. Except for the fact that the community resembles a veritable island, it looks much like other Great Plains towns, with an assortment of generously spaced old and new structures. From the top of the hill to the north, one can sec for miles across the lake and the Missouri River to the rolling …

The Expeditions Of John Charles Fremont, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

With the publication of this third volume in the Expeditions of John Charles Fremont series, a massive compilation and editing task begun in 1965 has come to an end. The first volume and accompanying map portfolio, published in 1970, dealt with Fremont's travels between 1838 and 1844, focusing on the first and second expeditions into the American West which secured his fame as an explorer. The second, published in 1973, was devoted to Fremont's third expedition, his participation in the Bear Flag Revolt and subsequent court martial. Finally, the present work covers Fremont's travels between 1848 and 1854, encompassing the …

Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey., Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly

Carlos Schwantes tells us in Coxey's Army that the 1894 "petition in boots" aroused greater fears of social disorder than any event since the disputed election of 1876, although he also makes clear that such fears were largely groundless. The march on Washington to demand federal jobs for the unemployed was the brain child of Jacob Coxey, a prosperous Ohio quarry-owner, and Carl Browne, an itinerant panorama-painter who joined marches of the unemployed in Chicago in 1893. Coxey hoped not only to eliminate unemployment and create good roads but also to inflate the currency bv paying workers in legal tender …

Early Fur Trade On The Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among The Mandan And Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818., James A. Hanson

Great Plains Quarterly

The permanent villages of farming Indians on the Upper Missouri were a central focus for trade in prehistoric times. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, both French and Spanish traders had reach ed the area, and by the early nineteenth century, the Mandan- Hidatsa villages had come to be a Parisian entrepot for the buffalo hunting tribes, the St. Louis and Canadian traders, and the artists and explorers of young America. While the drive up the Missouri from St. Louis is well documented, Wood and Thiessen have unveiled for us an exciting story of the important and early Canadian …

Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing The American Dream., Joanne Jacobson

Great Plains Quarterly

John E. Carter has collected Solomon D. Butcher's photographs of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural and small town Nebraska life in the most sharply detailed reproductions and the most generous format yet available. Cataloging the physical and social environment of farm families and ranchers, objects of work and leisure, the construction of prairie sod houses, the arrival of technology and urbane civilization on the frontier, Butcher's work provides an irreplaceable record of the establishment of white culture on the Plains.

Trails South: The Wagon-Road Economy In The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, Richard L. Lane

Great Plains Quarterly

The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, as C. Robert Haywood defines it, encompassed a "ragged, imprecise triangle" with its base in the upper panhandle of Texas and its apex at Dodge City. Haywood persuasively argues that for two formative decades-1868 to 1888-this region was unified not only by "common physiographical and demographical characteristics" but by an economic interdependence that transcended state and territorial boundary lines. As a market, shipping point, and source of supply, Dodge City was the effective, if not political, capital of the region. Such remote and diverse locations as Tascosa, Texas, and Fort Supply, Oklahoma, were linked to Dodge …

After The Buffalo Were Gone: The Louis Warren Hill, Sr., Collection Of Indian Art., Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly

This catalogue of the Louis W. Hill Collection of Indian art and crafts, evenly divided between the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning, Montana, and the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, makes available to specialists and general readers a visual portrait of a notable collection. While nearly 170 of the book's 256 pages consist of brief descriptions alongside black-and-white illustrations of items contained in the Hill collection, the volume also includes an account of Louis W. Hill, Glacier Park, and the gathering of the Hill collection by Ann T. Walton; a very brief essay by noted ethnologist …

Tribal Dispossession And The Ottawa Indian University Fraud., Thomas Burnell Colbert

Great Plains Quarterly

The story is complex with many actors-- white missionaries, church officials, land speculators, town boosters, government officials, and Ottawa Indian leaders from opposing factions. Good intentions are mixed with deceit. And in the final chapter, there is neither a happy nor a tragic ending, only a belated settlement. William E. Unrah and H. Craig Miner, two highly capable historians at Wichita State University, have produced this case study of the chicanery associated with the creation of Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. They expose how the desire of Baptist missionaries to create a college for Ottawa Indians became entangled with land …

Time And Vision In Wright Morris's Photographs Of Nebraska, Joanne Jacobson

Great Plains Quarterly

Wright Morris is better known as a writer than as a photographer, but his photographs of Nebraska deserve more attention than they have received. Morris's work in the 1930s never achieved the fame of the Farm Security Administration photographs. And he himself cut short his photographic work of the 1940s when he and his publishers became frustrated with the expense and the aesthetic strain of his early books' photo-text format. But Morris's images of a premodern Nebraska, taken from the 1930s to the early 1950s, form an impressive body of work that is especially acute for its rendering of a …

On The Nature Of The Horse Of The American West In Nineteenth Century Art, Martin E. Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly

