Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Mexicans In Oklahoma By Michael M. Smith, Ralph H. Vigil

Great Plains Quarterly

Because so little is known about the Mexican-American population living outside the Spanish-Mexican borderlands, this short introductory survey of the Mexican experience in Oklahoma adds to our knowledge of one state's "invisible minority." The book comprises nine chapters, a bibliographical essay, and four pages of notes. An index is lacking, but the ten photos illustrating the text add to the attractiveness of the work. Sources used by the author include secondary works, interviews, census reports and other U.S. government publications, newspaper articles, and three theses.

The first chapter is a readable and interesting summary of the distant relationship between Oklahoma …

Review Of Folklore From Kansas: Customs, Beliefs, And Superstitions By William E. Koch, Roger L. Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly

The labor that Bill Koch has put into this volume is heroic. For those of us who study the plains, it is truly a valuable contribution. There are more than five thousand items, maps, tables, charts, and an astonishing inventory of collectors and informants. Each item is documented by sex, age, urban-rural orientation of the informant, and the year the item was collected. I am delighted that this impressive corpus has been made available to us. There is no question but that scholars will long be grateful to Koch for his effort.

Now, anyone who reads book reviews regularly knows …

Friends And Allies: The Tonkawa Indians And The Anglo-Americans, 1823-1884, Thomas W. Dunlay

Great Plains Quarterly

Historical models of Indian-white contact on the frontier emphasize conflict and hostility, yet historians are not unaware that whites and Indians interacted in many different ways in different regions and time periods. Even in cases of Indian-white conflict, it was not at all uncommon to find Indians fighting beside the whites against other Indians, often greatly enhancing the capabilities of the white forces. Some tribes were notable for their long-standing alliance with whites against other Indian tribes; examples include the Catawbas of South Carolina, the Pawnees of Nebraska, the Wyoming Shoshonis led by Chief Washakie, and the Crows of Montana. …

Agricultural Pioneering In Dakota: A Case Study, Gilbert C. Fite

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent years many historians have increasingly turned their attention to what might be called microhistory. Rather than studying broad topics in a sweeping and comprehensive manner, they have preferred to examine a county, a city, political or social groups within a locality, or an individual firm or institution. The aim has been to present history from the grassroots or the sidewalks-a people-oriented history, so to speak. As a result of such works, historical understanding has been greatly enhanced.¹

Little serious microhistory, however, has been done on pioneer agriculture, farm life, and standards of living. While there have been …

Notes And News- Summer 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Christlieb Gallery: Opening And Dedication

Flandreau Santee Videotape Project

Czech Heritage Program

Center Governing Board

New Center Publications

American Pioneer Landscapes Symposium

Atlas Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition Planned

Review Of The Peace Chiefs Of The Cheyennes By Stan Hoig, John C. Ewers

Great Plains Quarterly

Stan Hoig here retraces a critical half-century of Cheyenne history from the tribe's first treaty with the United States in 1825 to the settlement of the traditionally nomadic northern and southern Cheyenne upon separate reservations in present day Montana and Oklahoma. The uniqueness of this book lies in its emphasis upon the roles played by some seventeen chiefs in serving the interests of their tribe through peaceful means. As did George Bent before him, Hoig points out that among the Cheyenne the recognized chiefs were not the young war leaders, but were mature men who assumed the more difficult role …

Review Of The Italians In Oklahoma By Kenny L. Brown, George E. Pozzetta

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume is part of a Newcomers to a New Land series design led to analyze the major ethnic groups of Oklahoma. Kenny L. Brown has studied the experience of Italians in the state and provides many interesting details on this little known topic.

Though few in number, Italians concentrated heavily in the coal mining districts of Oklahoma and contributed importantly to the communities in which they lived. As miners, they moved early into the labor unions of the coal fields and participated fully in the recurrent strikes that characterized this region in the period 1890-1925. Like their counterparts elsewhere, …

Review Of The British And Irish In Oklahoma By Patrick J. Blessing, Wilbur S. Shepperson

Great Plains Quarterly

To suggest accurately the impact of the British-Irish immigration on Oklahoma is a difficult and perhaps an impossible task. Eighteenth-century Americans were primarily of British-Irish stock, and the immigration movement increased throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1914 some 14 million persons from the United Kingdom arrived in the United States. The British-Irish were also the most heterogeneous of all immigrant groups. They rarely cooperated in attempting American settlement, and their speech, culture, and ideology have rendered them the most difficult nationality to isolate and study historically. As a whole, migrants from the United Kingdom found immigration a less …

