The Cattle Guard

With this study the cattle guard joins the sod house, the windmill, and barbed wire as a symbol of range country on the American Great Plains. A U.S. folk innovation now in use throughout the world, the cattle guard functions as both a gate and a fence: it keeps livestock from crossing, but allows automobiles and people to cross freely. The author blends traditional history and folklore to trace the origins of the cattle guard and to describe how, in true folk fashion, the device in its simplest form—wooden poles or logs spaced in parallel fashion over a pit in the roadway—was reinvented and adapted throughout livestock country. Hoy traces the origins of the cattle guard to flat stone stiles unique to Cornwall, England, then through the railroad cattle guard, in use in this country as early as 1836, and finally to the Great Plains where, probably in 1905, the first ones appeared on roads. He describes regional variations in cattle guards and details unusual types. He provides information on cattle-guard makers, who range from local blacksmiths and welders to farmers and ranchers to large manufacturers. In addition to documenting the economic and cultural significance of the cattle guard, this volume reveals much about early twentieth-century farm and ranch life. It will be of interest not only to folklorists and historians of agriculture and Western America, but also to many Plains-area farmers, ranchers, and oilmen. Description Jim Hoy is professor emeritus of English at Emporia State University, where he also directed Center for Great Plains Studies. Hoy is the author of numerous books about cowboy life, including Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales from the Tallgrass Prairie and My Flint Hills: Observations and Reminiscences from America’s Last Tallgrass Prairie. With a New Preface by the Author. This Kansas Open Books title is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

After the colonial period of American history, survey courses with so much to cover usually give short shrift to rural history. Yet the study of the farming fron tier on the Great Plains is impor tant to American history. The first census in 1790 revealed a popula tion 95 percent rural. By 1870, 79 percent of the population still lived on the or in rural small towns and 53 percent of the nation's workers made their livings from agriculture. Settlement on the Great Plains after the Civil War expanded America's rural heritage into a new environment?level, treeless, and arid. Railroads, steel plows, barbed wire, windmills and other technol ogy would be required to subdue it, according to historian Walter Prescott Webb in his seminal study The Great Plains. The unique fea tures of the Great Plains coincide with the changes wrought by the industrialization of America and provide secondary school students with a unique perspective for studying late nineteenthand early twentieth-century America. But while many survey texts in clude an obligatory chapter on the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century?invariably focusing on Custer and the Seventh Cavalry meeting their fate at the Little Big Horn?the role of the farming frontier in western devel opment needs attention. Discussion of plains agriculture, moreover, re peatedly ignores American Indian agriculture. Almost every Ameri can school child knows that Squanto's corn saved the starving New England settlers, but Plains Indians, and particularly American Indian women horticulturalists, are completely ignored. In fact, many Plains Native American cultures subsisted with a combination of bi son and agriculture before the in troduction of the horse. The flood of white population carried by the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads among others destroyed American Indian ways of life and radically changed the Great Plains environment. Free land and the indepen dence it promised proved an irre sistible lure for white home steaders, as students readily com prehend. The view of independent citizen-farmers enjoying prosperity on their own land, however, does not reflect the development of the Great Plains described by historian

