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Review Of Cowboy Life On The Texas Plains: The Photographs Of Ray Rector Edited By Margaret Rector, Charles S. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly

This slim volume is a happy combination of photographs from the Texas ranching country and a breezy but thoughtful essay about cowboys.

The introduction by John Graves dissociates itself from the specific time and place of the photos but maintains its Texas connection in its regional values and the color of its language. Graves gives broad consideration to economic change, technological development, the persistence of tradition and myth, and the impact of ecological change upon cowboy life. The cowboys he portrays came from rural places, participated in a legend they had already absorbed, and performed their jobs for fun and …

Review Of Texas Woollybacks: The Range Sheep And Goat Industry By Paul H. Carlson, B. Byron Price

Great Plains Quarterly

Paul Carlson presents readers with a comprehensive, well-organized, and easily read treatment of a subject comparatively neglected by historians of the American livestock industry. The first major synthesis of the Texas sheep and goat business in nearly forty years, Texas Woollybacks adds measurably in detail and focus to omnibus classics like Shepherd's Empire (1945) and America's Sheep Trails (1948), and to pioneering studies of the Texas business such as Winifred Kupper's The Golden Hoof (1945) and more recently Val W. Lehmann's Forgotten Legions (1969). The author, nevertheless, leans heavily on these and a variety of other supporting secondary sources. While …

Review Of Oil Booms: Social Changes In Five Texas Towns By Roger M. Olien And Diana Davids Olien & Oil In West Texas And New Mexico: A Pictorial History Of The Permian Basin By Walter Rundell, Jr., Frederick W. Rathjen

Great Plains Quarterly

The Permian Basin covers about sixty-eight thousand square miles of west-central Texas and the adjacent southeastern corner of New Mexico. About two hundred million years ago the region lay beneath a salt sea that laid down a limestone floor upon which were subsequently deposited complex geologic formations that entrapped equally complex ecosystems. This combination of geological and biological evolution produced petroleum deposits that made possible a veritable marvel of the contemporary industrial world.

Before 1920, persons who considered themselves of sound mind found little attraction in the environment of the Permian Basin, for the region seems to present the worst …

Review Of Gauchos And The Vanishing Frontier By Richard W. Slatta, Douglas W. Richmond

Great Plains Quarterly

Professor Slatta has written a solid social history of the Argentine countryside in the nineteenth century. Not only does he describe and analyze the life-style of the gauchos-in itself, a formidable task-but he also outlines changes in the economy and in the political structure.

Slatta's research is quite thorough. He avoids the tendency of many historians of Argentina to overlook primary sources, especially in the Archivo General de la Nacion. Moreover, the author has looked into provincial archives, particularly those at Tandil, and demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the relevant secondary sources.

Handsomely produced and graced by attractive illustrations as …

Review Of The West Of Wild Bill Hickok By Joseph G. Rosa, Gary L. Roberts

Great Plains Quarterly

Joseph G. Rosa's earlier book They Called Him Wild Bill is not only the definitive biography of the redoubtable James Butler Hickok but also a model for biographies of other western figures. The same qualities that marked Rosa's original biography of Hickok are evident in the present work. The West of Wild Bill Hickok is not a revision of the original biography (although it does present some new material not included in Rosa's 1974 revised edition), but rather, a thoughtful and detailed examination of the photographic record of the life and times of wild Bill Hickok. The purpose of the …

Review Of Wichita: The Early Years, 1865-1880 By H. Craig Miner, John C. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

City histories written in the late nineteenth century by amateurs were panegyrics to local men of property and standing. City "biography" was very much just that-a collective biography of the men who made the city what it was. As the discipline of urban history has matured, the view that tied each community's development to the unique personalities of its leaders has given way to an interest in the process of urbanization and the examination of cities as case studies, important primarily because of what they say about the larger urban experience.

Craig Miner's Wichita is a throwback to the …

Review Of Jewels Of The Plains: Wildflowers Of The Great Plains Grasslands And Hills By Claude A. Barr, Curtis M. Twedt

Great Plains Quarterly

After earning a degree from Drake University, author Claude Barr settled on a homestead just south of the Black Hills. In addition to his principal occupation as a rancher, Barr began to observe and propagate native plants in his small garden. One of his earliest ventures into writing about his avocation was an article in 1930 on the pasqueflower. He commented, "I was paid $20 for it, which seemed like a munificent price." This modest effort led to at least one hundred articles over the next fifty years.

