Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Imagining Kansas Place, Promotion, And Western Stereotypes In The Art Of Henry Worrall (1825-1902), Karen De Bres

Great Plains Quarterly

In May of 1876 three men took a private Santa Fe railroad car from Topeka, Kansas, ro the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. One was the Santa Fe land commissioner and the director of the railroad's exhibit, another was secretary of state for the Kansas Board of Agriculture. The third was a self-trained artist in the railroad's employ, and the designer of both the Kansas and Santa Fe exhibits. Fifty-one year old Henry Worrall lifted himself from a boyhood in the back streets of Liverpool to a comfortable life, and this journey in a company car, through artistic endeavors that helped support …

How William F. Cody Helped Save The Buffalo Without Really Trying, David Nesheim

Great Plains Quarterly

Although Leopold's aphorism refers to the common response to human suffering, it also reflects the way many historical accounts of the restoration of the American bison omit an important piece of that phenomenon. Most historians have focused their attention on two elements: western ranchers who started the earliest private herds and eastern conservationists who raised funds and lobbied for the creation of the first national preserves. However, the perpetuation of the image of buffalo in the hearts and minds of Americans was equally important in the eventual recovery of the species. No one was a more effective popularize than William …

Title And Contents- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 3 / Summer 2007

Contents

How William F. Cody Helped Save The Buffalo Without Really Trying

Imagining Kansas: Place, Promotion, And Western Stereotypes In The Art Of Henry Worrall (1825-1902)

"Young Poets Write What They Know": William Reed Dunroy, Poet Of The Plains'

Review Essay: Ghost Dancing Anew

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Book Notes- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Nebraska 1875: Its Advantages, Resources, and Drawbacks. By Edwin A. Curley

From Lead Mines to Gold Fields: Memories of an Incredibly Long Life. By Henry Taylor

Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Joseph Gossage of Dakota Territory. Edited by Paula M. Nelson

New Mexico Past and Future. By Thomas E. Chavez

Marc Simmons of New Mexico: Maverick Historian. By Phyllis S. Morgan

A Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures. Edited by George Horse Capture and Emil Her Many Horses

A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise …

Review Of The Broidered Garment: The Love Story Of Mona Martinsen Andlohn G. Neihardt By Hilda Martinsen Neihardt, Timothy G. Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1907, John G. Neihardt published A Bundle of Myrrh, his first volume of lyric poetry, thirty-three poems of often frank sexuality and longing. Reviewers found the book daring-the New York Times noted its "riotous joy of the flesh"-and occasionally crude. But it won Neihardt the ultimate rave review when it was read by a young American sculptress then studying with Auguste Rodin in Paris. When twenty-three-year-old Mona Martinsen read the poems, she was moved to write to the twenty-six-year-old Nebraska poet, beginning a correspondence that would culminate in a marriage proposal. In November 1908, when Mona Martinsen stepped …

Review Of Riding For The Brand: 150 Years Of Cowden Ranching By Michael Pettit, D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark

Great Plains Quarterly

As a family of ranchers, there is little doubt that the Cowdens have contributed to 150 years of the history of the western fringe of the Great Plains in Texas and New Mexico. As descendent and author Michael Pettit suggests, the Cowdens arrived in Texas approximately five years after the state was admitted to the Union. To add an additional perspective, Quanah Parker's band of Comanches were twenty-five years away from accepting reservation life at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory as William Hamby Cowden settled in Palo Pinto County, Texas. He clashed with bands of Comanches, . but in the …

Review Of American Outback: The Oklahoma Panhandle In The Twentieth Century By Richard Lowitt, Debbie Colson

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Lowitt's look at the Oklahoma Panhandle in American Outback is one of the first books documenting the area's recent history. Authors usually focus on the cattle operations prior to 1900 or solely on the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Ironically, not much is written in Oklahoma history books that specifically focuses on the Panhandle's history, so Lowitt's attention to its contemporary history is rewarding. He includes details about significant subjects such as the Dust Bowl; agricultural, oil and gas development; and the Optima Dam. In referencing farmer and magazine contributor Caroline Henderson, Lowitt recognizes her role in drawing …

Review Of Between Heaven And Texas Photographs By Wyman Meinzer, Roy Flukinger

Great Plains Quarterly

Colors, textures, lines, shapes, and forms are all rich visual elements-and, perhaps, no more honestly open to discovery than in the seeming infinity of the heavens above. But if one stares at the sky uninterruptedly for a long time, things may seem to start to come unbuttoned. No matter what riches nature provides for the human eye or the camera lens, it is always important to recognize the human perspective in the process. By paying heed to the horizon line and constantly referencing the fact that one's feet (or the camera's tripod) are planted firmly upon the earth, Wyman Meinzer …