In nineteenth century America the horse was identified with the frontier and served as an image of independence and unrestrained freedom. Western travelers published in their diaries and journals accounts of sighting mustangs, the wild horses of the prairies. Washington Irving's vivid descriptions in his Tour on the Prairirs (1835) were among the earliest. In painting, literature's sister art, however, images of the western horse do not correspond with the written descriptions of the livestock that actually inhabited the area. The artists, rather, painted the ideal Arahian horse, a recognizable type developed throughout the century. The Arahian, considered the oldest …

Cities Of The Prairie Revisited: The Closing Of The Metropolitan Frontier, John C. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

In a series of highly-regarded publications during the early 1970s, Daniel Elazar selected ten medium-sized communities he believed were representative of urban America, placed them in a broad historical context, and examined their ability to respond politically to the changes and problems confronting them in the years between World War II and the Kennedy administration. Elazar now returns to those same communities (predominantly in Illinois) and picks up the story where he left off, carrying it down through the Great Society, Vietnam, and Nixon's New Federalism.

Adobe Walls: The History And Archeology Of The 1874 Trading Post, Anne M. Wolley

Great Plains Quarterly

With the ever increasing public interest in archaeology, especially in historic archaeology, books such as this one are in great demand. Adobe Walls is a good example of how historic archaeology should be done and how it can be presented to the general public as well as to the academic community. The format of the book allows the general reader to become involved in the history of the Adobe Walls Trading Post as well as the actual archaeological work that took place at the site. At the same time the book provides concise information useful to other historians and archaeologists.

Baronets And Buffalo: The British Sportsman In The American West, 1833-1881, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly

This book, "a narrative history of the American West as seen through the eyes and exploits of British sportsmen," begins with an epigraph from George Frederick Ruxton: "Although liable to an accusation of barbarism, I must confess that the very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of the Far West" (v,iv). Ruxton was but one of scores of British sportsmen who wandered through the American plains during the nineteenth century-killing buffalo and elk, seeing (and sometimes fleeing) Indians, undergoing hardships, and generally revelling in the wildness they found beyond the frontier. After spending 1846-47 in …

Index To Vol 7

Great Plains Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Navitism Or Not? Perceptions Of British Investments In Kansas, 1882-1901, Larry A. Mcfarlane

Great Plains Quarterly

A recurring topic in the historiography of Populism has been the extent to which the Populists and other agrarian radicals were nativist or anti..Semitic in the tenor of some of their reforms. In this article I trace the progress of legislation intended to restrict or eliminate absentee ownership of Kansas lands by aliens, particularly British landlords, from the first demand for such restriction in 1882 through the enactment of restrictive legislation in 1891 to its repeal in 1901. I parallel this study by following the currents of anti..alien rhetoric of the agrarian radicals who advocated the restrictions. While it is …

Review Of More True Tales Of Old-Time Kansas, Amil Quayle

Great Plains Quarterly

"Henry Born married Ida Dillabaugh from Montague, Michigan, in July, 1900. They had four children-two boys and two girls. They lived beside a beautiful trout lake in the San Juan Mountains about twenty miles above Pagosa Springs during the spring, summer, and early fall. They spent their winters in town." If this type of clean, factual, detailed historical writing appeals to you, I'd recommend More True Tales of Old-Time Kansas by David Dary for your reading pleasure.

Notes & News (Great Plains Quarterly 7:1, Winter 1987)

Great Plains Quarterly

Eleventh annual conference 18-20 March 1987 on "Women's Culture in the Great Plains."

Enron Art Foundation has donated its Maximilian-Bodmer Collection to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska

CANPLAINS Data Base indexes all prairie relevant articles from over 140 periodicals

Montana Archaeological Society invites all interested readers to subscribe to Archaeology in Montana

1985 Don D. Walker award for the best article on western literature or culture has been presented to Roger Stein

1985 Robert Heizer award to Waldo Wedel and Douglas Parks

Nowhere Left To Go: Montana's Crees, Metis, And Chippewas And The Creation Of Rocky Boy's Resevation, Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the federal governments of Canada and the United States asserted their jurisdiction over the Great Plains through a series of treaties that established reservations for the various Indian tribes of the area. By the turn of the century, three small native groups found themselves homeless relics of a distant past long after other peoples had moved to their reservations. Several bands of Cree Indians and a number of mixed-bloods, who called themselves Metis, had used lands on both sides of the line that had become the border between the state of Montana …

Review Of The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism., Paul Comeau

Great Plains Quarterly

The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism is a valuable and compelling addition to Cather criticism. Working from the late eighteenth century definition of romanticism-the process whereby the creative imagination locates meaning in the material world-Susan Rosowski demonstrates convincingly how the central tenets of romanticism informed the progress of Willa Cather's artistic vision as exemplified both in individual works and in the pattern of her canon. Accordingly, the possibility of discovering value in external objects is addressed in the optimistic early novels, of which Alexander's Bridge constitutes a romantic allegory of creativity, The Song of the Lark, Cather's Prelude, and A …