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Title And Contents- Spring 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 2 / Spring 2001

CONTENTS

BISON: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF THE GREAT PLAINS AN INTRODUCTION Kenneth Winkle

THE FIRST PHASE OF DESTRUCTION: KILLING THE SOUTHERN PLAINS BUFFALO, 1790-1840 Pekka Hamalainen

"THE LAST BUFFALO HUNT" AND BEYOND: PLAINS SIOUX ECONOMIC STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY RESERVATION PERIOD Jeffrey Ostler

"WHEN WE WERE FIRST PAID": THE BLACKFOOT TREATY, THE WESTERN TRIBES, AND THE CREATION OF THE COMMON HUNTING GROUND, 1855 William E. Farr

REVIEW ESSAY: THE GREAT PLATTE RIVER ROAD ARCHWAY MONUMENT Susan Wunder and John Wunder

BOOK REVIEWS

Andrew C. Isenberg The Destruction of …

Review Of Into The West: The Story Of Lts People By Walter Nugent, Anne M. Butler

Great Plains Quarterly

Walter Nugent's Into the West: The Story of Its People adds an outstanding volume to the canon of Western history, reminding readers of the intellectual vitality that fuels this discipline. The book undertakes a grand sweep of Western history, from the speculative past of prehistoric tribes to the speculative future of the twenty-first century. On this epic journey across and through the American West, Nugent delivers exactly what he promises: a book about people.

Despite romantic notions about the region that haunt Americans, Nugent sees the West as a definable place with a history larger than images of a "frontier …

The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, Susan Wunder, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

The summer of 2000 marked the grand opening of the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument just east of Kearney, Nebraska, on Interstate 80. Costing approximately $60 million the site features exhibits on the history of the American West in the first and only "museum" to straddle an interstate highway. At the 16 July grand opening, former Nebraska Governor Frank Morrison, a spry ninety-five years, reminisced before an audience of over six hundred, including both of Nebraska's US senators and its current governor, about having realized his dream of honoring the nation's westward movement.

Coverage of the event in the …

"The Last Buffalo Hunt" And Beyond Plains Sioux Economic Strategies In The Early Reservation Period, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly

Sometime in late May 1882, several thousand bison appeared on the Great Sioux reservation about 100 miles west of the Standing Rock Indian agency (see Fig. O. According to James McLaughlin, the Standing Rock agent, the Indians knew "instinctively" that the buffalo had arrived, even though "it had been many years since the buffalo had sought the hunting-grounds of that part of the reservation." With this "rich store of succulent meat in sight," McLaughlin continued, "it was not possible that the Indians could be held in check." On 10 June, over 600 Standing Rock Lakota and Yanktonais left the agency. …

Review Of European Immigrants In The American West: Community Histories Edited By Frederick Luebke, Jon Gjerde

Great Plains Quarterly

European immigrants, Frederick Luebke argues correctly in his introduction to this collection of previously published essays, have been all but ignored by Western historians. Earlier Turnerian historians expected European immigrants to assimilate because this accorded well with their American frontier narrative. "New Western historians," focused as they are on race, also overlooked Europeans. Because European immigrants were "white," these revisionists of Turner similarly anticipated the Europeans' assimilation into the white majority. For their part, labor historians who have concentrated on class have rued the failure of Western workers, in part because of their attachment to ethnic group, to develop a …

Review Of The Earth Shall Weep: A History Of Native America By James Wilson, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly

This general history proposes to offer a Native American perspective on Indian-Anglo contact. Wilson's approach is now fairly standard. He includes substantial quotes from collections of Indian origin traditions and general ethnographic descriptions of elements of Indian cultures, bringing the narrative into the 1970s with accounts of the Indian occupations of Alcatraz in 1969 and the Wounded Knee trading post in 1972 .

Wilson's sympathetic telling of Native history leads to certain problematic interpretations. He describes Aztec leaders, for example, as holding flowers to their noses to counteract the unpleasant body odor of Spanish conquistadors who did not bathe, although …

Review Of Massacre Along The Medicine Road: A Social History Of The Indian War Of 1864 In Nebraska Territory By Ronald Becher, Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

The Indian War of 1864 provides the historian of the West with a wealth of sources, as one may imagine after nearly a century-and-ahalf of accumulation. Official army reports and contemporary newspaper accounts join later reminiscences and oral histories to form a sizeable, if not formidable, body of information. Add to these some newly appreciated sources, such as the vast bureaucratic paperwork generated by the 1890s Indian depredation claims found in the National Archives, and it could only be a matter of time before a book like Massacre along the Medicine Road: A Social History of the Indian War of …

Review Of Something In The Soil: Legacies And Reckonings In The New West By Patricia Nelson Limerick, Mark Daniel Barringer

Great Plains Quarterly

Stories matter.

