Dakota Territory Research Articles

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Interview with Jon Lauck

Interview with Jon Lauck

Crow Dog’s Trial and Ledger Drawing: Cultural Production and Tribal Nation in the Maw of the American Empire

Abstract The 1882 trial of Crow Dog (Kangi Súŋka), for the murder in 1881 of Spotted Tail (Siŋté Glešká), a leader of the Sicangu/Brulé Lakota, had all of the hallmarks of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century celebrity trial. People came for miles around Deadwood, Dakota Territory and far-flung parts to the west in order to attend the trial and rub shoulders with the participants. From the point of view of government officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs who engineered the trial, the goal was to wrest criminal jurisdiction from Indian governments on reservations. A number of drawings on paper, “ledger drawings,” produced by Crow Dog and other Lakota participants engulfed in the trial and related activities, show another colonial process at work—the appropriation and resignification of the Native voice within the public sphere. The confluence of national, regional, and local events swirling around Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and the legal case that becomes Ex-parte Crow Dog before the Supreme Court, resituates the historical significance of this genre of “Captivity Ledgers” both for Lakota and settler sensibilities during the post-Civil War and early reservation era.

Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853–1934: Reluctant Warrior by Armand S. La Potin

Reviewed by: Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853–1934: Reluctant Warrior by Armand S. La Potin James Bailey Blackshear Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853–1934: Reluctant Warrior. By Armand S. La Potin. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. 228. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In this biography, historian Armand S. La Potin details the life of a consummate military man of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hugh Lenox Scott was born in Kentucky in the middle of the nineteenth century. His father, an educator and minister, died when he was eight. His mother then moved the family to New Jersey, where his grandfather, principal of the Princeton Theological Seminary, helped to shape Scott’s early years. La Potin points out that Scott’s growing up within this literate and well-connected family paid many dividends. Using numerous family letters, military correspondence, and government records, La Potin chronicles Scott’s rise from West Point cadet to military governor of the Sulu Archipelago during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. The author also details Scott’s time in 1870s Dakota Territory, his interactions with Fort Sill Comanches, and his experiences as an officer during the Spanish-American War. The last half of the book looks at his military service during the twentieth century. Under Woodrow Wilson, Scott served as both acting secretary of war and army chief of staff. In the process of covering this soldier’s career, La Potin details Scott’s role in every major event in which the U.S. military was involved between 1877 and 1918. At the same time, as the subtitle indicates, this is less a history of tactics and battles than of one man’s earnest attempt at diplomacy and relationship-building. In clear narrative style, La Potin begins by following Scott away from West Point to the northern Great Plains. His posting to the Seventh Cavalry occurred soon after Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn. Under Colonel Nelson Miles, he was involved in the campaigns to reign in the remaining Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho who refused to live on reservations. Here, La Potin puts in place the theme that runs throughout the work: no matter what period or event, Scott was always interested in avoiding conflict and promoting peace among the peoples he was sent subjugate. At the same time, the author is quick to point out the contradictory challenges involved in such an undertaking. Another thread throughout is how Scott’s powerful East Coast connections helped to facilitate his rise within the army hierarchy. This, combined with his own ability to connect with his peers as well as the different cultures with which he came into contact helps illustrate his rise from frontier diplomat to military administrator. One of Scott’s longest postings was to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. There, the defeated Comanche and Kiowa held many of the same grievances and presented the same challenges that he had had to work through with the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Nez Percé from his earlier posts. While in Indian [End Page 133] Territory, he dealt with the implementation of the Dawes Act, corrupt government agents, greedy merchants, Chiricahua Apache resettlement, and the Oklahoma Land Run. Land issues and Scott’s interactions with Quanah Parker are detailed here, as are his constant battles with local and national politicians, federal bureaucrats, and War Department supervisors. Later chapters on the Spanish American War highlight Scott’s time as Leonard Wood’s chief of staff and adjutant general. His relationship with the irascible Wood is expertly detailed, as is his subsequent role as the military governor of the Sulu Archipelago. Here, among a majority Muslim population, his skills as a negotiator are put to task. La Potin does not shy from the obvious. Scott’s attempts to ingratiate himself within a variety of subjugated societies reveals that his empathetic nature and efforts to do good were shot through with a paternalism that impacted every decision he made, whether interacting with the Sioux or the Moros. Such insight is found throughout this book. While reading this biography I could not help but liken Hugh Lennox Scott to the fictional Forrest Gump. From Red Cloud to Teddy Roosevelt, Quanah...