Jewels of the Plains is not simply a compilation of plant characteristics …

Review Of The Platte: Channels In Time By Paul A. Johnsgard, Leslie T. Whipp

Great Plains Quarterly

This little book about Nebraska's Platte River is an inch wide and a mile deep.

In both form and content, the book is an argument for the life of the Platte River Valley. The prose text is less than a hundred pages; weaving in and around it are verses from Pawnee songs; maps and aerial photos; photos of animals, birds, and plants. Appendices identify the many different species of life that flourish in the valley, their locales and seasons.

The text takes us from before time until our own time, then confronts us with tomorrow. The author associates the Platte …

Review Of This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas Of United States And Canadian Society And Cultures Edited By John F. Rooney, Jr., Wilbur Zelinsky, And Dean R. Louder, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

What would you like to know about the cultural geography of the United States and Canada? Many aspects of society and culture in North America are displayed on the 387 maps and drawings in this fine atlas, which is a major landmark in the development of cultural geography.

The atlas is an outgrowth of the work of the Society for the North American Cultural Survey, which has as its long-term goal the production of a definitive atlas of contemporary American cultures based on fieldwork and surveys. This Remarkable Continent is an interim report that represents the extent of existing knowledge. …

Review Of Men Of The Steel Rails: Workers On The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 1869- 1900 By James H. Ducker, Robert H. Zieger

Great Plains Quarterly

Using an impressive array of company and union publications, newspapers, directories, and archival materials, James H. Ducker delineates the lives and experiences of the Santa Fe Railroad's labor force. Although he includes three chapters relating to unionism, strike action, and working-class politics, his main focus is on the more private side of his subjects' stories. Even in his chapter on the railroad unions, the author is as interested in the fraternal and social functions they served as in their collective bargaining character.

Ducker carefully places each of his topics in an appropriate historiographical context. When dealing with the strikes of …

Mapping The Interior Plains Of Rupert's Land By The Hudson's Bay Company To 1870, Richard I. Ruggles

Great Plains Quarterly

By royal charter, Charles II in 1670 granted to a small coterie of London entrepreneurs, united in a joint stock company, exclusive trading privileges in a vast territory of then unknown dimensions. The group was the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay," the Hudson's Bay Company. The territory was Rupert's Land, named for Prince Rupert, cousin of the monarch, who graciously consented to act as the first governor of the company. By charter, Rupert's Land included "all the Landes Countryes and Territoryes upon the Coastes and Confynes of the Seas" lying within Hudson Strait, that is, the …

The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I, Sylvia Lea Sallquist

Great Plains Quarterly

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given …

Review Of The Matador Land And Cattle Company By W. M. Pearce, Richard A. Bartlett

Great Plains Quarterly

The question that immediately comes to mind is: what justified a second printing in hardcover of this book first published eighteen years ago? The book is certainly well written, though it is not of great literary excellence; it is also very well organized and researched, yet not brilliantly so. The real contribution is clearly its subject matter.

In 1882 a group of businessmen, most of them from in and around Dundee, Scotland, purchased for $1,250,000 what became the Matador Land and Cattle Company. At the time, many other British and Scottish investors were also plunging into the American cattle business. …

Review Of Western Oklahoma: A Photographic Essay Photographs By Daisy Decazes, Introduction And Text By William S. Banowsky, John E. Carter

Great Plains Quarterly

Over the last several decades the photographic essay has gained more respect and understanding among serious students of culture. Western Oklahoma: A Photographic Essay falls abysmally short of the powerful potential of this medium. The work consists of seventy-five photographs by Daisy Decazes, a Sorbonnetrained photographer, and a brief introduction by William S. Banowsky, past president of the University of Oklahoma. The work begins with Banowsky's introduction, a simplistic time line of human evolution in Oklahoma, beginning with the Native American people's life and attempt to hold the land, followed by the onslaught of rugged pioneers, and culminating in the …

Review Of Singing Cowboys And All That Jazz: A Short History Of Popular Music In Oklahoma By William W. Savage, Jr., Stephen Cox