That simple statement is at the heart of the now decades-old struggle between the "Old" and "New" Western histories. The stories people hear about their pasts contribute to the construction of both personal and collective identities. In other words, what we believe about who we are is, to a significant extent, determined by the stories we are told about where we came from. The dominant story of the past two centuries in American history has been the tale of the frontier-for most Americans, the "winning" of the West. It has become the creation myth of the United States. …

Review Of The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology And Animal Kinship By Howard L. Harrod, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly

Over the past several decades Howard Harrod-Oberlin Alumni Professor of Social Ethics and Sociology at Vanderbilt University- has published widely and well regarding the religious history of Great Plains Indians. His latest work examines what he calls "'sacred ecology' ... the sensibility, evident in North Plains cultures, that the world was constituted by powers that took the form of Persons. In hunting cultures, these Persons often appeared in animal form." A non-Indian (indeed, a non-hunter), Harrod has written his book because he thinks that these Native Americans have valuable insights for us all in "reimagining our relationships with the nonhuman …

Notes And News- Spring 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News- Spring 2001

Circles Of Knowledge: Plains Indian Education

Marl Sandoz Heritage Society: Call For Papers

Missouri Valley History Conference: Call For Papers

Great Plains Chautauqua Society

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

Tribal Colleges

The First Phase Of Destruction Killing The Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840, Pekka Hamalainen

Great Plains Quarterly

The eradication of the vast bison herds from the North American Great Plains is one of the oldest topics in western history and, recently, also one of the most popular. Drawing ideas and methodologies from ecology and zoology, historians have revealed in the 1990s an entirely new anatomy of the destruction. According to the new interpretation, the great slaughter of the 1870s merely delivered a clinching blow to herds that had already been weakened in a number of ways. Concentrating on the Southern Plains, Dan Flores has concluded that large-scale dying may have begun as early as 1840, when a …

Bison The Past, Present, And Future Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Kenneth J. Winkle

Great Plains Quarterly

Throughout history, bison have exerted a fundamental influence on life and culture on the Great Plains, as both an ever-present reality and an enduring symbol. When planning the Center for Great Plains Studies' Interdisciplinary Symposium for the spring of 2000, Charlene Porsild, now with the Montana Historical Society, and I wanted to choose a topic with relevance that spanned the millennia, and so we selected the bison. Three years in planning, "Bison: The Past, Present, and Future of the Great Plains" brought over five hundred people to discuss, debate, analyze, and celebrate the bison as perhaps the premier symbol of …

Review Of Documents Of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, And Conventions, 1775-1979 Edited By Vine Deloriajr. And Raymond J. Demallie, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

The relationship of Indian tribes to the federal government constitutes a legal maze since federal Indian law is embodied in a vast array of Congressional Acts, treaties and agreements, executive orders, rulings, conventions, and judicial opinions. Charles Kappler's Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties has been a standard reference for important documents relating to American Indian diplomacy. In their impressive two-volume set, part of the Legal History of North America series, Deloria and DeMallie have reproduced hundreds of treaties and agreements made by Indian nations that are unavailable in Kappler.

Volume one's twelve chapters range from the Pre-Revolutionary War period to …

Review Of The Destruction Of The Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 By Andrew C. Isenberg, William A. Dobak

Great Plains Quarterly

The transformation of the Great Plains through the introduction of new plants and animals and the restriction or near-eradication of native species is one of the great environmental events of the past two hundred years. In The Destruction of the Bison, Andrew C. Isenberg describes the nineteenth-century decline and near-extinction of one species and early twentieth-century attempts to regenerate and reintroduce it to its former habitat. Isenberg deals with cultural, ecological, and economic factors, stressing the "volatile" nature of the Plains and declaring that "the destruction of the bison was not merely the result of human agency, but the …

Review Of The American West: A New Interpretive History By Robert V. Hine And John Mack Faragher, Keith Edgerton

Great Plains Quarterly

This is flat out the best, most inclusive, least partisan textbook on Western American history available to contemporary professionals and the general public. Lack of a suitable, comprehensive, apolemical text has long constrained teachers of Western US history; this one is something of an anomaly too: a textbook that is actually compelling to read.