Little Drought on the Prairie

Little Drought on the Prairie Barbara Mayes Boustead (bio) For seven years there had been too little rain. The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land had to be mortgaged, for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was no harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed. —Rose Wilder Lane, On the Way Home1 author laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), born in Wisconsin, lived in Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota (Dakota Territory) in the course of her childhood, settling in Missouri for most of her adult life. In this essay, I approach the topic of drought in the life and literature of Laura Ingalls Wilder through the lens of my experience as a meteorologist, with thirteen years of experience forecasting weather in the central Plains of the United States, and as a climatologist, in addition to experience as a Laura Ingalls Wilder scholar and researcher. As readers of the Little House book series know, Wilder's historical fiction explores the homestead settlement era of the late 1800s through Wilder's eyes, chronicling the Ingalls family's migratory life in the central United States during her childhood. Wilder documented many weather and climate events in her books, often with stunning accuracy (Boustead et al.). Through the course of her series, Wilder documents a range of weather- and climate-related events: blizzards and tragically difficult winter conditions (On the Banks of Plum Creek, The Long Winter, These Happy Golden Years), extreme cold (Farmer Boy, These Happy Golden Years), tornadoes (These Happy Golden Years), hail storms (The First Four Years), grass fires (Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, The First Four Years), a locust infestation (On the Banks of Plum Creek), and floods (On the Banks of Plum Creek, The Long Winter). This essay focuses on her depiction of drought in On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) and The First Four Years (1971), as well as references to drought in her travel journal, published as On the Way Home (1962). The meteorology community has defined drought rather loosely, compared to other meteorological events, as a period of abnormally dry weather, of short or long duration, that causes a hydrological imbalance ("Drought") that has an impact (Wilhite and Glantz 9). A drought can last for a month or for decades, over small swaths of land or large. In our modern era, meteorologists and climatologists track drought by analyzing precipitation—and sometimes temperature—observations, satellite vegetative health, and objective and subjective impact reports. In the era of homesteading in the central United States, when homesteaders had comparatively brief lived experiences or observations in their new home areas and were unlikely to deeply [End Page 14] consider the input of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, any relative dryness could have been labelled a drought, even if it would not qualify as such by today's standards. Droughts drove the migration of the Ingalls and Wilder families at least three times. The first of these migrations was from Walnut Grove, Minnesota (near the titular Plum Creek), to Burr Oak, Iowa, in 1876. Although Burr Oak was left out of the "Little House" narrative, the Ingalls family spent a year there after failing to thrive on their Plum Creek farm. The Ingalls family arrived at their Walnut Grove farm in 1874, the same year that witnessed the first season of Rocky Mountain locust infestation to reach Minnesota in the 1870s. The locusts had followed unusually warm and dry weather from the central Plains, especially Kansas and Nebraska, then migrated into Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. Waves of the airborne locusts dropped into these areas, stripping vegetation and consuming cloth, leather, and other soft materials. They also laid eggs, ensuring a new wave of locusts would spread onward. While other pioneers described a hot summer followed by a dry fall as "grasshopper weather" (Lockwood), Wilder attaches the label "grasshopper weather...

Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park

Reviewed by: Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park Elizabeth Bush Park, Linda Sue Prairie Lotus. Clarion, 2020 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-328-78150-5 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-358-33083-7 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 It’s 1880, and ever since her Chinese mother died two years ago, Hanna Edmunds and her white father have moved increasingly eastward from Los Angeles, hounded along by anti-Chinese bigotry. Papa believes they will finally take root in LaForge, Dakota Territory, an up-and-coming railroad town supervised by a fair-minded justice of the peace. They do successfully find lodging while Papa’s dry goods store is under construction, but Hanna’s longed-for tenure at the one-room schoolhouse is a mixed success: most other students are withdrawn from attendance when she arrives, and the teacher quietly brokers a compromise solution by helping fourteen-year-old Hanna graduate early. Hanna’s next challenge is to become the dressmaker her mother trained her to be, overcoming local prejudices, her father’s tight protection, and also some of his deeply private misgivings that she never suspected. Park writes in her author’s note that Hanna’s story is “an attempt at a painful reconciliation” between the Laura Ingalls Wilder books she loved as a child (LaForge is based on Wilder’s De Smet, South Dakota) and her awareness, even sensed as a child, of the systemic racism that rears up throughout the Little House series (much as Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House, BCCB 7/99, is a Native response to Wilder’s work). In this accessible exploration of a biracial teen’s prairie year, Park invites fellow Wilder fans to consider the struggle for respect and independence roiling beneath the iconic sunbonnet. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Early Internal Control Practices in the United States Army and the Evolution of Internal Control Practices in Businesses

ABSTRACTThis research analyzes, via an examination of documents from a frontier fort, Fort Abercrombie, Dakota Territory, the internal controls the U.S. Army had in place in the mid-1800s. Findings include: (1) that there are controls in place that safeguard assets, encourage efficient and effective use of funds, and comply with appropriations passed by the U.S. Congress; (2) the army's control system is similar in nature to the effective control system identified by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission; and (3) the army contributed to the evolution of internal controls in business.

Forts on Burial Mounds: Interlocked Landscapes of Mourning and Colonialism at the Dakota-Settler Frontier, 1860–1876

During the 19th century, the U.S. government took ownership of Dakota homelands in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, leading to increasingly violent conflicts and decades of war. Military and militia forts were built at the physical boundaries of contested space to push “hostiles” west and to protect European American settlers. Fort Wadsworth, constructed in South Dakota during the 1864 Dakota Campaign, and Fort Juelson, built in 1876 by Norwegian immigrants during an “Indian scare” in Minnesota, were both knowingly constructed on top of burial mounds, appropriating and reshaping sacred Native American landscapes into protective enclosures for the dominating, yet fearful, colonizers. Aerial laser scanning, geophysical survey, and historical research explore the archaeological expression and significance of these interlocked landscapes at geographic and cognitive frontiers.

