Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Notes And News- Winter 2002

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Call For Papers

Cather Symposium

Veterans History Project

Summer Institute On Lewis & Clark

Central States Communication Conference

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

Native Culture

Kansas Battle Flags

Review Of The Frontiers And Catholic Identities Edited By Anne M. Butler, Michael E. Engh, And Thomas W. Spalding, Robert C. Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly

Sometimes small books can have a large impact. This is one of those publications. It might be likened to a bale of cotton which, in appearance, seems compact and contained, but, when opened, expands to generous proportions. The Frontiers and Catholic Identities is one of nine proposed or already issued titles in the American Catholic Identities Series, each a documentary sampling on specific topics. As such, it is a sort of proposal, or suggestion, about where to locate sources that will increase one's knowledge in two areas: the role of the frontier in the making of American Catholicism, and the …

Review Of Creating Colorado: The Making Of A Western American Landscape, 1860-1940 By William Wyckoff, Kenneth Helphand

Great Plains Quarterly

Most settlers and visitors to Colorado came across the Plains, watching the Front Range of the Rockies slowly materialize from what seems to be a mirage on the horizon. While the eastern third of the state is within the Great Plains, it is the mountains and beyond that dominate our perception. William Wycoff uses Colorado's diverse and distinctive regions as a framework for his fine historical and cultural geography of the state. Appropriately, he begins with the mountains, the state's spiritual heart, and then visits the Piedmont Heartland, that zone between mountain and Plain where Denver and most of the …

Review Of Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism And Contemporary Fictions Of The Transcultural Frontier By Carlton Smith, Shari M. Huhndorf

Great Plains Quarterly

Delivered at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner's now-famous frontier thesis speech, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," contends with only one other nineteenth- century development in terms of popularity and influence: Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. These narratives provided complementary visions of Western history that centered on white males, marginalizing women and people of color. Together they shaped both academic and popular perceptions for most of the twentieth century .

It is this racialized and gendered vision of the West that Carlton Smith takes as the starting point for Coyote Kills John Wayne. …

Review Of Mari Sandoz's Native Nebraska: The Plains Indian Country By Laverne Harrell Clark, Kim Lee

Great Plains Quarterly

Mari Sandoz's Native Nebraska is essentially a collection of photographs with extended captions relating to Sandoz and her writings. Author LaVerne Harrell Clark has drawn on several sources for the book's images: archival photographs, Sandoz family photographs, and Clark's own photography. At first glance, the reader may well believe this book, Clark's seventh, to be uniquely focused on the Native people of the Great Plains about whom Sandoz wrote; in fact it is centered squarely on Sandoz. After a one-page introduction, Clark takes the reader-viewer on a photographic tour of significant Sandoz sites, found mostly in northwestern Nebraska (where Sandoz …

Review Of Shapers Of The Great Debate On Native Americans- Land, Spirit, And Power: A Biographical Dictionary By Bruce E. Johansen, Robert L. Bee

Great Plains Quarterly

This useful compilation of biographical sketches spans about 375 years of conflict. The basic issue is Native land rights versus unremitting colonial expansion. The eight chapters are arranged as separate chronological periods, beginning with seventeenth-century New England, and generally track the westward movement of the frontier. Each chapter presents a biographical sketch of its period's key players. The actors are juxtaposed to present both Native and non-Native views of Native land rights and sovereignty. Sequoyah and John Ross appear in a chapter with Andrew Jackson and John Marshall; Custer is set against Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. Lakota spokesmen Black …

Review Of Greengrass Pipe Dancers By Lionel Little Eagle, Kathleen Danker

Great Plains Quarterly

Greengrass Pipe Dancers is an account of Little Eagle's trips in 1988 and 1990 to Lakota communities in South Dakota, notably Greengrass on the Cheyenne River Reservation, on a quest for counsel about an old Oglala pipe bag that had come into his possession, for physical healing for his sick wife, and for his own emotional and spiritual healing following her death. During these brief visits, the author, who claims European and Micmac ancestry, meets several well-known Lakota religious leaders and elders; attends ceremonies including pipe ceremonies, inipis, a yuwipi, and a sun dance; and experiences visions.

Little Eagle states …

Review Of Videostyle In Presidential Campaigns: Style And Content Of Televised Political Advertising By Lynda Lee Kaid And Anne Johnston, E.D. Dover

Great Plains Quarterly

American elections have increasingly become candidate-centered campaigns in which solitary aspirants for office bear the primary responsibility for generating their own money, issues, imagery, and support. Candidates present themselves through televised advertising appearing as social tribunes instead of representatives for political and governmental institutions. News media respond by depicting campaigns as ongoing battles among individual combatants and direct much of their attention to the question of who is winning and who is not.

