Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Saskatchewan: A New History By Bill Waiser, Max Foran

Great Plains Quarterly

Bill Waiser's sweeping narrative of the history of Canada's most identifiable agricultural province was published as part of Saskatchewan's centennial celebrations. Wonderfully written in an authoritative but engaging style, Waiser's "Saskatchewan" is a story of challenge where buoyant hopes and dashed dreams were acted out by generations of people whose origins and backgrounds were as diverse as the physical environment they settled.

Two dominant themes underpin Waiser's narrative. The first is the enduring presence of a rural order built around "King Wheat," one that through the years, in both good times and bad, became the focus around which Saskatchewan defined …

Review Of Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving The West Through Women's History Edited By Sarah Carter, Wendee Kubik

Great Plains Quarterly

Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West Through Women's History arose out of the same-named conference held at the University of Calgary in 2002. This edited collection brings together a broad spectrum of contributors and a variety of "modes of expression." The incorporation of region and gender is an ongoing theme; it is, as well, the "glue" that holds everything together throughout all of the articles. The major contribution of the book is the connection among gender, place, and the processes that shaped the diversity of women's experiences in the settlement of the Canadian West.

There is a broad range of articles, …

Review Of Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward By Charlyne Berens, Peter Longo

Great Plains Quarterly

There is little doubt that Chuck Hagel will be remembered as one of the leading statesmen in the domestic and global political scene. Indeed, Senator Hagel should be of keen interest to students, scholars, lawmakers, and citizens in general. Charlyne Berens's Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward is therefore a timely read for concerned onlookers. Yet, as Berens illustrates, the Chuck Hagel story is more than an account of a beltway career.

Berens offers a fine journalistic account of Hagel's life, including his upbringing, and how Nebraska's political and environmental variables helped mold his character. She tells us, for example, that

in …

Review Of A New South Dakota History Edited By Harry F. Thompson, Paula Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

In some academic circles today the study of governmental units-nations or states-is passe. Race, class, and gender, categories of analysis that are "stateless," rule the discourse. That is unfortunate for the study of history. Politics and political designations matter. They shape the lives of the individuals who live within them and create or limit the possibilities for individual achievement within their borders. Herbert T. Hoover and John E. Miller, both scholars of South Dakota and its peoples, have collaborated to write portions and edit the entire anthology of substantial chapters and thoughtful essays. Harry Thompson, archivist at the Center for …

Review Of Hidden Treasures Of The American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, And Alice Marriott By Patricia Loughlin, Courtney Vaughn

Great Plains Quarterly

Patricia Loughlin has written an excellent work about three female scholars specializing in Native studies on the frontier, more specifically Oklahoma. Loughlin couches her analysis of Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott in terms of Nancy Parezo's concept of "hidden scholars." They comprised scores of early twentieth-century women who wrote for scholarly and popular audiences about Native people. Ironically, the three subjects in Loughlin's book were conceptually part of this larger movement but often worked in isolation. Although Debo did teach at West Texas State College, and Wright was editor of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, especially Debo …

Review Of Farmers Vs. Wage Earners: Organized Labor In Kansas, 1860-1960 By R. Alton Lee, Margaret Wood

Great Plains Quarterly

In Farmers vs. Wage Earners, R. Alton Lee seeks to uncover the hidden history of organized labor in his native state of Kansas. Historians of the sunflower state have long valorized the agricultural roots of Kansas while largely overlooking the contributions of working men and women to the region's history. In this thorough and well-researched study, Lee attempts to redress this gap in historical knowledge and trace the development of the political, cultural, and economic boundaries that came to divide farmers from wage earners. The volume admirably documents the development of this antagonistic relationship while also providing a detailed …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored Immigrants In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Renee M. Laegreid

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's move to Nebraska as a child, the people she met there, and the seemingly endless prairie around her captured her imagination and became the inspiration for her novel O Pioneers! In this work, Cather introduces her readers to the diversity of immigrants who settled in the area around her home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather's novel represents the age-old appeal of the West-hope, optimism, mystery-as well as the Janus-face dilemma of acculturation: the longing to partake in all that the new land has to offer and the reluctance to give up a rich and comforting cultural heritage.

While …

Book Notes- Winter 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Architecture, Town Planning and Community: Selected Writings and Public Talks by Cecil Burgess, 1909-1946. By Cecil Scott Burgess

WinniPeg 1912. By Jim Blanchard

Alberta Remembers: Recalling Our Rural Roots. By Karen Brownlee

A History of Education in Saskatchewan: Selected Readings. Edited by Brian Noonan, Dianne Hallman, and Murray Scharf

Roadside History of Colorado. By Candy Moulton.