Great Plains Quarterly

A monograph defined by state boundaries must begin (and may very well end) as an inventory- even if the scholar intends by careful study of the particular to make a contribution to wider human understanding, perhaps, or to explain the ways of a state to itself. Enthusiasts of six powerful genres of American music will recognize Oklahoma as an apt subject for an inventory of popular music. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was first transcribed at a Choctaw boarding school in Oklahoma and sent to the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nashville, Tennessee, who made it among the best known of black …

Review Of The Gate City: A History Of Omaha By Lawrence H. Larsen And Barbara J. Cottrell, Harl A. Dalstrom

Great Plains Quarterly

This work, the fourth volume in Pruett Publishing Company's Western Urban History Series, is a survey of the history of Omaha from its founding in 1853-1854 to 1980. It is the third general history of Omaha to be published since 1980 and is the first to give any relatively significant treatment to the city's history in the post-World War II era.

Larsen and Cottrell divide their narrative into ten chapters that cover five periods, each from twenty to thirty years. The narrative of fewer than three hundred pages, including a large number of photos, is synoptic and fast. paced, and …

Review Of Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes In Action By Lew L. Callaway, William L. Lang

Great Plains Quarterly

The image of a hastily gathered posse comitatus riding out of a fearfully paralyzed western town to administer swift and violent justice to a band of desperadoes is as firmly etched in the American mind as nearly any popular western scene. In one violent portrait, the remoteness of the frontier from civilization, the failure of established institutions, and the necessity of good men to protect their families and property are capsulized. The fascination with vigilantes is bred of the excitement of its violent solution and the inherent mystery behind it all. What drove men to take the law under their …

Review Of Wolves For The Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts And Auxiliaries With The United States Army, 1860-1890 By Thomas W. Dunlay, Clyde A. Milner Ii

Great Plains Quarterly

Books on the U.S. military in the trans-Mississippi West abound. Yet surprisingly, no comprehensive study of the familiar but exotic Indian scouts has been published. Thomas W. Dunlay's work sets out to fill this void and is on the whole very successful. Dunlay approaches his subject in an analytic, thematic manner. He has a set of questions that frame the central chapters of his book. In general, he wants to understand why the U.S. military chose to include Indians in its western service and how these Indians were used. In addition, he seeks to understand the Indian point-of-view, the dynamics …

Review Of The Great Kansas Bond Scandal By Robert Smith Bader, Patrick G. O'Brien

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1933 Kansas was mired in the Great Depression, ravaged by the Dust Bowl, and afflicted by human cupidity. The biggest public scandal in Kansas history is the subject of this thorough and well-written monograph.

Ronald and Warren Finney, son and father, were the principal malefactors in the bond scandal. The state reverberated from the exposure of the "freewheeling, charismatic" Ronald's forging and deposit of bonds in the state treasury, brokerage houses, and banks to finance high living and business ventures. Even more disquieting was the knowledge of the culpability of his father, a respected, civic-spirited, influential businessman and banker …

Review Of The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico By David J. Weber, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly

This amply illustrated, fully documented and well-organized study is essentially a synthesis "built mainly on the work of other scholars" (p. xxii). However, David J. Weber also makes use of archival sources and primary materials in this overview of the Mexican borderlands. Part of the Histories of the American Frontier Series, this account sheds new light on "a dark age in the historiography of the Southwest" and differs from prior studies in two ways. First, it attempts to place this period "squarely within its Mexican context, without minimizing the significant activities of Anglo Americans and other aliens." Second, "the region …

Review Of Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, And Gerald Vizenor By Alan R. Velie, Charles L. Woodard

Great Plains Quarterly

Some of today's best writing is by Native American authors. That fact is not as widely known as it should be for two reasons: the majority culture tends to compartmentalize writing by and about Native Americans as "Indian" literature, and the traditions out of which such writing comes are different in many respects from European traditions, causing it to be undervalued and/or misunderstood. There is a strong need for bridge building between literary cultures in this country, and an equally strong need to break down the tendency to restrict Native American literature to ethnic categories.