Review Of William H. Ashley: Enterprise And Politics In The Trans-Mississippi West By Richard M. Clokey, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Clokey's biography of William Ashley is the product of fifteen years of research. The time was well spent; this is a thorough, perceptive, and interesting study of a man who played an important role in the early development of the American West. Perhaps more could have been made of Ashley in the existential sense, giving the reader more insight into his personality, but as a historian (and not a psychohistorian) Clokey understandably chose to emphasize the public rather than the private man. Still, Ashley emerges from his actions as a man who "sought respect and admiration and,. .. projected …

Lawrence Goodwyn And Nebraska Populism: A Review Of Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment In America By Lawrence Goodwyn, Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly

Lawrence Goodwyn's book Democratic Promise is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of Populism. Reviewers have termed it "brilliant" and "comprehensive" and "the new standard against which all future efforts must be measured."¹ Goodwyn does, indeed, provide the reader with insights into the nature of Populism that are available nowhere else. Unfortunately, his work also has serious flaws, most obviously in his handling of the Populist movement in Nebraska but ultimately pervading the entire book. The student of Populism must be aware of the flaws but ought not dismiss the work as a whole, for its …

Immigrant Voters And The Nonpartisan League In Nebraska, 1917-1920, Burton W. Folsom Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

Many people have wondered why socialism never came to America. Some think that life in the factories and on the farms was often so poor that Americans should have been ripe for a socialist government. Political historians have recently shown that radical movements in America had two insurmountable hurdles: strong ethnic loyalties and religious ties. During America's age of capitalist expansion, cultural divisions prevailed when waves of immigrants poured into urban factories and onto Midwestern farms. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, immigrants and natives fought intense local battles over prohibition, woman suffrage, and compulsory school laws. The economic …

Review Of The American West: New Perspectives, New Dimensions Edited By Jerome O. Steffen, James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly

One learns to be suspicious of essay collections. Not only does article quality usually vary, but often the issues addressed are so disparate that an editor can write of an encompassing theme only by using the vaguest of terms. Using these points as criteria, The American West is a better-than-average collection. Editor Jerome Steffen does not say how the eight essays were assembled, but, with one exception, the quality is very good and, with another exception, an important central theme is followed. Steffen asserts that western history needs new and enlarged perspectives if it is to escape its label of …

Review Of Crossing Frontiers: Papers In American And Canadian Western Literature Edited By Dick Harrison, George Wolf

Great Plains Quarterly

Crossing Frontiers asks its readers to think comparatively about the literature of the Canadian and American Wests. The practice, as these proceedings of the 1978 "Crossing Frontiers" conference show, tends to loosen the grip of parochial notions of what "western" literature is and how it ought to be studied. The conference's six major papers, intelligently introduced and edited by Dick Harrison, are presented here along with the critiques and summations of a distinguished group of Canadian and American scholars. The volume conveys the intellectual excitement participants experienced at Banff in April 1978, and it reveals the status of comparative work …

Review Of Landlord William Scully By Homer E. Socolofsky, Leslie Hewes

Great Plains Quarterly

The main concern of this book is with the American holdings of the Irish landowner, William Scully. The story continues virtually to the present time when the American estate of 225,000 acres at Scully's death in 1906 had shrunk but little to 175,000 acres in the hands of his heirs. The report is notable for the wealth of business details uncovered, from which the account is largely fashioned.

One may wonder how different things might have been if Scully's intention to become a resident farmer on his recently acquired land in Illinois in the early 1850s had been realized. Instead, …

Review Of Deserts On The March By Paul B. Sears, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1935, the worst Dust Bowl year, Paul B. Sears, then professor of botany at the University of Oklahoma, published Deserts on the March, a succinctly written book that directed public attention toward the growing menace of soil erosion in the United States. By 1980, Deserts on the March had become a classic ecological study; it is currently in the tenth printing and fourth edition. Sears, now retired from his position of chairman of the conservation program at Yale University, has rewritten much of the original text, but his message is the same today as it was nearly fifty …

Review Of Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880 By Julie Roy Jeffrey, Sandra L. Myres

Great Plains Quarterly

The exploration and settlement of the American West have long been subjects of interest to American historians and their readers, but until recently the frontier was viewed as a predominantly male experience. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontiers were explored, conquered, and settled by men, and Turner's successors kept to the male theme. The few women who were mentioned in western history texts and general studies could be counted on the fingers of one hand-Sacajawea, Narcissa Whitman, and Calamity Jane-with an occasional sprinkling of brave pioneer mothers and mining camp prostitutes with hearts of gold.