The book is a substantial revision of Hine's 1984 The American West: An Interpretative History, second edition. It is comprehensive and capacious in its sweep-incorporating a great deal of important new scholarship on gender, the environment, ethnicity, and Native Americans-generous in detail, replete with superb …

Review Of George Washington Grayson And The Creek Nation, 1843-1920 By Mary Jane Warde, Michael D. Green

Great Plains Quarterly

Late in his long and illustrious life, George Washington Grayson wrote a memoir. W. David Baird edited and published it in 1988 under the title A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy. Grayson had written mostly about his service in the Civil War but included enough about his life as politician and businessman to suggest he would be an excellent candidate for a biography. Mary Jane Warde, who began this study as a graduate student under Baird's direction, has done her subject justice.

Warde says Grayson was a progressive nationalist and a cultural broker. Well-educated, he represents a type in …

Review Of Buffalo Soldiers And Officers Of The Ninth Cavalry, 1867-1898: Black & White Together By Charles L. Kenner, Tom Phillips

Great Plains Quarterly

Charles Kenner presents a vivid portrait of some of the men and officers of one of the four regiments of black enlisted men and mostly white officers in the post-Civil War army. This regimental cast runs the gamut from the dedicated and gallant to bigots and bullies. There is Colonel Edward Hatch, who commanded the Ninth for twenty-three years, and Major Guy V. Henry, a tireless cheerleader for the regiment and his own career. Here, too, are rankers "of all degrees of competence," such as Emanuel Stance, a Medal of Honor winner so hated he was probably murdered by fellow …

Review Of A Country In The Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard Devoto, History, And The American Land By John L. Thomas, Frank J. Popper

Great Plains Quarterly

John Thomas, a historian at Brown University, offers a conservation-focused portrait of two of the last century's most distinguished men of American Western letters, Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) and Wallace Stegner (1909-1993). Both grew up amid the ambivalent legacy of the boomer frontier. Both became prolific historians, novelists, journalists, and public intellectuals with touchy ties to academia. Both rank among the creators of modern environmentalism.

Thomas's sharply written, often evocative account of their life, work, and friendship deals largely with their efforts to preserve the public domain-that is, the federal lands of the intermountain West, what Thomas calls the national commons. …

"When We Were First Paid" The Blackfoot Treaty, The Western Tribes, And The Creation Of The Common Hunting Ground, 1855, William E. Farr

Great Plains Quarterly

In mid-October of 1855, Blackfoot Treaty commissioner Isaac 1. Stevens, governor of Washington Territory and ex-officio its superintendent of Indian Affairs, and his co-commissioner Colonel Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Superintendency including Nebraska Territory, finally assembled the Blackfoot Peace Council just below the confluence of the Judith and Missouri Rivers. The federal government through the Office of Indian Affairs by then had already pieced together a new reservation policy for the West. This "new order of things," largely designed by Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny, hoped to reduce white conflicts with Indians, to prevent, if possible, expensive military …

Review Of Willa Cather: Queering America By Marilee Lindemann, Michele Aina Barale

Great Plains Quarterly

Arguing that for Willa Cather "the body that signifies the nation is a queer body indeed," a body that is always out of the control of the very subject inhabiting it, of its own symbolic meaning, of even its relationship to citizenship itself, Marilee Lindemann tracks the "queer" as a "deviant, disruptive figure" in Cather's early fiction and letters. In both, the prairie "is even more elaborately figured as the staging ground for several impossible struggles: between immigrant and native-born, the illicitly sexual and the erotophobic, the effeminate male and the too-powerful female, the home wreckers and the nation-builders." And …

Review Of A Reader's Guide To The Novels Of Louise Erdrich By Peter G. Beidler And Gay Barton & The Chippewa Landscape Of Louise Erdrich Edited By Allan Chavkin, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

Both of these recent publications support Professor A. LaVonne Brown Ruoffs observation that Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is the author most studied in recent literary criticism of American Indian literatures (Chavkin 182). While Erdrich may be the object of much study and discussion, the accuracy and usefulness vary widely.

The stronger of the two books, Peter Beidler and Gay Barton's A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, carefully presents time lines, genealogies, geographic identifications, and character definitions. As a study guide, the approach thoroughly clarifies, delineates, and cross-references the complicated relationships among Erdrich's characters, places, and …

Review Of Cowgirls: Commemorating The Women Of The West Photography By David R. Stoecklein, Joyce Gibson-Roach

Great Plains Quarterly

A cowgirl, her face and form obscured in work garb, is featured on the jacket of a book of lavish photography about the modern cowgirl. Nothing, however, is concealed between the covers. Cowgirls, mostly young, fairly blaze across the pages. If all, in reality, are not glamorous, the photographer's art makes them appear so. Fine horses accompany every cowgirl. One token male appears on the last page.