Sleepwalking Slowly: Kat Eng and the Feminist Art of Living Labor in Common Time

Sleepwalking Slowly:Kat Eng and the Feminist Art of Living Labor in Common Time Kelly I. Chung (bio) It is a frigid day in New York City, and KAT ENG, a multimedia artist and activist based in Minnesota on Anishinaabe and Dakota territory, is sitting in front of H&M's flagship store in Times Square (Fig. 1). Wearing nothing more than a short-sleeved polo shirt, a long-sleeved undershirt, loose pants, a beanie, and a dust mask, she is hunched over a makeshift station, sewing on a machine that is propped up on a green plastic crate. Both hands are directly out in front of her as she performs the same repetitive motion over and over again. While her right hand is steadily running the spinning wheel, her left hand is holding down and sliding the product—her daily wage in dollar bills. For a span of eight hours, she sits, sewing slowly and meticulously without bathroom or stretch breaks.1 Before us, Eng stands in as a worker and animates the process of labor otherwise invisible to us and kept within the walls of the factory, tightly linking her presence as a worker to the clothes on sale in the retail store behind her. Although it is difficult to make out her face, she may resemble someone in our own lives who works on an assembly line, or one of the countless racialized women at work featured across news outlets and documentaries that [End Page 601] provide glimpses into global factories. While she embodies physical attributes typically associated with Asian women—most notably stamina, discipline, docility, and dexterity—her speed of production is slow, lagging in contrast to capitalist demands for productivity as well as notions of Asian labor as excessively efficient.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Kat Eng, Less than Three. New York, New York. January 17, 2014. Photo by Kyle Depew. Courtesy of the artist. Yet, Eng's slowness invokes neither a slowing down nor a refusal of work akin to autonomist Marxism's anti- and post-work politics, which insists on more unproductive time beyond work for rest, play, and idleness.3 Rather than focusing on a reprieve from, a refusal of, or an end to work—though all necessary—this essay centers this performance art piece by Kat Eng, whose slowness brings our attention to the racialized and feminized worker who remains at work ongoingly. I approach slowness, in this performance, as an aesthetic practice that is counterintuitive, attuning spectators to a feminist temporality that is oriented not toward a grand break from the conditions of low-wage flexible labor but toward remaining at work within it.4 Her performance counters a rich history of feminist performance art, particularly during the 1960s and '70s, that aimed to prompt women to get up, break out, and join the fight to reclaim women's time and subjectivity beyond work.5 As Rebecca Schneider explains, the feminist endeavor within this tradition has "long labored in the effort to wake sleepwalkers—to incite active subjects where patriarchal worldviews had calcified passive objects."6 The figure of the sleepwalker is not only feminized but also, though not directly stated, racialized. We may be reminded here of the ways racialized and feminized bodies, and Asian women more specifically, are perceived as inherently passive, polite, apolitical, and servile—always willing to work and thereby too slow to wake up and catch [End Page 602] up to proper feminist politics. As such, "they occupy the time of the after," as Summer Kim Lee astutely notes, appearing "to have arrived late to politics" or, as we will see in this performance, to have yet to arrive to it (or never at all).7 If proper feminism—as practiced by the tradition and, by extension, second-wave feminists of the time—incites and inhabits an active stance toward a liberatory end to work, this essay underscores a feminist stance that is seemingly inactive and passive—not yet awake to join the fight against work. In what follows, I turn to Eng's Less than Three (2014) to explore what appearing to remain passive might enable within the scene...

Guest Editor's Introduction: Reconsidering Civil War Veterans

Guest Editor's IntroductionReconsidering Civil War Veterans Susannah J. Ural, Guest Editor (bio) In 2015, James Marten, Brian Matthew Jordan, Barbara Gannon, and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh offered broad analyses of veterans within a national and global context in this journal's first special issue on veterans. Their work reflected a strong body of scholarship that has continued to grow and enrich our understanding of veterans' readjustment to civilian life, the challenges they faced as their age advanced and their health declined, and the battles they waged over how their service would be remembered and who would tell that story. But for all of this rich scholarship, significant holes and flawed interpretations remain in our work on veterans, which this special issue seeks to fill. Scholars are well versed, for example, in the tensions that existed between northern civilians and Union soldiers who came home. But how did this relationship collapse? It began with eager, devoted aid workers volunteering time, energy, and capital to the plight of the soldier; with civilians raising funds for hospitals and supplies; with parades and meals prepared for men heading off to war. It ended in deeply entrenched resentment and miscommunication. That disconnect inspired Sarah Gardner's article, which opens this issue. What caused such angst and such—from our perspective—coldness in civilian activists devoted to veterans in need? One source of that friction, Gardner observes, is Americans' talent for honoring their battlefield dead and their habitual failure to care for soldiers who survive. Victorian concerns over the degrading influence of charity partly explains this failure, Gardner agrees, but her close study of a Pennsylvania chapter of the U.S. Sanitary Commission reveals something more. These were not simply Gilded Age reformers frowning at veterans who failed to meet society's expectations. Relief workers truly struggled to reconcile their drive to uplift with their compulsion to maintain a stable society, but in the end, they sacrificed empathy in the name of stability. By examining the metamorphosis of soldier to veteran—a puzzling process when, in the cases of most Confederates, there was no formal [End Page 1] demobilization—Caroline Janney's essay spotlights another gap in our understanding of veterans. Janney follows the soldiers of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia from Appomattox Court House through the post-surrender period, tracing moments of continued military order and discipline as soldier-veterans journeyed home as companies and even brigades. But that discipline was tenuous and often went unenforced by officers who, Janney observes, had no official authority and who, along with their men, resented the myriad symbols of what Union victory wrought: the unraveling of slavery, debilitating poverty, and armed occupation by both white and black Union soldiers. Kurt Hackemer shifts our attention to Dakota Territory as he seeks to understand what drove veterans west after their Civil War service. Scholars have tied this movement to military service, but until now there has been little evidence to support such claims. Through a close statistical analysis of a special census of more than six thousand veterans, he finds that some men were escaping lingering wartime trauma after especially hard service, but in other veterans, Hackemer uncovers patterns of mobility that started before the war. In these cases, prewar experiences affected veterans' postwar lives as much as their military service. We should not, Hackemer warns, grant too much causation to a war that was a brief, though exceptionally intense, period of a veteran's life. Mississippi's Confederate home—known as "Beauvoir"—inspired my own essay. Beauvoir challenges historians' understanding of Confederate veteran facilities as places where aging men sat in fading gray uniforms, isolated from society, and waiting to die. That flawed narrative is the result of an overreliance on a Lost Cause framework to interpret these homes. My close analysis of the gender and racial diversity of Beauvoir's residents and administrators at this state-funded, state-run facility reveal that New South modernization and segregation shaped Beauvoir just as much as its Lost Cause roots. Ian Isherwood closes this special issue with a review essay that brings two fields awash in veteran studies in conversation with one another. In a...