A Travel Guide to the Plains Indian Wars. By Stan Hoig

A Legacy Greater Than Words: Stories of u.s. Latinos & Latinas of the World War II Generation. Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Juliana Torres, Melissa DiPiero-D'Sa, and Lindsay Fitzpatrick

Review Of The Conquest Of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing In The Promised Land, 1820-1875 By Gary Clayton Anderson, Sam W. Haynes

Great Plains Quarterly

The struggle between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans in Texas was a long and violent one. Beginning with the arrival of the first settlers to Stephen F. Austin's colony in the 1820s, when the area was still under Mexican rule, it would continue largely unabated until the U.S. Army's campaign against the western Plains tribes in the 1870s. In his latest book, Gary Anderson reexamines this collision of cultures, and in doing so challenges the triumphalist, Anglocentric narrative that has long dominated the historiography of the state.

In seeking to provide a new paradigm for the racial conflict that spanned half …

Review Of Indian Wars: The Campaign For The American West By Bill Yenne, Todd Leahy

Great Plains Quarterly

Arguing that the Indian Wars after the Civil War were the longest campaign ever waged by the United States military, Bill Yenne once again covers welltrod territory. To anyone familiar with the work of Robert M. Utley, Yenne's Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West is immediately recognizable. Yenne states that his work will break down old stereotypes about the Indian wars and that "this book places the people and the battles in the context of the overall history of the nineteenth century and the Indian Wars in the West so that their place in American history will be …

Review Of A Western Legacy: The National Cowboy And Western Heritage Museum Foreword By Charles P. Schroeder, James D. Mclaird

Great Plains Quarterly

The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is the subject of this inaugural volume in the University of Oklahoma Press's Western Legacies Series. The museum was the brain child of Chester Arthur Reynolds who in 1955 suggested there should be a hall of fame for cowboys. After a decade of planning and fund raising, the institution opened its doors. Now, fifty years later, the museum houses more than 30,000 historical objects and works of art. This book commemorates the museum's founding and details its history, activities, collections, and exhibits. It is a beautiful work, including eighty full-page …

Review Of Women Writing Women: The Frontiers Reader Edited By Patricia Hart And Karen Weathermon, With Susan H. Armitage, Gioia Woods

Great Plains Quarterly

The essays collected in Women Writing Women: The Frontiers Reader weave together theoretical, personal, and material frameworks feminist scholars use to write about their lives and the lives of other women. The essays, organized centrifugally ("Writing the Self" to "Writing Women from a Distance"), were selected by the editors from essays published originally in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Like the journal, Women Writing Women is multidisciplinary, theoretically informed, and, above all, grounded in the lived experiences of diverse women. Explaining the cohesiveness of the anthology in their introduction, editors Hart, Weathermon, and Armitage insist that the "diversity …

Review Of The Colonel And Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, And The Beginnings Of Superstardom In America By Larry Mcmurtry Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody And The Wild West Show By Louis S. Warren, Sarah J. Blackstone

Great Plains Quarterly

BUFFALO BILL, SUPERSTAR

William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody was the best known man of the Gilded Age, and in the eighty-nine years since his death his life and accomplishments have been examined, retold, debunked, reinvented, and dramatized hundreds of times. It could be said that there is nothing new to be learned about this iconic American figure. In 2005, however, two new books, each by a highly respected western historian, were published on the subject, and it turns out there is still much to be said about Cody. What makes these new studies different from those that have .come before …

Review Of Charlie Siringo's West: An Interpretive Biography By Howard R. Lamar, Randolph B. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

Although he was born near the beach on Texas's Matagorda Peninsula in 1855 and died in a suburb of Los Angeles in 1928, Charlie Siringo spent most of his adventurous life on the Great Plains. He became a cowboy as a teenager, drove herds on the Chisholm Trail and helped establish the LX Ranch in the Panhandle while in his twenties, and married and opened a store in Caldwell, Kansas, before he turned thirty. Somewhat ironically, given that he left the cowboy life at an early age, Siringo then published an autobiography that gave future authors and movie makers everything …

Review Of Indians And Emigrants: Encounters On The Overland Trail By Michael L. Tate, Susan Badger-Doyle

Great Plains Quarterly

Relations between emigrants and the Indians they encountered along the central route of trails ro Oregon, California, and the Salt Lake Valley were a significant aspect of overland travel, particularly on the segment crossing the Great Plains. Emigrants and Indians is a comprehensive study of the complex history of these intercultural relations from 1840 to 1870. In contrast to popular stereotypical images of "savage" Indians and a focus on conflict, Michael Tate shows that cooperation, aid, and mutual benefit dominated Indian-white relations throughout the period. In topical chapters, he examines the evolving nature of relations between two fundamentally different peoples …

Review Of Tulia: Race, Cocaine, And Corruption In A Small Texas Town By Nate Blakeslee, J. Patrick Hazel

Great Plains Quarterly

Tulia is a fascinating read and hard to put down. Unfortunately (especialiy for a native Texan), it is a true story that took place during the last year of the twentieth century and the first three years of the twenty-first in a small Texas town of about 5,000 located in Swisher County in the Texas Panhandle. The dominant themes are racial prejudice and legal misdoings, if not corruption, with justice finally winning out. But it is not really a "happy ending" book.