The genesis of this study is in response to the United States (US) Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) listing of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) on 17 December 2020 in the US Federal Register as a candidate species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Annual censuses have identified that the eastern and western North American monarch migratory populations have been generally declining over the last 20 yr due to a myriad of environmental factors. Monarch reproduction at the larval stage is dependent on the presence of milkweed (Asclepias) plant species. The United States Department of Agriculture‐Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA‐NRCS) National Resource Inventory rangeland data set (~23,400 on‐site samples; 2032 sites with milkweed presence) was used to evaluate milkweed species densities, geolocations, and environmental gradients. Twenty‐two milkweed species were identified on rangelands across 17 sampled US western states, with seven species comprising 65.5% of milkweed frequency of occurrence. The most dominant milkweed species on non‐federal rangelands wereAsclepias viridis,A. syriaca,A. verticillata, andA. speciosa(constancy >10% where milkweed was present).Asclepias speciosawas the dominant species from the standpoint of total plant density for the data set, whereasA. viridiswas the most frequently occurring species. Total milkweed density estimates based on low, midpoint, and high estimates were 1.3, 4.1, and 6.9Bplants on 13.2 M ha. Seven US states (Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Montana) contained 88.8% of the total estimated ha with milkweed presence. In the Central Great Plains, Northwestern Great Plains, Nebraska Sand Hills, and Flint Hills, Southwestern Tablelands, High Plains, Northwestern Glaciated Plains, and Cross Timbers, Omernik level III ecoregions contained 76.7% of the estimated milkweed plants. Milkweed species density was highest at latitude N35‐40 with decreasing populations toward south (N25‐30) and north (N45‐50) latitudes. Milkweed species densities were greatest at longitude W‐95‐100 and decreased toward the western US with lowest population numbers at W‐120‐125. Analysis of environmental variables showed milkweed species dominance on mollisols, non‐saline sites, neutral pH, well‐drained soils, loam and sandy loam soil textures, and sites with soil organic matter at 1.5–3%. Disturbance gradients and habitat dynamics relating to ecological condition and rangeland health differed among the dominant milkweed species identified in this study.

Reviewed by: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan George O’har The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. By Timothy Egan. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Pp. 340. $28.95. The Worst Hard Time was the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction. And while the work is directed toward a popular rather than an academic audience, it is well researched and benefits from a knowledge of the relevant scholarship. The narrative employed by Timothy Egan as a frame for his forty-year (1901–39) tale of the dust bowl is the by-now-familiar explanation of what happened in that storm-cursed corridor extending from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles up into southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado, about a hundred million acres of land. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the windstorms that ripped across the dust bowl during the Great Depression and ruined the lives of thousands of settlers and “sodbusters” were considered the greatest natural disaster to hit the United States. Even after Katrina, these storms may still hold the record for the human misery and environmental devastation they left in their wake. In each case, Katrina and the dust bowl, misery was exacerbated by human ineptitude, although the degree to which that was the case, especially regarding the dust bowl, is open to debate. Egan’s position is best summed up by Melt White, one of the survivors he interviewed: “God didn’t create this land here to be plowed up. He created it for Indians and buffalo. Folks raped this land. Raped it bad” (p. 9). Egan’s version of the settlement of the High Plains is hardly the tale told by Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains (1931). Yet Egan admires the fortitude of the settlers and farmers, especially those who stayed behind to fight bad luck and weather. Overall, though, he is skeptical about the enterprise—farming on the arid plains—and more caught up in what might be called the dark side of empire and technology. His tale is a cautionary one. Settlement of the plains by Anglo Americans, most of them farmers, was driven largely by land speculation and the post–Civil War extension of the railroads into the territories. The Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1909 also played a significant role. Between 1880 and 1925,“roughly two-hundred million acres” were homesteaded, and of that number, “nearly half was considered marginal for farming” (p. 56). Farming methods and machinery that worked well in the humid eastern half of the nation (east of the 98th meridian) had to be modified in order for them to be effective in the windy, arid, treeless plains. The disc plow, barbed wire, dry farming, windmills, and the siphoning of the aquifer, a well-known saga to students of Webb, made it possible to grow wheat. Then the weather turned bad, and the land failed. Dry to begin with, the soil was only made worse when plows ripped up the native grasses—by the roots, so they could not be replenished. Areas the size of entire states back east were stripped bare, and then high winds, drought, and [End Page 872] loose soil brought on a disaster almost biblical in scope: plagues of grasshoppers, spiders, air that literally stuck to your skin. While the particulars may not be known to the general reader, the larger story—giant dust clouds said to be ten thousand feet high, haunted faces staring out at the camera, shacks covered up to their roofs with dirt—has become part of American folklore. Egan remarks that the archaeological record indicates that Native Americans were farming on the plains as far back as “the time of Christ” (p. 122). Deep deposits of wind-blown soils show up in the record as well, which tells us that dust storms are a constant feature of life on the plains. During the Depression, dust storms also struck areas of the plains where native grasses had barely been disturbed. So the extent to which land-use practices of a particular moment in time exacerbated...