In an important book addressing these electoral features, Kaid and Johnston focus on the personal style candidates develop through television advertising. They claim a candidate's style is …

Review Of Kit Carson And The Indians By Tom Dunlay, Robert S. Mcpherson

Great Plains Quarterly

Kit Carson-the name conjures images of a bigger-than-life mountain man and Indian fighter who attained the skills and knowledge necessary to "win the West." As cliché-bound as this dime store novel impression may be, part of it may be warranted. Even while still alive, Carson became subject to the mythologizing process associated with the American frontier. Since that time, historians have added their own interpretations, in some cases clarifying and in others confusing the man and his times.

Tom Dunlay recognizes these errors and their origins, believing that in order to uncover the real Carson, one must understand the context …

Review Of Gathering Remnants: A Tribute To The Working Cowboy Photographs By Kendall Nelson, J. C. Leacock

Great Plains Quarterly

About five years ago, Kendall Nelson, then a segment producer for Fox Television in Los Angeles, was invited to photograph cowboys on a large ranch in Texas. Coming from a photographic and artistic background, with degrees from San Francisco State and Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Nelson jumped at the chance. At first she was only visually interested in the opportunity, but in no time found herself captured by the culture as well. What started out as a week at the ranch lengthened to a month. "I fell in love with it," she says. "I knew I would …

Review Of Our Town On The Plains: J. J. Pennell's Photographs Of Junction City, Kansas, 1893-1922 By James R. Shortridge, Alfred Young Man

Great Plains Quarterly

The nineteenth-century settlement of the Great Plains coincided with a number of technological developments, including improved railroad equipment, the steel plow, and the agricultural combine. Photography was among these technical developments, ensuring that the process of settlement would be both celebrated and recorded. The history of Junction City, Kansas, is bound up with such technological developments. Located near the junction of the Republican and Smoky Hill Rivers, it grew close by the site of Fort Riley in north central Kansas and became a railroad town and county seat by the 1870s. By 1890 the community was prosperous and its economy …

Review Of Collecting Native America, 1870-1960 Edited By Shepard Krech Iii And Barbara A. Hail, Margaret A. Mackichan

Great Plains Quarterly

Setting out to explore the roles of private collectors in founding North American public museums of American Indian materials, the editors of Collecting Native America have assembled discussions of Sheldon Jackson (1834-1909), Alaska's best known late-nineteenth- century missionary collector; David Ross McCord (1844-1930), founder of the McCord National Museum, Montreal, which opened in 1921; Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859-1928) of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, chartered in 1907; Rudolf F. Haffenreffer (1874-1954), of Rhode Island's King Philip Museum, established during the 1920s; Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842-1919), mother of newspaper publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and founder, in 1901, of the Museum …

Review Of Voices Of Wounded Knee By William S. E. Coleman, Christer Lindberg

Great Plains Quarterly

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

The heartbreaking words of Black Elk and the tragic events at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, in December of 1890, …

Review Of Fort Reno And The Indian Territory Frontier By Stan Hoig, Warren Metcalf

Great Plains Quarterly

A prolific writer on the Southern Plains and the people who have lived in the region, Stan Hoig focuses here on the Fort Reno and Darlington Agency of the Indian Territory, contending that these were "center posts around which western Indian Territory was transformed from raw frontier" to an "agricultural/ commercial domain of the white man by the end of the 1880s." Until the mid-1880s, these twin outposts served primarily as agencies for controlling and suppressing the activities of the relocated Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Later, the military outpost served largely to intercept and remove white settlers in Indian Territory. …

Review Of Dakota Circle: Excursions On The True Plains By Tom Isern, Kimberly K. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly

Tom Isern's Dakota Circle marks the inauguration of North Dakota State University's Institute for Regional Studies Pathmaker Series. Begun as "a collection of new reflective or creative works that address the question of identity on the Great Plains of North America," the series intends to follow the pathways of daily living and to "help us think about who we are .... " Culled from his syndicated "Plains Folk" column, and augmented by further ponderings, Isern's contribution to the achievement of this goal is significant.