Review Of Captain Lack And The Dalton Gang: The Life And Times Of A Railroad Detective By John J. Kinney, Paul T. Hietter

Great Plains Quarterly

The evening of July 14, 1892, a train carrying a heavily-armed posse passed slowly through Adair, Indian Territory. Also on board was John J. "Captain Jack" Kinney Jr, who headed the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas {"Katy"} Railroad detectives. Their presence resulted from a tip that the Dalton gang planned to rob the Katy near Pryor Creek. Perhaps as a result of this apparent false alarm, the posse was unprepared as the train passed through Adair. It was here that the gang successfully robbed the Katy. It was also here that Kinney became "a part of history-a parenthetical person, a human …

Review Of Hostiles?: The Lakota Ghost Dance And Buffalo Bill's Wild West By Sam A. Maddra & Ghost Dances And Identity: Prophetic Religion And American Indian Ethnogenesis In The Nineteenth Century By Gregory E. Smoak, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly

GHOST DANCING ANEW

The history and significance of the Ghost Dance received renewed scholarly attention in 2006, as these two fine but very different works attest. Sam A. Maddra's study adds new material to the significant literature about the bestknown incarnation of the Ghost Dance, which flourished among the Lakotas and gained infamy by association with 1890's tragedy at Wounded Knee. Gregory E. Smoak's book proceeds in a much different direction by examining Ghost Dances among the Shoshones and Bannocks, along with those groups' changing identities during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Together they not only enrich our understanding …

Notes And News- Summer 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Conference Announcement

Travel Fellowships For Teachers

Call For Papers

Theodore Roosevelt Symposium

"Young Poets Write What They Know" William Reed Dun Roy, Poet Of The Plains, Carrie Shipers

Great Plains Quarterly

In a column for the Lincoln Courier, a newspaper that actively covered the city's political and artistic scenes in the mid-1890s, William Reed Dunroy writes, "Young poets write what they know; what life has taught them." If his own poetry and imaginative prose are any indication, what Dunroy himself knew best, and cared about most deeply, is the Great Plains region-its weather, landscape, and the lives of its people. Dunroy's career as a poet and a reporter began in Nebraska, and his work is most remarkable when he is writing about the place he loved.

Dunroy has not been overlooked …

Review Of With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian And Aboriginal Relations In Colonial Canada Edited By Celia Haig-Brown And David A. Nock, C. L. Higham

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of essays focuses on a specific group of Euro-Canadians: those who "recognized injustices" and "allied themselves with Aboriginal people who also saw the injustices and were actively resisting them, and worked in a variety of ways to address them." Yet the authors approach their subjects with a critical eye, realizing many of these efforts were concentrated on aboriginal peoples who missionaries thought adopted "appropriate and/or useful aspects of Christianity, European dress, and settlement into farming villages or business ventures." Additionally, the authors realize some of the actors in the book "struggle[d] to reconcile their Christian morality with their …

Review Of From Dominance To Disappearance: The Indians Of Texas And The Near Southwest, 1786-1859 By F. Todd Smith, William Meadows

Great Plains Quarterly

F. Todd Smith's work provides the first detailed history of the Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, an area encompassing parts of present day Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma over a seventy-four year period.

Foremost, it highlights the competing efforts of the Spanish, French, American, and later Texan governments to control and maintain boundaries in the region, much of which depended on the ability of colonial powers to provide trade goods to tribes, and to supply assistance in the form of protection against then-existing enemy tribes. The Spanish inability consistently to provide trade goods and the growing intercession of …

Review Of A History Of Migration From Germany To Canada, 1850-1939 By Jonathan Wagner, Hans Werner

Great Plains Quarterly

German speakers have been important migrants to the Great Plains, but in Canada most came not from Germany, but from Eastern Europe. Given the low numbers that came to Canada from the Reich itself, Jonathan Wagner's study is more about explaining the country's failure to attract Germans than about their actual migration. According to Wagner, this failure can be explained by Canada's later and less complete industrialization, which meant that its "perceived needs could not win converts in the more industrialized Germany." While Canada was seeking immigrants to farm the wide-open spaces of the Canadian prairies, Germany was already an …

Review Of The Women There Don't Treat You Mean: Abilene In Song By Joe W. Specht, John Wheat