Reviews 247 search he has built a carefully documented, thoroughly reliable account of the exploits of the Negro cavalry between 1866 and 1891. The sheer volume of material that Leckie has assembled enforces both the great virtue and the unavoidable shortcoming of the book. Its virtue is in its compression, its inexorable record of one engagement after another during the twenty-four years that the two regiments campaigned on the Great Plains, in Western Texas, in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and the Dakotas. Its necessary shortcoming is that it cannot stop to linger for more than a paragraph or two when a trooper’s heroism wins a Congressional Medal, when troopers assist the posse that nearly captures Billy the Kid, or when Lieutenant Henry Flipper, the one Negro officer in the U. S. Army in 1882, is courtmartialed and dismissed from the service. It can give only brief chapters to the campaigns against Victorio and Geronimo. Leckie is detailed but restrained in recounting the prejudice and dis­ crimination that was “ever harrassing, hampering, and embarrassing” the efforts of the buffalo soldiers. He rightly complains that “their contributions still go largely unknown or unheralded.” But when he writes that theirs “is a record in which every American can take justifiable pride,” he seems in­ sensitive to the irony of employing Negro troops to exterminate Indian tribes for the benefit of white men who despised both dark skinned races. E v e r e tt L. Jo n e s, University of California, Los Angeles1 Western America in 1846-47: The Original Travel Diary of Lieutenant J. W. Abert who mapped New Mexico for the United States Army. Edited by John Galvin. (San Francisco, John Howell Books, 1966. 174 pages, illus., maps, $7.50.) In the years after the Lewis and Clark expedition and before the Civil War the government sent out many army expeditions on reconnaissances and surveys of the region beyond the Mississippi. These included the expeditions of Pike and Long in the first two decades of the century, and the western travels of John C. Fremont across the continental divide, into the Great Basin and beyond to the Pacific in the 1840’s. Then there were the several surveys of the 1850’s occasioned by the Pacific Railroad Act of 1853 aimed at deter­ mining the best route for a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific Coast. In that same decade was conducted the survey of the Great Sale Lake under 248 Western American Literature the leadership of Captain Howard Stansbury assisted by Lt. John W. Gunnison of tragic fame a couple of years later in connection with the railroad surveys. In 1857 the Utah expedition under Colonel Albert Sydney Johnston was mounted to quell in Utah a supposed Mormon rebellion. In 1859 Captain James H. Simpson worked out a wagon road west from Camp Floyd across the Great Basin to the Sierra. With the exception of Johnston’s army most if not all of the other surveys were under command of officers in the Corps of Topographical Engi­ neers, which in the years before the Civil War was the elite corps of the United States Army. It was expected that men trained for such activity and assigned to such duty would keep careful field notes and make reports of their expeditions. All of them did. In addition many included artists and topographers in their expeditions to record the topographical features and the flora and fauna of the country under their inspection. The result was a full reporting of the major topographical features of the great American West so little known only a handful of years before. Lt. J. W. Abert, assigned to General S. W. Kearny’s Army of the West, falling ill, was left behind to recuperate at Bent’s Fort. He arrived at Santa Fe in September 1846 after the army had gone on to California. Here he received orders to conduct a survey of New Mexico as a new possession of the United States. This task he did with much resolution and resourcefulness and under considerable hardship. It was one of the earliest and best Anglo accounts of this hitherto little known and strange land. His...