In the wake of the feminist movement, …

Review Of The Sioux: A Critical Bibliography By Herbert T. Hoover & The Emigrant Indians Of Kansas: A Critical Bibliography By William E. Unrau, Francis Paul Prucha

Great Plains Quarterly

The Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library is publishing a series of brief bibliographies, of which eighteen have now appeared. They cover topical aspects of Indian history-for example, demography, federal Indian policy, and missions-and particular tribes or groups of tribes. All the volumes follow a similar format. There is an alphabetical listing of roughly two hundred important works, with a shorter list of works suitable for a basic library collection. Writings recommended for beginners and for high school students are also marked. Preceding the full list is a historiographical essay of some thirty to …

Review Of "Paper Talk": Charlie Russell's American West By Brian W. Dippie, Robert Spence

Great Plains Quarterly

After much too long a wait, we have now a second volume of Charles M. Russell's inimitable "paper talk" -as he called his illustrated letters, verses, Christmas greetings, and similar personalia. The first was assembled by Frederic Renner in 1962 for the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, and has long been out of print.

Russell (1864-1926), the self-taught cowboy artist of the northern plains frontier, had a wide circle of friends and he was characteristically loyal to them. His correspondence is surprisingly extensive (despite his disclaimer that "writing ain't my strong holt"). Brian Dippie has performed a …

Review Of The Pirst Polish Americans: Silesian Settlements In Texas By T. Lindsay Baker, Maria Starczewska- Lambasa

Great Plains Quarterly

Though sporadic arrivals of Poles into the United States had started much earlier, it was onl y in 1854 that Polish immigration led to the establishment of the first self-contained Polish community and parish. It was perhaps a trick played by history that the first settlements of Silesian Poles sprang up in the San Antonio area of Texas rather than in an area such as Connecticut, which in many respects is geographically more like Poland. The large stream of Polish immigrants arriving in this country in the latter part of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth moved to …

Review Of In Search Of Canaan: Black Migration To Kansas, 1879-80 By Robert B. Athearn, Walter Weare

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning in the spring of 1879 and continuing through most of 1880, thousands of former slaves (estimates range from six thousand to sixty thousand) fled the American South, determined to resettle on the "holy ground" of John Brown's Kansas. This dramatic "Exodus" captured the attention of journalists and politicians at the time, setting off a U.S. Senate investigation in 1880, and over the decades has held a mild fascination for historians. More recently, a number of scholars have caught the "Kansas Fever," most notably Robert Athearn in this volume and Nell Irvin Painter in her Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas …

The White Mustang Of The Prairies, Elizabeth Atwood-Lawrence

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the most vivid and symbolically expressive legends in the annals of the American West is that of the White Mustang. Inhabiting the vast reaches of the western plains, the Stallion was said to have "paced from the mesas of Mexico to the Badlands of the Dakotas and even beyond, from the Brazos bottoms of eastern Texas to parks in the Rocky Mountains," during an interval extending from about 1825 to 1889.¹ Alternately known as the "White Steed of the Prairies," the "Pacing White Stallion," the "Phantom White Horse," and "Ghost Horse of the Plains," his story occurs …

Title And Contents- Spring 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Spring 1981 Vol. 1 No.2

CONTENTS

THE WHITE MUSTANG OF THE PRAIRIES Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence

MULFORD AND BOWER: MYTH AND HISTOR Y IN THE EARLY WESTERN William A. Bloodworth, Jr.