Great Plains Quarterly

What's in a name? If that name is "Abilene" and it rhymes easily with other poetic phrases and occupies a mystic landscape in the popular imagination, then there's quite a bit. That is the basic message of this modest but surprisingly complex essay in cultural geography that traces the presence of Abilene, Texas, in some sixty popular songs over the past century. Author Joe Specht, librarian and music historian at McMurry University in Abilene, has collected music and files on this subject for many years and finally brought it all together with recent interviews with many of the songwriters themselves. …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 2 / Spring 2007

Contents

The Militarization Of The Prairie: Scrap Drives, Metaphors, And The Omaha World-Herald's 1942 "Nebraska Plan"

The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored: Immigrants In Willa Cather's 0 Pioneers!

Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution: The Afro-American Council's Struggle Against Racial Violence

Review Essay: Centennial Saskatchewan

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Review Of The Encyclopedia Of Saskatchewan: A Living Legacy, Patrick Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly

Saskatchewan celebrated its centennial as a Canadian province in 2005, and the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan resulted from the admirable desire to make a lasting commemoration of that milestone. When one considers that the project had a tortured history of chronic underfunding, and, as a result, failed to engage many in the scholarly community, the final product, flawed though it might be, is still a remarkable success.

The goal of the Encyclopedia, publisher David Gauthier informs readers in an introductory preamble, was to create "a substantial memorial to the people of Saskatchewan that highlights their achievements and provide a comprehensive …

Review Of One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader Edited By Carol Higham And Robert Thacker, Keith Thor Carlson

Great Plains Quarterly

Collectively the eight essays in One West, Two Myths provide readers with a solid introduction to the comparative approach to historical study. The forty-ninth parallel serves as the volume's focus. And though the surrounding region has had, and retains, certain social, cultural, and economic commonalities, the book clearly argues that the international border is real and meaningful-despite its geographical arbitrariness.

The lead essays, by three senior historians of the Canadian and American Great Plains (Elliot West, Donald Worster, and Gerald Freisen) provide what are essentially historiographical engagements with the region as viewed through the prisms of social geography, the myth …

Review Of Going Indian By James Hamill, Todd Leahy

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the publication of Hazel Hertzberg's The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (1971), scholars have struggled to understand the development of an ethnic Indian identity among the nation's Indian population. Anthropologist James Hamill's work comes as close as any to explaining how an ethnic Indian identity can supplant a tribal one. In exploring the dynamics of creating culture and identity, Hamill focuses his investigation on the state of Oklahoma, which holds over seventy distinct Indian groups. The shaping forces for identity, Hamill explains, are not broad culturally based principles, but rather shared historical experiences. As Hamill …

Review Of America's 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey Photographs And Text By Monte Hartman, David Mcmillan

Great Plains Quarterly

Photographs come in many guises: tools of advertising, personal mementos, scientific data, reportage, self-expression. A tree can be photographed as a representative of a specific species in a field guide, a casualty of a lightning strike in a newspaper, a symbol of strength for an insurance company, or an object of beauty interpreted by an artist. Each manner of photography reflects a different relationship the photographer has to both subject matter and form. The photojournalist, for example, has an obligation to appear neutral, to be the unbiased eyewitness to the subject matter depicted, which is usually an editorial assignment. The …

Review Of This Is Not A Peace Pipe: Towards A Critical Indigenous Philosophy By Dale Turner. Toronto, Dennis Mcpherson

Great Plains Quarterly

By his own admission, Wittgenstein's famous imperative "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" can be paralyzing for Dale Turner. Turner says "I am indigenous, yet I am not an indigenous philosopher; and therefore I ought not to place myself in the privileged position of explaining the meaning of indigenous spirituality." Dale feels that "In a European philosophical context, having invoked a term like 'spirituality' [he] must then explain how this normative term is to be used in its rightful place and do so in the English language." Why must Wittgenstein's imperative be paralyzing? You cannot know what …

Review Of A Godly Hero: The Life Of William Jennings Bryan By Michael Kazin, Troy Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan represents the first major biography of Bryan published in almost forty years. Michael Kazin's well-written and engaging book complements Edward Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods (1997), in providing another useful corrective to the misguided yet common understanding of Bryan that emerged from popular histories of the Scopes trial. Kazin successfully illustrates why Bryan belongs in the "top rank of American leaders" of the reform era, arguing that only Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had a greater impact on politics and political culture in the …