By way of introduction, Isern notes that his musings are not intended "to argue fine points …

The Making Of Little Sweden, Usa, Steven M. Schnell

Great Plains Quarterly

Ethnic tourism in the United States has become big business. An estimated six billion dollars were spent on various forms of "heritage tourism" (including ethnic tourism) in the US in 1995 alone.¹ At first glance, this desire for roots and tradition within an American public more often noted for its worship of progress and individualism may seem surprising. Yet as Americans have become increasingly mobile, wired, and rootless,² many have become disillusioned with the growing urbanization and industrialization of their society³ and have begun efforts to recapture a sense of what they perceive as traditional rural community. …

The Beginning Of The End The Indian Peace Commission Of 1867~1868, Kerry R. Oman

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1867, in an effort to avoid the high costs of war and protect overland transportation routes, Congress passed a bill authorizing a commission to establish peace with the Plains Indians. In less than two years, what proved to be the last major commission sent out by the government to treat with the Indians met and signed treaties with the Kiowa, Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, Crow, Navajo, Eastern Shoshone and Bannock, and the Brule, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, and Santee bands of Lakota Sioux. Their efforts helped end Red Cloud's …

Review Of The Kiowas And The Legend Of Kicking Bird By Stan Hoig, With Three Kiowa Tales By Col. W. S. Nye, Charles M. Robinson Iii

Great Plains Quarterly

Stan Hoig is known for outstanding books on Southern Plains Indians. The Kiowas and the Legend of Kicking Bird joins that corpus. With his usual thoroughness, Hoig has gone back to the original sources, breaking new ground, cross-checking, and, where possible, resolving contradictions in the old accounts. When contradictions cannot be settled, Hoig considers the various possibilities and allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. He also reflects on political infighting among the Kiowas, particularly between the Kicking Bird and Satanta factions, which exists to some degree even today.

The result goes far beyond what the title …

Title And Contents- Winter 2002

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 22/ Number 1 / Winter 2002

CONTENTS

THE MAKING OF LITTLE SWEDEN, USA Steven M. Schnell

A SLAVE TO YELLOW PERIL: THE 1886 CHINESE OUSTER ATTEMPT IN WICHITA, KANSAS Julie Courtwright

THE BEGINNING OF THE END: THE INDIAN PEACE COMMISSION OF 1867-1868 Kerry R. Oman

BOOK REVIEWS

Bruce E. Johnson

Shapers of the Great Debate on Native Americans - Land, Spirit, and Power By ROBERT L. BEE

Tom Dunlay Kit Carson and the Indians By ROBERT S. MCPHERSON

Amanda J. Cobb Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 By MARY JANE …

Book Notes- Winter 2002

Great Plains Quarterly

BOOK NOTES

The Road to the Rapids: Nineteenth-Century Church and Society at St. Andrew's Parish, Red River. By Robert J. Coutts

Dakota Cross-Bearer: The Life and World of a Native American Bishop. By Mary E. Cochran

Different Travellers, Different Eyes: Artists' Narratives of the American West, 1820-1920. Edited by Peter Wild, Donald A. Barclay, and James H. Maguire

Wheel Boats on the Missouri: The Journals and Documents of the Atkinson-O' Fallon Expedition, 1824-26. Edited and with an introduction by Richard E. Jensen and James S. Hutchins

Review Of Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, And Popular History By Joy S. Kasson, Sarah J. Blackstone

Great Plains Quarterly

Joy Kasson's study of William Cody as the first modern celebrity, a man who took advantage of every medium and life experience to build on his fame and accrue a fortune, is a good addition to the existing material on Buffalo Bill. It synthesizes the huge variety of material available on Cody and provides a focused look at the aspects of his life that affected the myth of the American West.

The book's real strength is its author's ability to walk the fine line between admiration of Cody and excoriation. She achieves a balanced portrait of this complicated man by …

Review Of The Indian Territory Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, Scott Eckberg

Great Plains Quarterly

Professional soldier, avid sportsman, boisterous raconteur, acute observer: this composite is vividly conveyed in Wayne R. Kime's superbly-edited journals of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.

Written during intervals of intense military activity in 1878-1880, Dodge describes actions that reinforced federal Indian policy on the Great Plains. Ranging from Kansas to Indian Territory, the expanse that later became Oklahoma, Dodge was in his element and at the prime of his career at a significant juncture of frontier Plains history.

Dodge served as a field commander during the Northern Cheyenne outbreak and as commanding officer of Cantonment North Fork Canadian River, the …

Review Of Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis And The North American Indian Photography And Text By Edward S. Curtis, Richard Francaviglia

Great Plains Quarterly

In the early 1970s, a massive body of photographs of Native Americans by Edward S. Curtis came to light after nearly fifty years of obscurity. The work, comprising 45,000 to 50,000 negatives and 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of language and music, had been distilled down to 2,200 photographs and 4,000 Museum, geographer James Shortridge uses about 150 of Pennell's photographs to document the life and times of Junction City during a period considered by some to be the halcyon days of the small town in America.