184 biography Vol. 11,No. 2 Joseph C. Porter, Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 362 pp. $29.95. John Gregory Bourke is known to generations of readers as the author of the adventure -epic On the Border with Crook, recognition that would satisfy most persons of creative bent. But not Bourke, who composed this study of a colorful frontier commander after a productive career in several non-literary fields. However, the book's popularity has had the effect of deflecting attention from Bourke's many other achievements, described collectively as works of "a life of incident." Now his comprehensive life history as revealed in Paper Medicine Man, which acknowledges Bourke's role as a popular author, is placed in the balanced context of his many other accomplishments . Through the skilled characterization oÃ- Paper Medicine Man, he surfaces as a keenly sensitive, curious, versatile man who won distinction first as a professional soldier, then as an internationally recognized ethnologist/folklorist, a frontier critic, a popularizer of late nineteenth-century revolutionary scientific doctrine, a champion of the scorned Native American, and a persuasive advocate of federal Indian policy reform. A success in each venture, he preferred to be known as a soldier-scientist. Bourke, son of Irish immigrant parents who settled in Philadelphia, began his army career at the age of sixteen, enlisting in a Pennsylvania volunteer cavalry unit for Civil War service against the Confederacy, campaigning with distinction in major engagements across the South including Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. At the close of the war he was nominated for appointment to West Point Academy. Bourke matriculated there, graduated in 1869, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Third United States cavalry. The author has cogently recreated the physical attributes and persona of this man so that the reader has the sense of knowing him—strong physically, of remarkable stamina , restless, assertive, a leader of men, perceptive, clever as a story teller and eloquent as a public speaker; it was reported that "with his charm 'he could talk the birds out of the trees'." Several officers rated him the "best story teller in the army," and these same men praised Bourke as the "bravest of the brave" in combat. Quite early in his years of active duty Bourke formed the habit of keeping detailed diaries and recording observations of frontier life. Apaches noted that he seemed always "writing, writing, writing," and named him "Paper Medicine Man." The Bourke biography plots Paper Medicine Man's military service from a beginning in New Mexico Territory during 1871 to its conclusion in Southwest Texas late in the century and details his participation in those major post-bellum incidents occurring in Western America. This fortuitous exposure to repeated grand happenings is explained largely by his assignment to the staff of General George Crook, whom the Secretary of War consistently called upon for the major frontier campaigns. Crook promptly realized the value of this young lieutenant to his command and for years held Bourke in continuous service as his aide. From an early assignment in New Mexico and Arizona territories searching for Western Apache raiders, the author reports that Bourke moved to the northern Plains to perform escort duty for the geological expedition surveying the Black Hills in 1875, a prelude to the gold rush in this hallowed Indian domain the following year. During 1876 Bourke rode with Crook's cavalry and infantry forces against the Sioux, Cheyennes , and Arapahoes in the Powder River campaign. Following combat duty in the northern Rockies and Plains, Bourke is reported to REVIEWS 185 have spent much time in the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho lodges where he interviewed Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, and other Native American leaders. He collected tribal stories including one from Cheyenne and Arapaho spokesmen claiming they were the first of the northern tribes to obtain horses, receiving them from Comanches who stole the animals from New Mexico ranchers. At about this time Bourke began submitting his notes and artifact collections to the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. This included nearly 2,000 Plains tribes pictographs. Bourke's varied assignments as Crook's aide...

This presentation will discuss historical transportation information, recommendations and available transportation data. Stocker and feeder cattle transportation in the U.S. is virtually unchanged in the last five decades. Transportation stress continues to be accepted as an important factor in the morbidity and mortality of cattle shipped to Southern Great Plains feedyards and stocker operations. Transportation research has occurred in bits and pieces that provide glimpses into mechanisms involved but in general the results are puzzle pieces that have had little influence on transportation techniques. The Electronic Logging Device (ELD) use mandate in livestock hauling will impact stocker and feeder transport to the Great Plains. The extent of which is not yet known and recent delays in implementation with concurrent “exceptions” and “adjustments” make it unclear what the future will hold for stocker and feeder cattle transportation. The Livestock Marketing Association (LMA) has in recent decades developed voluntary livestock handling and transportation training for their customers. Some of the training has been accomplished in a partnership with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). The first of these were the “Focal Point” training and “Master Transporter Guide.” More recent, NCBA has developed Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) Transportation certification training for both “Farmer/Rancher” and “Professional Drivers.” Packers have embraced this effort and the major packers currently require all drivers delivering livestock to their operations to be certified. The NCBA BQA Transportation training certification is applicable to stocker and feeder drivers hauling cattle to the Great Plains, but currently it is rare that stocker and feeder operations require drivers to have transportation certification that bring cattle to their operations. Interesting and useful data will be reviewed, such as transportation data collected from Dr. Richeson and Dr. Lawrence at West Texas A&M University. Finding examples include; cattle during transportation can take thousands of steps while on in the semi-trailer with differing number of steps and G-Forces being recorded for cattle on the top deck compared to cattle on the lower deck.