Review Of Civil War On The Missouri-Kansas Border By Donald L. Gilmore, John M. Sacher

Great Plains Quarterly

Donald Gilmore seeks to redefine our understanding of the conflict on the Missouri-Kansas border during the Civil War era. He contends that biased histories have long portrayed Kansans as innocents who suffered depredations at the hands of lower-class Missouri bushwhackers- a pejorative term that historians continue to use. These histories place special emphasis on William Clarke Quantrill, whom they almost invariably depict as a demonic leader of savages. According to Gilmore's corrective, if anyone should be blamed for the atrocities of the border war, it should be the abolitionist Kansans. Kansans, including Jim Lane, James Montgomery, and "Doc" Jennison, had …

Review Of Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales Of The Tallgrass Prairie By Jame F. Hoy, Richard W. Slatta

Great Plains Quarterly

Jim Hoy, professor of English at Emporia State University, has ridden and written about the Flint Hills region of east-central Kansas since the 1970s. His earlier works include The Cattle Guard: Its History and Lore (1982), Prairie Poetry: Cowboy Verse of Kansas, with Vada Snider (1995), and a prequel to the present book, Cowboys and Kansas: Stories from the Tallgrass Prairie (1997). Hoy aptly describes his work as "part memoir, part history, part ethnography." Moreover, "this paean to the Flint Hills is my thanks to the land that has nurtured my life and nourished my soul."

After introducing the …

Review Of Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography And The Law By David ]. Carlson, Hertha D. Sweet Wong

Great Plains Quarterly

In Sovereign Selves, David ]. Carlson presents an original, thoughtful, and convincing argument that early Native American autobiography was profoundly shaped by Native "engagement with colonial legal discourse." Even more dramatically, he proposes that such an engagement framed post contact Native self formulations. In short, the federal legal system constructed notions of the "Indian" (child of the forest, ward of the state, etc.) that Native autobiographers both accepted and refashioned.

Well read in legal, historical, and autobiography studies, Carlson takes the scholarship of Indian law further than most by showing not merely its tangible effects on Native populations, but …

The Militarization Of The Prairie Scrap Drives, Metaphors, And The Omaha World-Herald's 1942 "Nebraska Plan", James J. Kimble

Great Plains Quarterly

Some of the most unusual weapons deployed by the United States in World War II hailed from Phelps County, Nebraska. For over thirty years, two cannons had flanked the entrance to the county courthouse, serving as a memorial to the Civil War. In July 1942, county officials directed that the cannons be removed; they were again to serve as munitions in an American conflict. From Washington, President Roosevelt himself lauded the county's sacrifice and suggested that others might consider making a similar contribution to the war effort.

Not even the president was certain, of course, that the cannons would still …

Review Of The Heavy Hand Of History: Interpreting Saskatchewan's PastEdited By Gregory P. Marchildon; On The Side Of The People: A History Of Labour In Saskatchewan By Jim Warren And Kathleen Carlisle; & Saskatoon: A History In Photographs By Jeff O'Brien, Ruth W. Millar, And William P. Delainey

Great Plains Quarterly

CENTENNIAL SASKATCHEWAN

In their pictorial overview about the northern prairie city of Saskatoon, Jeff O'Brien, Ruth Millar, and William Delainey note that the opening decade of the twenty-first century contains three significant centennials for Saskatchewan, a land described by journalist Peter Gzowski as "that most Canadian of provinces." In 2005, Queen Elizabeth II joined Canadians in observing the centenaries of this western province as well as its restive sibling, Alberta. During 2006, residents and officials recognized the hundredth anniversary of Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan and home to the majestic University of Saskatchewan. For 2007, similar celebrations are planned …

Notes And News- Spring 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

NOTES AND NEWS

CALL FOR PAPERS

PLAINS INDIANS AND THE MAORI

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Vengeance Without Justice, Injustice Without Retribution The Afro-American Council’S Struggle Against Racial Violence, Shawn Leigh Alexander

Great Plains Quarterly

wr 1 he Negro's friend has dwindled to a Smith & Wesson pistol, a Repeating Rifle, 50 rounds of ammunition for each, a good, strong nerve, a lesson in good marksmanship, and then use." That was the call from the editors of the Wichita Searchlight on January 19, 1901, just one week after the streets of Leavenworth, Kansas, witnessed the burning of Fred Alexander, a twenty-two-year-old black Spanish-American war veteran. The brutal murder of Alexander horrified many African Americans throughout the region, who decided that it was time to stand up and let their grievances be heard by argument and …