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Reviewed by: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser John E. Miller Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. 625 pp. $35.00. Weighing in at 515 pages of text and eighty-six pages of notes, Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prizewinning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is large physically and large in its ambitions. Benefitting from a successful rollout of favorable reviews and media interviews, the book has garnered numerous awards and plaudits and rightfully so. Fraser’s industrious research shines through in her footnotes and in the increased detail she is able to furnish on a number of issues and topics surrounding Wilder’s life and writings. Her felicitous writing style keeps the pages turning and readers asking for more. She is riding a wave of recent interest in the subject, especially the 2014 release of Wilder’s previously unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Pioneer Girl,” which served as a resource for her and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, when they collaborated in producing the Little House novels of children’s literature fame. Fraser, like other writers before her, understands that any biography of Wilder must necessarily be a dual study of mother and daughter, who were tethered together by family circumstance and authorial ambition. Some readers and commentators have balked at the frequently critical take Fraser presents on Lane, but, for the most part, her treatment of the mercurial short-story writer, essayist, novelist, and eventually political theorist rings true to my way of thinking. Much more difficult to assess, because the traces she left behind were relatively meager, is the life of her mother, who turned out to become one of American’s most beloved children’s novelists. Lacking evidence on Wilder’s life at a number of points, Fraser does not hesitate to speculate, and in many cases her guesses and musings are plausible and [End Page 216] suggestive. Instances of this include comments on her father’s avoidance of military service during the Civil War, the possibility that her sister Mary’s blindness helped Laura develop an unsentimental voice, and so forth. In other cases, her conjectures are less convincing. Trying to read too much into family photographs, for instance, can be an interesting exercise, but also a hazardous one. Too often, Fraser implies that she is breaking new ground in addressing questions, such as the comparative contributions each woman made to the writing of the books, something that has been hashed and rehashed numerous times. Some reviewers seem to have been overly influenced by advertising for the book suggesting that previous researchers had not already addressed or settled a number of questions. More serious, however, is Fraser’s effort to establish two major points, which constitute her overarching claims for novelty in approaching her subject. This is not to detract from the generally effective and persuasive presentation she makes generally throughout the book, but it appears that in seeking to present a bold new thesis or theses, Fraser has been too ready to venture beyond the evidence. Her contention that Wilder’s childhood was horrible and that her memories of it were hellish is contradicted by the author’s highly positive statements about her growing-up years when she took the opportunity to talk about it and by the fact that life on the midwestern frontier during the late 1800s was generally challenging and hazardous. In asking how good or bad Wilder’s life was within her childhood environment, one is compelled to ask, “Compared to what?” A more troubling contention is that the family’s moving out into eastern Dakota Territory—the locus of half of the novels—was “one of the biggest boondoggles of them all” and that the area should never have been settled by agriculturalists. Evidence presented for this assertion is thin and strained and unlikely to convince many objective inquirers. Nevertheless, Prairie Fires is a welcome addition to the Wilder library, deepens our understanding of Wilder, Lane, and their times, will be bound to provoke continuing discussion, and takes its place as an essential read for anyone interested in the subject. [End Page 217] John E. Miller...

Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 by Harvey Markowitz

Reviewed by: Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 by Harvey Markowitz Michael F. Steltenkamp S.J Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916. By Harvey Markowitz. [The Civilization of the American Indian, Volume 277.] (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 303. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8061-5985-0.) Popularly known as “Sioux,” the Lakota today live on nine reservations in South Dakota and several others in Canada and the United States. The Sicangu division (formerly referred to as the “Brulé”) occupy the Rosebud Reservation. This study addresses a range of subjects that affected these people and the Indian world as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chapters cover “Federal-Indian relations,” Grant’s “peace policy,” Bishop Marty’s stewardship of the Dakota Territory, his interaction with the controversial Father Francis Craft, and his enlisting German-born nuns and priests to staff St. Francis Mission. Apart from the challenging terrain upon which the people were scattered, efforts to establish Church presence at Rosebud were hampered by “acts of God,” anti-Catholic sentiments harbored by government officials, lack of funds, and the resistance of some to the missionary message. Clergy, agents, and diverse Lakota citizens (notably Spotted Tail) come to life via diary accounts and government documents. Concluding chapters report the [End Page 173] interaction of diverse actors during a turbulent time of culture-contact. Readers might negatively interpret church initiatives as “cultural imperialism” or, more positively, a form of “interfaith dialogue” apropos conditions of the time. Accounts substantiate these conflicting perceptions—their legacy being an Indian population that today both sustains Christian practice and avoids it. That legacy reveals an array of religious practitioners among contemporary Rosebud Lakota. One now finds conventional Catholics, non “churchgoers,” those who have grafted Christian thought onto native antecedents, and those who consider themselves “pipe carriers” (i.e., persons identifying with a pre-reservation religious identity). In short, Markowitz presents an early-reservation milieu that was the seedbed of contending religious perspectives still present a century later. The author surprisingly charges the legendary Jesuit explorer, Pierre De Smet, as being ethnocentric. This conflicts with the much-noted respect that was accorded him within Lakota country of the mid-nineteenth century (chronicled in biographies of the man). Similarly, the author’s emphasis on people’s resistance to baptism begs reconciliation with images of De Smet busily baptizing numerous souls when visiting Lakota who eagerly sought his blessing. By the same token, this illustrates the challenge which scholars face when trying to understand a complicated socio-religious landscape of the past. For example, as the Indian revitalization movement got traction in the late twentieth century, activists and writers popularized a plaint that Markowitz echoes. He writes that the Sicangu would find it “absurd” to abandon their beliefs and practices “for the ways and teachings of a wanikiye (lifegiver) named Jesus” (p. 182). The problem with this observation is that throughout Lakota country of the early-reservation period, the Ghost Dance was widely popular—its central doctrine being that Jesus would come again—this time, to Indian people. To what extent his return would meld or replace old and new practices never materialized. However, embrace of the Ghost Dance shows a people’s desire for sacred revelation—whatever its source and tenets. Theirs was not a one-dimensional parochialism that contemporary observers so often associate with a native religious perspective. Marquette University is the repository of diaries cited in Converting the Rosebud. It alone should beckon readers to visit Milwaukee and read the captivating accounts not included within the text. Markowitz’s contribution is that he introduces readers to these diaries, and by doing so reveals the complex world of culture contact as it bore upon religion. Inquiring minds will want to find greater clarity on this topic, and so should be grateful to Converting the Rosebud for sparking interest in this quest. [End Page 174] Michael F. Steltenkamp S.J Wheeling Jesuit University Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press