THE HEIRS OF JAMES C. MALIN: A GRASSLAND HISTORIOGRAPHY Allan G. Bogue

BOOK REVIEWS

Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American

and Canadian Western Literature

The American West: New Perspectives,

New Dimensions

The Sioux: A Critical Bibliography

The Emigrant Indians of Kansas: A

Critical Bibliography

The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture

The Fur Trade of the American West,

1807-1840: A Geographical Synthesis

Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi

West, 1840-1880

The …

Notes And News- Spring 1981

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES & NEWS

DIRECTOR ON LEAVE

NEW CENTER PUBLICATIONS

JOURNALS OF THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION

CHRISTLIEB COLLECTION OF WESTERN ART

AMEN FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

THE 1982 SYMPOSIUM: CALL FOR PAPERS

SENATOR HRUSKA GIFT

Mulford And Bower: Myth And History In The Early Western, William A. Bloodworth Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

With the exception of commentary on Owen Wister and The Virginian (1902), surprisingly little has been written about popular western novels published before world War I.¹ Yet it was writers following in the wake of The Virginian's popularity who really developed and defined the mass-audience western of commercial prospects and formulaic content. B. M. Bower, Clarence Mulford, William McCleod Raine, and Charles Alden Seltzer prepared the way for the later and greater popularity of Zane Grey, whose books first became best-sellers between 1912 and 1917; for the prolific productions of pulp writers like Max Brand after 1918; and …

The Heirs Of James C. Malin: A Grassland Historiography, Allan G. Bogue

Great Plains Quarterly

In the early pages of his important novel of western life, Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County, Joseph Kirkland brought the Prouder family to the blazed tree that marked the location of the Illinois land that was to be their new home, the "woods behind" and the "prairie before" them. Herbert Quick halted yOl1ng Jacobus Vandemark on the bluffs above Dubuque, where the first great rolling sweep of the prairie grassland lay spread before him, and reported that a great surge of emotion coursed through the boy. John Ise pictured the covered wagon of his parents, Rosie and Henry …

Review Of The Black Towns By Norman L. Crockett, Lawrence H. Larsen

Great Plains Quarterly

In the fifty years after the Civil War, black leaders founded some sixty predominantly black communities in the United States. Most were located in the rural South or on the central Great Plains. Most failed within a short time, leaving behind shattered dreams and few, if any, remains. Norman L. Crockett examines five of these communities in his new book, The Black Towns: Nicodemus in Kansas, Mound Bayou in Mississippi, and Langston, Clearview, and Boley in Oklahoma.

Crockett, who says that studies of fragmentary records indicate that these towns were fairly typical, believes that the rhetoric and behavior of …

Review Of The Fur Trade Of The American West, 1807- 1840: A Geographical Synthesis By David J. Wishart, Doyce B. Nunis Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

The fur trade of the Trans-Missouri West has long been a fertile field of historical investigation, effectively plowed for almost a century by scholars, both trained and lay. Taking those familiar materials, Wishart has produced a book that brings a new and challenging dimension to that history. Indeed, his synthesis calls for a new interpretation, namely, that the fur men's rapacious exploitation of the fur resources of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains "was destructive to the physical environment and to the native inhabitants alike." The romantic image of the buckskin-clad mountain man at the cutting edge of the nation's …

Review Of The Horse In Blackfoot Indian Culture By John C. Ewers, Mary Jane Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

The reprinting of The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture makes it possible for a new generation of plains anthropologists and historians to savor this book, long a basic reference. When Ewers began fieldwork on the Blackfoot Reservation in 1941, one of his concerns was the description of the role of the horse in Blackfoot and Plains Indian culture. Although concerned primarily with the Blackfoot, he also assembled pertinent ethnographic and historical data from other tribes.

Beginning with a general review of the acquisition of horses by North American Indians, the first chapter ends with a discussion of the acquisition of …

Review Of Women And Men On The Overland Trail By John Mack Faragher, Robert L. Munkres

Great Plains Quarterly

Instead of a general treatment of life on the road west, Women and Men on the Overland Trail by John Mack Faragher is an analysis of several rather specialized aspects of interpersonal relationships within the context of the westward movement. These relationships are then further examined in connection with rural Midwestern life generally during the time period under consideration. Among the topics considered in some detail are gender roles and the division of work both on the farm and on the trail, the significance of differences in men's and women's diaries, the frequency and costs of child-bearing and rearing, and …

Two Authors And A Hero: Neihardt, Sandoz, And Crazy Horse, Helen Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

The western writers John G. Neihardt and Mari Sandoz had much in common, not the least of which was their admiration for Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala Sioux chief during the Indian wars of the last century, whom both considered the "last great Sioux." The chief was a fine tactician and warrior, fighting successfully against General Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud and General Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, but the authors found much more to admire in his personal life. Born on the Great Plains around 1841, he remained a "hostile savage" all his life; nevertheless, …