Alan R. Velie's Four American …

The Prairie Mermaid Love-Tests Of Pioneer Women, Robert H. Solomon

Great Plains Quarterly

In some fictional, historical, and autobiographical accounts of the lives of married women on the prairies of North America during the brief period between initial exploration and permanent settlement, there appears a rather widespread and complicated motif. In it the woman lives on an empty prairie, usually far from the edge of town; physically isolated with her husband, she is psychologically alone, too, and friendless, especially in terms of female companionship. Often her family is far away; always her husband is insensitive and unsympathetic, and, in general terms, unworthy of her devotion. Sometimes even before she is able to voice …

Review Of Lakota Society By James R. Walker, Herbert T. Hoover

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume contains a hodgepodge of personal writings and field notes by a physician who served at Pine Ridge Agency soon after the establishment of a reservation for Oglalas in western South Dakota. Without formal preparation, James R. Walker recorded (between 1896 and 1914) what he perceived from observations and collected from informants. Guided by published materials on the same general subject, Raymond DeMallie has strung them together on a thin editorial thread. Together, the meagerly trained researcher from a previous era and an anthropologist who has served on the faculty of Indiana University in recent years have produced a …

Closing The Circle The American Optimism Of Laura Ingalls Wilder, William Holtz

Great Plains Quarterly

It was the summer of 1894. Their wagon had halted where the ferry would take them across the Missouri River, while across the parched landscape they had just traversed, "covered wagons stood one beyond another in a long, long line." The woman spoke to the child at her side, '" That's your last sight of Dakota.''' At twenty seven, she had turned her back on Dakota and a failed homestead to set out for a new life in the Missouri Ozarks, leaving behind her own family and her husband's, in every way all she had ever known of home. Her …

Title And Contents -Spring 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SPRING 1984 VOL. 4 NO.2

CONTENTS

CLOSING THE CIRCLE: THE AMERICAN OPTIMISM OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER William Holtz

INDIAN MAPS: THEIR PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF PLAINS CARTOGRAPHY G. Malcolm Lewis

CARL SCHURZ AND THE INDIANS Hans L. Trefousse

THE BEGINNINGS OF WHEELED TRANSPORT IN WESTERN CANADA Barry Kaye and John Alwin

BOOK REVIEWS

With Good Intentions: Quaker Work among the Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas in the 1870s

Lakota Society

Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980

American Farm Tools: From Hand-Power to Steam-Power

NOTES & NEWS

Review Of Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan And The Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980 By Michael L. Lawson, Janet Mcdonnell

Great Plains Quarterly

Under the Pick-Sloan plan the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed five mainstem dam projects that destroyed more than 550 square miles of tribal land in North Dakota and South Dakota. The projects wreaked havoc on five Sioux reservations: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and Yankton, Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980 chronicles the development and implementation of the plan and traces the events, personalities, and agencies involved.

The Pick-Sloan plan, formulated by Colonel Lewis A. Pick of the Army Corps of Engineers and William Glenn Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation, …

The Beginnings Of Wheeled Transport In Western Canada, John Alwin, Barry Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

Water transport has played a major part in the economic development of Canada. It has been claimed that a series of east-west water routes were essential to Canada's evolution as a transcontinental nation. The many connecting rivers and lakes formed the lines of least resistance through the environment, so that in most regions of Canada, water transport was almost invariably the earliest and most important form of transport. Land transport and land routes developed more slowly and thus played a secondary role in Canada's development prior to the beginning of large-scale agricultural settlement. However, there was one region, the prairie …

Indian Maps Their Place In The History Of Plains Cartography, G. Malcolm Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly

References to the maps and mapping activities of North American Indians have appeared in scholarly writings for approximately two hundred years and in contemporary accounts of discovery and exploration for more than four hundred years. The topic has received relatively little attention, however, from modern scholars. In view of the recent expansion of Indian studies in both Canada and the United States, this lack may at first seem surprising. In part it reflects the fact that there are relatively few extant examples of Indian maps because Indians and most whites have tended to treat them as ephemera, not for the …

Carl Schurz And The Indians, Hans L. Trefousse

Great Plains Quarterly

Carl Schurz's importance as an immigrant leader and ethnic politician is well documented; his efforts on behalf of civil service reform and anti-imperialism have often been commented upon. His role as an administrator, however, is less familiar but by no means insignificant. Because it contributed to the more rational treatment of native Americans and the conservation of natural resources, it deserves to be explored more fully.

In March 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes sent to the Senate his nomination of Carl Schurz for secretary of the interior, party regulars were outraged. "In the selection of Mr. Schurz as one …

Notes And News- Spring 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

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