Out of the Black Patch: The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack, Folk Musician, Artist, and Writer. Edited by Noel A. Carmack and Karen Lynn Davidson. Life Writings of Frontier Women, Vol. 4. (Logan: Utah State University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xviii, 398. $29.95, ISBN 0-87421-279-0.) Effie Marquess Carmack (1885-1974) patterned her memoirs on the pioneer story of settling a frontier, struggling against adversity, and surviving. She noted of the log dog-trot cabin she lived in during her childhood in the western Kentucky tobacco region called the Black Patch, for example, that was the same type of dwelling the pioneers built when they landed in America (p. 33). Carmack wrote in vivid detail about farm life at the turn of the century. She described the never-ending labor of the men, women, and children as they planted, topped, and wormed tobacco, tended chickens, killed hogs, sewed, cooked, and made soap. Noel A. Carmack and Karen Lynn Davidson skillfully edited this autobiography based on the mimeograph provided by Elder John Carmack, Effie's grandson and the managing director of the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Carmack noted that we were used to financial calamities. Often, when [farmers] had worked all year, and made a good crop of tobacco, they got nothing for when selling time (p. 55). That was true during the early 1900s when James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company, a trust controlling the tobacco market, manipulated prices. Planters responded by organizing and night riding. Carmack does not mention the strife, although she lived in an area of intense unrest. When she was eleven the family converted to the LDS Church. They had always read the Bible and observed the Sabbath, she recalled, but not until two young Mormons came preaching did the family find a religion that fit their needs and allowed them to enjoy music and dancing, activities that brought them joy. The conversion year was one of the best in Carmack's life, but tragedy soon followed with the death of her mother and sister. Her father remarried and moved the family to Arizona. Carmack loved the West, a land of brown, red, and gold, and cut through by washes and canyons that appealed to her artistic side, but her father did not. They returned east where she married Edgar Carmack, reared their children, witnessed the death of a son who was burned in a grassfire, taught Sunday school, painted, sang, and worked. The ability to accept and find pleasure in work defined her life. She proudly claimed that have worked ever since I was old enough and I didn't mind it (p. 341). Carmack's was a life of labor, love, and endurance. Her book will appeal to a general audience, folklorists, and historians of women, the South, religion, and agriculture. Well Boys, May Jordan (1889-1914) wrote in her first diary entry in December 1912, am going to give you my experiences on buying furs through Alabama And my Adventures with animals And the history of the country . …

Native American reservations on the Northern Plains were designed like islands, intended to prevent contact or communication between various Native peoples. For this reason, they seem unlikely sources for a sense of pan-Indian community in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But as Frank Rzeczkowski shows, the flexible nature of tribalism as it already existed on the Plains subverted these goals and enabled the emergence of a collective identity even amidst the restrictiveness of reservation life. Rather than dividing people, tribalism on the Northern Plains actually served to bring Indians of diverse origins together. Tracing the development of pan-Indian identity among once-warring peoples, Rzeczkowski seeks to shift scholars' attention from cities and boarding schools to the reservations themselves. Mining letters, oral histories, and official documents--including the testimony of native leaders like Plenty Coups and Young Man Afraid of His Horses--he examines Indian communities on the Northern Plains from 1800 to 1925. Focusing on the Crow, he unravels the intricate connections that linked them to neighbouring peoples and examines how they reshaped their understandings of themselves and each other in response to the steady encroachment of American colonialism. Rzeczkowski examines Crow interactions with the Blackfeet and Lakota prior to the 1880s, then reveals the continued vitality of intertribal contact and the covert--and sometimes overt--political dimensions of visiting between Crows and others during the reservation era. He finds the community that existed on the Crow Reservation at the beginning of the twentieth century to be more deeply diverse and heterogeneous than those often described in tribal histories: a multi-ethnic community including not just Crows of mixed descent who preserved their ties with other tribes, but also other Indians who found at Crow a comfortable environment or a place of refuge. This inclusiveness prevailed until tribal leaders and OIA officials tightened the rules on who could live at--or be considered--Crow. Reflecting the latest trends in scholarship on Native Americans, Rzeczkowski brings nuance to the concept of tribalism as long understood by scholars, showing that this fluidity among the tribes continued into the early years of the reservation system. Uniting the Tribes is a ground breaking work that will change the way we understand tribal development, early reservation life, and pan-Indian identity.

