With Good Intentions: Quaker Work Among the Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas in the 1870s by Clyde A. Milner II

Abstract

Reviews 361 Mogen’s analysis of the West as cultural myth will not appeal to everyone. Those who adhere to the conventional wisdom that the American West and Outer Space are unique and basically not comparable will not find much merit in Mogen’s point. Those willing to admit that the West is at least as much a creation of the American as the American of the West, will find Wilderness Visions a convincing study. JAMES K. FOLSOM University of Colorado With Good Intentions: Quaker Work Among the Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas in the 1870s. By Clyde A. Milner II. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 238 pages, $21.50.) With Good Intentions is a highly specialized study: it deals with the work of only one branch (Hicksite) of one religious denomination (Quaker) with three Indian groups (Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas) in only one decade (the 1870s) in one state (Nebraska). Consequently, the appeal of Milner’s book appears to be severely limited — mainly to historians interested in specific areas of Indian-white relationships in the West. Yet what Milner’s study offers, because rather than in spite of its close focus and careful, detailed research, is something of far greater importance. The book shows precisely what went wrong with Indian policy after the Civil War. The heart of the matter, not only for Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas but for most apparently “settled” Indians west of the Mississippi, was a wellintentioned but ultimately tragic assumption held by both secular and religious white leaders. This assumption, central in Western European and American cultural mythology as well as in governmental Indian policy, held that diversi­ fied subsistence farming was the proper means of survival for once “wild” Indians. As one Quaker wrote in 1877, “Agricultural life is the grand panacea for all nomadsf;] anchor them to the soil, make the cultivation of it profitable to them, and they will . . . gather around them all the comforts and conven­ iences of civilized life.” The enormous irony of this assumption lies in the painful and clearly observable failure of white farmers who, even with their extensive agricultural heritage, couldn’t make a go of farming on the central plains in the 1870s. In addition to showing the sad results of agricultural assumptions when applied to Nebraska Indians in the 1870s, With Good Intentions shows how government-Quaker cooperation relied on an illusion of Indian-Quaker cooperation in the colonial past, how white reformers failed to understand tribal differences among the Indians they wanted to help, how good intentions were essentially blind to matters of culture, how local white interests could foul up even the most knowledgeable of good intentions, and how the reform­ ing zeal of Carl Schurz (as Secretary of the Interior after 1877) only made 362 Western American Literature matters worse for Nebraska Indians. The book also shows how Quaker paci­ fism, though noble in theory, rendered Quaker officials absolutely helpless to prevent other Indians (especially Sioux) from raiding those tribes under government control in eastern Nebraska. The terrible event known as Mas­ sacre Canyon, where over fifty Pawnees (including a majority of women and children) were killed by raiding Oglalas in 1873, serves as the most obvious evidence of this problem. Milner’s book does not deal in any manner with western American litera­ ture. But it does portray the disturbing context of Indian-white affairs within which much western literature is set. The fact of “good intentions,” much the same as those which would produce the Dawes Act in 1887, rather than Custer-like military conflict, suggests the extent of the irony here. WILLIAM BLOODWORTH East Carolina University Frank Matsura, Frontier Photographer. By JoAnn Roe. Introduction by Murray Morgan. (Seattle: Madrona Publishers, 1981. 144 pages, $27.50.) Frank Matsura arrived in the small town of Conconully in north-central Washington in 1903. He died of tuberculosis ten years later — June 16, 1913 — in the neighboring town of Okanogan. He arrived a Stranger, according to Murray Morgan, the first Japanese in town — lured by an advertisement for a job as a cook’s helper and laundryman. But he arrived also wearing a suit, white shirt, tie, and hat, and sporting a camera...