The events in Tulia were too reminiscent of my childhood. As a Texas trial lawyer and teacher of …

Review Of American Women Modernists: The Legacy Of Robert Henri, 1910-1945 Edited By Marian Wardle, Sharon L. Kennedy-Gustafson

Great Plains Quarterly

There is a common tendency in art history to lump artists and art styles into simplified categories, and early-twentieth-century modernist art is no exception. While the term broadly encompassed the ideas of individuality and social diversity, it later became equated with abstract art and an aggressive style, dominated by men. In this book, Marian Wardle and six other female scholars set out to broaden the modern art parameters and reinsert some two hundred professional women artists into the picture. Because Robert Henri taught thousands of men and women over a thirty-five-year period, the unifying thread is this astute, modernist teacher …

Review Of Lethal Legacy: Current Native Controversies In Canada By J. R. Miller, Nathalie Kermoal

Great Plains Quarterly

Apart from being from Western Canada, what do Louis Riel and Peter Lougheed have in common? According to J. R. Miller, the two have a shared heritage: both are Metis. Yet, in the eyes of Canadians, one is always identified as Metis while the other is not. This interesting parallel helps the author grapple with the complicated question of Native identity in the first chapter of Lethal Legacy: Current Native Controversies in Canada.

The reasons for writing a book with such a title are clearly indicated in the preface. Miller-professor of history and Canada Research Chair in Native-newcomer Relations at …

Review Of Leaving Shadows: Literature In English By Canada's Ukrainians By Lisa Grekul, Mary K. Kirtz

Great Plains Quarterly

In the 1890s, when Canadian government officials first began a concerted effort to settle Canada's prairie provinces, they sent envoys to Eastern Europe, most notably to the area that is now Ukraine, to find people willing and able to accept the harsh conditions of the prairie region. Thus came the first large wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, followed by two others: during the Great Depression and immediately after World War Two. How has this large contingent of settlers fared in the Canadian imagination, specifically in its literature, as succeeding generations, born and raised in Canada, grapple with their dual …

Review Of The University Of Oklahoma: A History. Volume I, 1890-1917 By David W. Levy, Patricia Loughlin

Great Plains Quarterly

A research project fifteen years in the making, David W. Levy's first volume in a series of three on the institutional history of the University of Oklahoma invites the reader to think about the origins of higher education on the barren Southern Plains during the territorial days. Established in 1890 by the territorial legislature, the University of Oklahoma held its first classes in September 1892 with four instructors and fifty-seven students (half were women) and grew to 2,516 students, 154 faculty members (almost exclusively men) and two campuses by 1917. David Ross Boyd, the university's first president, provided stability and …

Review Of L. A. Huffman: Photographer Of The American West By Larry Len Peterson, Carl Mautz

Great Plains Quarterly

Visual history is gaining respect as a portal to the past, and one individual who stands out in depicting life on the northern Great Plains of the American West is Laton Alton Huffman. This book is a splendid celebration of Huffman's life work, first as post photographer at Fort Keogh in 1879 where he made portraits of Indians near the end of the Indian Wars, and later as a professional photographer in Miles City, Montana, where he recorded life on the frontier, including buffalo, cattle ranching, hunting, small town life, western personalities, reservation life, and the beginning of the end …

Review Of A Seat At The Table: Huston Smith In Conversation With Native Americans On Religious Freedom By Huston Smith, Michael D. Mcnally

Great Plains Quarterly

As Native American religious traditions have reached new visibility and vitality over the last forty years, it is clear that constitutionally protected religious liberty has not extended to Native American communities. This is no mere matter of a tragic past; it is of currency today as a human rights concern. Indeed, two landmark cases by which the Rehnquist Court shrank the reach of constitutional protection for religious minorities generally involved Peyote practices of the Native American Church and management of sacred sites on federal lands.