Background: Asthma and hay fever have been found to be both positively and negatively associated with farming lifestyles in adulthood. Lack of congruency may depend upon early life exposure. Objective: To assess the importance of different periods of farm residency for asthma and hay fever in an adult Canadian population. Methods: We conducted a questionnaire survey in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. We assessed a history of asthma and hay fever with five categories of farm residency that were mutually exclusive: first year of life only, currently living on a farm, both first year of life and currently living on a farm, other farm living, and no farm living. Generalized estimating equations were used to adjust for clustering effects of adults within households. Results: Of the 7148 responding, 30.6% had an early farm living experience only, 34.4% had both early and current farm living experiences, while 17.4% had never lived on a farm. The overall prevalence of ever asthma and hay fever was 8.6% and 12.3%, respectively, and was higher in women. Sex modified the associations between ever asthma and hay fever with farm residency variables whereby women had a decreased risk for both asthma [adjusted odds ratio (ORadj): 0.67, 95% confidence interval (CI):0.47–0.96] and hay fever (ORadj: 0.60, 95% CI: 0.44–0.83) with an early farm exposure only. Men currently living on a farm without an early farm exposure had an increased risk for ever asthma (ORadj: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.02–3.24). Conclusion: Farm residency in the first year of life shows a protective effect for adult asthma and hay fever that appears to differ by sex.

Native and agricultural forests in the Northern Plains provide ecosystem services that benefit human society—diversified agricultural systems, forest-based products, and rural vitality. The impacts of recent trends in temperature and disturbances are impairing the delivery of these services. Climate change projections identify future stressors of greater impact, placing at risk crops, soils, livestock, biodiversity, and agricultural and forest-based livelihoods. While these native and agricultural forests are also a viable option for providing mitigation and adaptation services to the Northern Plains, they themselves must be managed in terms of climate change risks. Because agricultural forests are planted systems, the primary approaches for reducing risks are through design, plant selection and management. For native forests, management, natural disturbances, and collaboration of multiple ownerships will be needed to address key risks.