Union Veteran Migration Patterns to the Frontier: The Case of Dakota Territory

Recent scholarship argues that newly minted veterans of the American Civil War found reintegration into civilian life difficult, and that their wartime experiences led many to migrate away from their antebellum communities, often to the frontier. However, closer examination of almost 6,000 veterans who settled in Dakota Territory reveals that they had been mobile their entire lives rather than only after the war, that they had been pushing westward before the war even faster than veterans in general, and that their westward momentum continued at a faster pace after the war. In addition, their wartime experience included longer service and more exposure to combat trauma than most Union soldiers. This sizable group was distinctly different from the larger body of veterans that the current scholarship has over-generalized, highlighting the need for more regional studies.

Outlaw Dakota: The Murderous Times and Criminal Trials of Frontier Judge Peter C. Shannon by Wayne Fanebust

Reviewed by: Outlaw Dakota: The Murderous Times and Criminal Trials of Frontier Judge Peter C. Shannon by Wayne Fanebust Hon. Mark C. Dillon Outlaw Dakota: The Murderous Times and Criminal Trials of Frontier Judge Peter C. Shannon. By Wayne Fanebust. Sioux Falls: Center for Western Studies, 2016. ix + 380 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index. $14.00 paper. Aficionados of books about the history of the Old West will enjoy every page of Outlaw Dakota. Wayne Fanebust owns right, title, and deed to all things early Dakota. Fanebust describes the rough and tumble development of the Dakota Territory in the 1870s and 1880s by focusing on the integral role of its courts during that time. In particular, Fanebust describes the trials presided over by Dakota chief judge Peter C. Shannon as a common thread around which many Dakota stories are weaved. Tying together the Shannon trials, and Dakota's maturation toward statehood, is an interesting book concept that "works" for the reader, as Dakota courts were intertwined with the politics, crime, corruption, greed, vigilantism, business interests, and governance of the region. Judge Shannon presided over some historically well known trials, such as that of Jack McCall for the murder of "Wild Bill" Hickok, committed during a card game at Deadwood on August 2, 1876. McCall was found guilty of the murder by a jury and hanged. Another well-known trial (and retrial) was that of a banker, Peter Wintermute, for the murder of retired General Edwin McCook. Wintermute's shooting of McCook arose out of personal animosities related to their memberships in rival political clubs within the Dakota Republican Party. Fanebust describes the gripping details of the initial trial that led to Wintermute's conviction to first-degree manslaughter, the vagaries of the appellate process which controversially overturned the conviction, and the retrial which resulted in a surprising acquittal. Outlaw Dakota [End Page 150] chronicles several other trials conducted during the same period which, while perhaps not as notorious then or now, nevertheless prove to be of equal interest. Outlaw Dakota also identifies the people that shaped early Dakota history for good or for bad—politicians, lawyers, judges, prospectors, ranchers, newspapermen, robbers, murderers, shady characters, prostitutes, and common folk. Some of these persons are presented as admirable and likeable, and others, not so. The mainstay of the book, Judge Shannon, is depicted by the author fairly and evenhandedly. Shannon is portrayed as a capable and hardworking judge who attempted, with some measure of success, to introduce his refined Pennsylvanian legalese to the maelstrom of the burgeoning Dakota Territory. Fanebust's prose is organized, readable, colorful, and at times dryly witted. He avoids the mistake made by some writers of western history of romanticizing events with glitzy or exaggerated language. The book's research is deep, dogged, and careful, including contemporaneous newspaper accounts of events, laws in effect at the time, historical collections, personal memoirs, and books of the period. Fanebust's original source materials enable him to describe and analyze events with detail, accuracy, objectivity, and insight. The work is enhanced by the author's background as an attorney. He explains the substantive and procedural aspects of Dakota law and trials in a manner that is plain and understandable to the Barnes and Noble reader. The book should therefore be of interest not merely to lawyers but also to the very broad audience of persons interested in the dusty development of the Old West. Hon. Mark C. Dillon Poughquag, New York Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Amid the Mockingbird's Laughter: Non-Indian Removals in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Depression-Era Novels