A Seat at the Table explores the wide range of these contemporary issues, from protection …

Review Of Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views Photographs By John Conway, Courtney Milne

Great Plains Quarterly

In his acknowledgments, John Conway writes: "I have 'gone out photographing' with only one other person in my life, my friend Garth Abrams. When we arrived at a place, we usually walked off in different directions, each preferring our own way." That statement defines Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views. As a Saskatchewan landscape photographer, I too resonate deeply with the solitude the Great Plains invites, if not commands. Conway's spartan landscapes form the mouthpiece for a haunting lament shared by all who choose to spend time alone here. To recognize these unadorned one hundred sweeps and unpretentious corners is to acknowledge our …

Review Of Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life By Kingsley M. Bray, R. Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

It is a rare gift to receive a milestone book to review. Kingsley Bray's Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life is such a gift, as well as a turning point in the his torical literature of the Great Plains. Simply put, Bray's biography of the famed Lakota leader officially replaces Mari Sandoz's Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas: A Biography (1942) and consigns that most original work to the historical fiction section of our bookshelves where it has long belonged.

That it has taken sixty-plus years to supplant the one with the other speaks more of the difficulty of …

Review Of General James G. Blunt: Tarnished Glory By Robert Collins, William Garrett Piston

Great Plains Quarterly

James G. Blunt's name is obscure except among those who specialize in the Trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War. In that neglected region he was a major personage in both political and military affairs. A native of Maine, an abolitionist, and a Republican, he moved to the Kansas Territory in 1856 and was an active player in the Free State cause. He became one of the most important supporters of Free State politician James H. Lane, and to a significant degree his fortunes rose or fell with those of the "Grim Chieftain." Partly due to Lane's wartime patronage, Blunt served …

Review Of Going It Alone: Fargo Grapples With The Great Depression By David Danbom, Sean Taylor

Great Plains Quarterly

Going It Alone provides an in-depth examination of Fargo, North Dakota, during the Great Depression. Danbom was drawn to this study by his interest in the city in which he has lived for thirty years and by the impact the Great Depression had on his parents, his mother in particular. She, along with many other people who lived through that decade, carried the habits and attitudes shaped by the Depression throughout her adult life. The author notes correctly that any event "powerful enough to mold one's life is worthy of careful attention."

Danbom begins his study by outlining a series …

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man Of The Oglalas By Marl Sandoz Historiography, A Philosophy For Reconstruction, Mary Dixon

Great Plains Quarterly

HISTORIOGRAPHY: MYTH FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

Noted historians Will and Ariel Durant have outlined the importance of knowing, understanding, and celebrating history as a valuable heritage. They call historiography "an industry, an art, and a philosophy-an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of the materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment." A true evaluation of the history of the American West is an important consideration for Americans, because as the Durants claim, there is much to gain from a proper understanding of it. In order to gain perspective and enlightenment from …

"Everything Promised Had Been Included In The Writing" Indian Reserve Farming And The Spirit And Intent Of Treaty Six Reconsidered, Derek Whitehouse-Strong

Great Plains Quarterly

In December 2005, a Canadian federal court justice dismissed a six-hundred-million-dollar claim by the Samson Cree related to alleged mismanagement of its energy royalties. In newspaper interviews, a lawyer for the Samson Cree expressed disbelief and stated that the justice "discounted the testimony of our elders" and "followed essentially the word of the white man and the written word of the white man."

He continued: "It's as if the white man cannot be biased, but the Indians might be biased in their recounting of history." Interestingly, 120 years before the justice dismissed the Samson Cree case, the Canadian Department of …

Title And Contents- Winter 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 27 / Number 1 / Winter 2007

CONTENTS

THE ART OF OPEN SPACES: CONTEMPORARY SEA AND PRAIRIESCAPES

"EVERYTHING PROMISED HAD BEEN INCLUDED IN THE WRITING": INDIAN RESERVE FARMING AND THE SPIRIT AND INTENT OF TREATY SIX RECONSIDERED

CRAZY HORSE: THE STRANGE MAN OF THE OGLALAS BY MARl SANDOZ: HISTORIOGRAPHY, A PHILOSOPHY FOR RECONSTRUCTION

REVIEW ESSAY: BUFFALO BILL, SUPERSTAR

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of Fort Randall On The Missouri, 1856-1892 By Jerome A. Greene & Fort Concho: A History And A Guide By James T. Matthews, Barton Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly

National Park Service historian Jerome A. Greene, a leading figure in western military historiography, here offers a comprehensive study of Fort Randall, which served as a bastion of U.S. Army presence in the Great Plains for thirty-eight years. Built in 1856, Fort Randall's garrison was expected to keep peace among Native Plains nations, prevent Indian-white conflicts, and monitor the burgeoning traffic on overland trails and the Missouri River. Located just above the Nebraska-South Dakota border, Fort Randall lay within two hundred miles of the Ponca, Santee, Yankton, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge reservations. Despite its proximity to these sometimes troubled reservations, …