To supplement the photographs and written descriptions, Shortridge also prepared seven original maps showing …

Review Of World War Ii And The American Indian By Kenneth William Townsend, Tom Holm

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the publisher claims on its jacket cover that Kenneth William Townsend's World War II and the American Indian "offers the first history of the twenty-five thousand Native Americans who served during World War II," it is actually the third general history of Native American participation in the war effort. Alison R. Bernstein's American Indians and World War II (1991) and Jere Bishop Franco's Crossing the Pond: The Native American Effort in World War II (1999) precede it, as have several smaller scale or more focused studies. Numerous biographies dealing with Native American veterans of the war, studies of the …

Review Of New Essays On My Antonia Edited By Sharon O'Brien, Andrew Jewell

Great Plains Quarterly

In her introductory essay, Sharon O'Brien correctly claims that My Antonia's critical history illustrates the indeterminacy of meaning, for even in this relatively short book one is struck by the variety of responses evoked by Willa Cather's novel. From the first essay, suggesting the "sweetness" of Cather's narrative, to the last, recording the violence of Jim Burden's hegemonic presence, this collection gives readers a fresh, if sometimes unconvincing; look at one of the most famous novels of the Great Plains.

Miles Orvell's essay "Time, Change, and the Burden of Revision in My Antonia" gives us the first argument …

Review Of Native American Spirituality: A Critical Reader Edited By Lee Irwin, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly

Lee Irwin, whose earlier writing has focused on Plains Indian visionary traditions, has gathered fourteen essays (including one of his own) that express current thinking about North American Indian religions. The authors include Indians, part-Indians and non-Indians, mostly trained anthropologists, and historians of religion.

They are all self-conscious about their scholarly mission: To what extent do they have the authority to represent Indian religious practice and belief to non-Indian audiences? How should the history of religious persecution (of Indians by non-Indians) in the Americas frame the treatment of their subject matter? How can they incorporate Indian viewpoints through dialogue? How …

A Slave To Yellow Peril The 1886 Chinese Ouster Attempt In Wichita, Kansas, Julie Courtwright

Great Plains Quarterly

Wichita's war on the Chinese began in 1886. Although a small war in comparison to other anti-Chinese outbursts in the American West, the persecution and violence against the city's small Asian population was nonetheless terrifying and significant to those who were the focus of the racist demonstrations. In an attempt to follow the national anti-Chinese trend of the late nineteenth century, which the Chinese called the "driving out time,"¹ groups such as the local assemblies of the Knights of Labor and the Women's Industrial League in Wichita, Kansas, organized a boycott against Chinese businesses. Citizens attacked the "yellow peril" …

Review Of Happy As A Big Sunflower: Adventures In The West, 1876-1880. By Rolf Johnson., H. Arnold Barton

Great Plains Quarterly

In December 1876, Rolf Johnson, the twenty-year-old son of the Swedish immigrant parents in Henderson Grove, Illinois, began writing a diary he would continue until it ended without explanation four years later in Cubero, New Mexico. In March 1876, the family moved, with other Swedish settlers from Knox County, Illinois, out to Phelps County, Nebraska. Rolf recounts the excitement and hardships of pioneering of the Plains, including plagues of grasshoppers, prairie fires, lawlessness, and Indian unrest. But he also tells of courage, neighborliness, and community building. He works the harvests in eastern Nebraska and hunts buffalo to the west.

Review Of The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Journal By Stephen R. Jones, Ron Block

Great Plains Quarterly

In The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Joumal, naturalist Stephen R. Jones provides an informed and passionate portrait of the Sandhills of western Nebraska, "the last remaining relic of the boundless grasslands that once extended from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains." These grass-fixed sand dunes have not only provided Jones with his subject but also a style, since these twenty essays are as graceful, diverse, and startling in their transitions as the Sandhills themselves.

A representative essay may begin in first person, emphasizing the sensual complexity of directly experiencing the Sandhills. But then by subtle shifts and turns, …

Review Of Cowboys, Gentlemen And Cattle Thieves By Warren M. Elofson, Patrick A. Dunae

Great Plains Quarterly

This book focuses on the golden age of the ranching industry in western Canada from the early 1880s to the early 1900s. During that period large ranches were established in what is now southwestern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta, many of them owned by wealthy investors in England and eastern Canada; some of the spreads were managed by graduates of prestigious agricultural colleges. The owners, the managers and their families, and the cowboys they employed comprised a community that was cultured, conservative, and generally law-abiding.

Warren Elofson doesn't see it that way. He argues that the ranching frontier in the Canadian …