Reviews Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains. By Helen Winter Stauffer. (Lin­ coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 322 pages, $22.50.) Mari Sandoz’s life makes for a classic American story. The scrawny, lonely, eldest daughter of immigrant parents, she grew up on the Nebraska frontier, forming “close emotional ties with the prairie, the bluffs, and the river,” hiding behind the stove to overhear the stories told by her eccentric father, Old Jules, and his Indian friends, stories which would become the foundation for her understanding of plains culture and history. As inde­ pendent, stubborn, and even cantankerous as her father, the major influence on her imagination, she rebelled against the restrictions he set upon her as a woman to make herself into a writer, teacher, and scholar, largely self-taught and eventually acknowledged as a foremost western historian. Always carry­ ing with her a sense of being an outsider, a visionary response to the land, and the psychic scars of her violent childhood, Sandoz explored in her best work her “emotional identification” with a region and a people. The forces which shaped her character also shaped her understanding of American history, as Helen Stauffer shows in her long-awaited biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains. Stauffer focuses on “the author’s life as it relates to her work.” Based on ten years of research as meticulous as that of Sandoz herself, including work with previously unexamined archival materials, Story Catcher of the Plains is tight and lively, gracefully integrating a wealth of information about Sandoz’s professional life, attitudes, and work habits with close discussions of her work. While Stauffer cannot expand greatly upon Sandoz’s own treatment of her early life in Old Jules, she has much to say about the influences on her writing during her formative years in Lincoln. She shows the genesis of her major works and the interrelations among them, traces her sources and explores her research methods, examines her repeated problems with her publishers, and details her awards and the critical reception of her writing. Stauffer empha­ sizes certain crucial themes and concerns like Sandoz’s efforts to de-bunk western myths, to present the Indian point of view, or to preserve historical materials in connection with several of her works at different times in her life. Believing that Sandoz’sprose contributes as much asher historical insights and her careful research to her stature as a writer, Stauffer is particularly perceptive when she analyzes stylistic innovations and shows how they grew from Sandoz’s sense of human experience. She discusses, for instance, how Sandoz conceived of Love Song of the Plains as a series of tall tales which would express the fantastic stories of the region. While acknowledging the 240 Western American Literature book’s lyricism, Stauffer quotes Sandoz as saying that she hopes some of her “written with barbed wire on sandpaper” style remains. Chronicling one of Sandoz’s many stylistic arguments with her publishers, Stauffer recounts an anecdote where Sandoz called an editor an “hadophile” : “ ‘one who has a mania for the word had and sticks it into prose like telegraph poles along a railroad right of way.’” Stauffer’s analysis of Sandoz’s efforts to recapture stylistically the Indian point of view is especially eloquent: Noting the copy editor’s aversion to her use of participial forms, Mari pointed out that although people from villages and cities tend to drop those forms from their vocabulary, persons who are aware of the continuous changes of life use the -ing form. The Indians, she said, were the extremists, particularly the Cheyennes, who had a pervading sense of the present, as their names often indicated: Flying Hawk, Sitting Man — even Dull Knife, which, translated literally, means Knife-that-isn’t-cutting. Participial forms are indispensible to this sense of life as a continuous thing, an endless, flow­ ing stream, Mari argued, and for that reason she objected to the editor’s attempt to eliminate them. While she looks most closely at what she calls Sandoz’s public image, Stauffer brings her subject to life through colorful personal details about her apartments, where filing boxes covered kitchen counters and chairs...

In a moving short story entitled 'Internee Julius Caesar', the Austrian journalist Carl Weiselberger writes about the impact of internment on detainees held in a Canadian prison camp during the Second World War. To counter the monotony of camp life — which includes the choice between attending yet another lecture about the history of the homing pigeon in the recreation lounge, or the use of the compress in natural healing in the dining room — the internees decide to play a theatrical guessing game which, with a veiled allusion to Franz Kafka, they call 'Changing Identities' (Sichverwandeln).1 Two internees leave the room, while the rest assign well-known personae to them; on their return, each of the two internees is secretly told about the other's identity, and the point of the exercise is that each has to try to uncover their own identity by interrogating the other, who also drops hints. The story recounts how the men, once they have all had their turn, draw into the game the inconspicuous and reluctant New Age internee No. 801, a man who believes in metempsychosis and is convinced that in an earlier life he was both a priest of the Astarte cult, and Julius Caesar. The men have deliberately decided to make No. 801 guess that he is indeed Julius Caesar. After several mistaken attempts — the Roman greeting of the raised arm, provided as a hint, does not mean that he is Mussolini — internee No. 801 finally guesses that he must be Julius Caesar.