The author says his intent is to tell some of the story of the modern West through his photography. The photos themselves are often filtered through ethereal dust. Some cowgirls are posed provocatively, …

Review Of The Changing Presentation Of The American Indian: Museums And Native Cultures By W. Richard West Et Al., Russell Thornton

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of six papers with an introduction and appendices is drawn from a 1995 symposium convened at the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in New York City to examine how "Indians and their cultures have been represented by museums in North America." The authors all have some degree of experience in museums and in the presentation of American Indian exhibits. Some are Native; some are not.

How American Indian cultures have been presented by museums over the years as well as new directions these presentations are taking are difficult tasks to consider in slightly …

Women's Sense Of Place On The American High Plains, Cary W. Dewit

Great Plains Quarterly

The plight of women on the American Great Plains is a familiar one to anyone who has explored the region's history. Account after account exists of women during the early years of Euro-American settlement who suffered hardship, persevered, and triumphed, or who succumbed to homesickness, lost their children or husbands, and sometimes descended into madness.² The women's historical situation on the Plains has also been popularized in fiction and dramatized or romanticized in dozens of films.³ But what of today's Plains women?

Few sources describe women's contemporary experience of Plains life. Some works have given us a glimpse …

Title And Contents- Winter 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 1 / Winter 2001

CONTENTS

MANAGING THE FARM, EDUCATING THE FARMER:

O PIONEERS! AND THE NEW AGRICULTURE

William Conlogue

THE PRICE OF PATRIOTISM: ALBERTA CATTLEMEN AND THE LOSS OF THE AMERICAN MARKET, 1942-48 Max Foran

WOMEN'S SENSE OF PLACE ON THE AMERICAN HIGH PLAINS Cary W. deWit

EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN TOPEKA, KANSAS, PRIOR TO THE 1954 BROWN CASE Jean Van Delinder

REVIEW ESSAY:

PLAIN TRUTHS AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN NEW CATHER CRITICISM Deborah Carlin A review of Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition and Willa Cather and the …

Review Of Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats And The Nuclear West By Len Ackland, Michael A. Amundson

Great Plains Quarterly

Between 1951 and 1989, the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver processed more than a hundred and fifty tons of plutonium while manufacturing more than 70,000 nuclear bombs as part of America's Cold War nuclear deterrence policy. In the name of national security, the bomb factory also provided good blue-collar jobs to more than 23,000 people during its operation and contributed millions of dollars to the Colorado economy. But at what cost? As author Len Ackland clearly suggests, Rocky Flats also created extremely unsafe working conditions for many of its employees and caused billion dollar damage to the …

Review Of Buffalo Jump: A Woman's Travels By Rita Moir, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly

Buffalo Jump is a surprisingly good little book. I say "surprising" because it's such an unassuming, small paperback, as if its publisher didn't expect much of it; as a result, the reader may expect the same. Thankfully, I was wrong. It's a memoir, a travel document, a story about families, and a story about stories. It's a song of praise for the writer's mother and grandmother- in fact, for prairie women in general and the hardships of their lives in those generations. Unfortunately, it loses power because it tries to do so much, while nevertheless managing to be nearly always …

Review Of Land Of Enchantment, Land Of Conflict: New Mexico In English-Language Fiction By David L. Caffey, David King Dunaway

Great Plains Quarterly

Nearly seventy-five years ago, in The Phantom Herd, novelist Bertha Bower summed up the tension between the presentation of the West and its reality. A movie director and crew are sent out from Hollywood to New Mexico to film a western. Halfway through, the director's disgusted crew demands more realism. The director complains that the problem isn't his but the audience's: the only West he can tell is "served hot and strong and reeking with the smoke of black powder." These images still plague us today in the West-in television dramas and in sometimes dangerous school yards .

David …

Book Notes- Winter 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Stories of Young Pioneers: In Their Own Words

Chiricahua Apache Women and Children: Safekeepers of the Heritage

The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America

A Sharing Of Diversities: Proceedings Of The Jewish Mennonite Ukrainian Conference, "Building Bridges."

Angels on High: Márton Váró's Limestone Angels on the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas.

Review Of Ladonna Harris: A Comanche Life By La Donna Harris, Barbara Torralba-Hobson

Great Plains Quarterly

This autobiographical account of La Donna Harris, a Comanche woman from rural southwest Oklahoma, describes an individual who by all accounts was not initially a candidate for the activist life she has led. As one reads her life's story, however, one understands how Harris has been able to take part in shaping the political agenda for American Indian issues in the 1960s and beyond. Stockel does not write Harris's story but rather edits it, allowing Harris free rein to give her perspective on life as an American Indian woman.

In the initial chapters I became intrigued with the history of …