The area of native prairie known as the Great Plains once extended from Canada to the Mexican border and from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to western Indiana and Wisconsin. Today the declines in prairie landscape types, estimated to be as high as 99%, exceed those of any other major ecosystem in North America. The overwhelming loss of landscape and accompanying loss of species constitute a real threat to both ecological and human economic health.Prairie is a comprehensive examination of the history, ecology, and current status of North American grasslands. It presents for the first time in a single volume information on the historical, economic, and cultural significance of prairies, their natural history and ecology, threats, and conservation and restoration programs currently underway. Chapters cover: environmental history of the Great Plains the economic value of prairie prairie types -- tallgrass, mixed grass, shortgrass, wetlands -- and the ecological processes that sustain each type prairie fauna -- invertebrates, fish and other aquatic creatures, amphibians and reptiles, birds, and mammals conservation programs such as the Great Plains Partnership, Canada's Prairie Conservation Action Plan, the U.S. Prairie Pothole Joint Venture, and others The book brings together knowledge and insights from a wide range of experts to describe and explain the importance of prairies and to position them in the forefront of North American conservation efforts. Praire is an essential reference for anyone interested in prairie ecology and conservation and will play a critical role in broadening our awareness and understanding of prairie ecosystems.

Reviewed by: Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains by David Danbom R. Douglas Hurt (bio) Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains. By David Danbom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. x+ 129. $44.95/$19.95. Americans have always been a how-to-do-it people. This book is a how-it-was-done history of farm making in the Great Plains. It is conceptually well framed, with chapters about land acquisition, establishing farms, acquiring credit, and creating communities, among other topics. Historians of the Great Plains know about these general subjects, but this study provides a solidly researched, clearly written survey of how people made farms in the region, one that goes beyond well-known generalities. The area of the Great Plains under study here primarily emphasizes developments in present-day Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota. David Danbom is a leading historian of rural America, and his knowledge of the region helps us better understand the role of the environment, government, and economic institutions that influenced the success or failure of settlement in the Great Plains. Danbom first discusses the multiplicity of ways that settlers acquired land, such as by homesteading, preemption, and purchase from state governments, railroads, and speculators. This discussion helps the reader learn how buyers located land, paid fees, acquired “first papers,” and proved up, as well as about matters of commutation, relinquishments, and deficiency judgments. Danbom notes that settlers purchased as much as 80 percent of the land acquired rather than obtaining it free under the terms of the Homestead Act, and that they did so for good reasons. This discussion should end all romantic thoughts about westward expansion and homesteading. Readers will learn how settlers built a sod house and confronted grasshoppers, cinch bugs, and prairie fires. Danbom notes that settlers broke only about 30 percent of the Great Plains for crops and that farm families needed about $1,000 in hand to support their first year on the land. The need for cash and credit to purchase land, equipment, seed, livestock, and home-building supplies proved a significant challenge for early settlers. Women helped pay the bills with egg and butter money or by exchange for needed goods at country stores. Danbom makes a particularly significant contribution by helping us understand how credit worked for farmers, both in getting loans and repaying them. He clarifies the nuances of short- and long-term credit and mortgages. Borrowers might receive only 80 percent or less on a loan after various fees were deducted, but they still had a high interest rate on the full principal, an issue that helped fuel the Populist revolt. Banks, insurance companies, and moneylenders—that is, investors and speculators—aided and sometimes proved detrimental to farm making. Settlers brought their culture and institutions with them. Community building reflected ethnicity, religion, and custom. Churches gave settlers a [End Page 982] sense of social and cultural security. The establishment of public schools indicated a commitment to education and provided gathering places that, in turn, helped foster new local institutions. Danbom’s discussion of town site selection shows that railroads could make or break town development, and here we learn why. He cogently notes that “settlement of the Great Plains was not an event but a process” (p. 95). Settlers came and went, some got richer, some were disillusioned. Immigrants were more likely to stay, but persistence remained uncertain. Communities changed over time, but the settlement of the Great Plains, Danbom contends, is an “American success story” (p. 107). It epitomizes how hard work, commitment, and institutional, corporate, and government support enabled men and women to adapt and prosper within the parameters of a harsh environment. This book is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it provides a succinct overview of settlement and community building in the Great Plains. Second, it is a synthesis that includes little-known aspects of the farm-making process. Third, it is well conceived and insightfully written. In sum, it is an excellent study that should be widely adopted for courses on the Great Plains and American West. R. Douglas Hurt R. Douglas Hurt is professor and...