Amid the Mockingbird's LaughterNon-Indian Removals in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Depression-Era Novels Amy S. Fatzinger (bio) Most frontier stories share a common theme: non-Indians take possession of the land, while American Indians are forced from the region or fade out of the story. In her Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder reverses that theme twice—twice it is the Ingalls family who exits the disputed territory while American Indians appear to remain on their land. Wilder's first scene depicting non-Indian residents' forced removal from Indian Territory occurs in Little House on the Prairie, when the federal government identifies the In-galls family as illegal squatters on Osage land and the family leaves their homestead amid a mockingbird's laughter. The second scene appears in These Happy Golden Years, when Laura's visiting uncle recounts his experience as a member of a group of trespassing miners driven out of Lakota lands by soldiers. Both scenes suggest that non-Indians, including Wilder and her relatives, were in the wrong when they rushed into Indian Country, thus contradicting the premise of manifest destiny and confounding a basic expectation of a frontier narrative. These scenes are important to more fully understand Wilder's portrayal of Native characters and themes, and when examining them it is useful to consider that most of Wilder's novels were published during the Great Depression and are a product of that time at least as much as they are of the frontier times reflected in the content. The scenes in Wilder's novels depicting non-Indians' removals from Indian Country are startling in the context of frontier literature or even historical facts but far less so in the context of Depression-era literature in which writers more commonly sought to examine America's past. Situating the Little House texts as literature of the Depression helps to shed light on [End Page 181] some of Wilder's probable motivations as a writer and complicates first impressions regarding her portrayal of American Indian people and issues. In 1915, well before the publication of the first Little House book in 1932, Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, encouraged her mother to record her frontier experiences. She wrote to her mother and advised her to emphasize Only one generation ago Indians and forests and half a continent practically untouched by the human race. Free land, free fuel for the hunting it—"Go west, young man, and grow up with the land," And "Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm." That sort of thing. And do it all concretely—don't say those things were so, show that they were so. (Lane qtd. in Anderson, Literary 39) Lane was born into a pioneer family in Dakota Territory herself, but her letter suggests that in 1915 she embraced the mythology of the frontier where she herself had once lived. "Make it real," she told her mother, "because you saw it with your own eyes" (39). Wilder, however, either intentionally ignored her daughter's advice or found that she could not follow it, as she created the Little House novels with a more complex view of America's frontier past than the one Lane initially advocated for, particularly where Native people were concerned. Even as Wilder's protagonist, Laura, and her family participate in westward expansion as they travel from home to home on the Midwestern prairies during the 1870–80s, Wilder recalls her family's experiences in a manner that is often critical of expansion; the frontier that Wilder "saw with [her] own eyes" and reflected upon was quite different from the imaginary frontier Lane proposed. During the next several decades, though, Lane's perspective on frontier history evolved, perhaps as a result of her own experiences of writing about her family's pioneer history and helping her mother with the Little House series. The content in the Little House novels was informed by Wilder's own experiences but not solely by her experiences as a child on the frontier. Her childhood memories were filtered through her lifetime of experiences as she recalled and recorded them, and perhaps no [End Page 182] experience was...

Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army . North Texas Military Biography and Memoir Series. By James Carson.

Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army . North Texas Military Biography and Memoir Series. By James Carson. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2015. xxvii + 399 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $32.95, cloth; $26.36, e-book.) Visitors to Sturgis, South Dakota, perhaps wonder briefly how Lazelle Street got it name. This book will tell them. Henry M. Lazelle, then major of the First U.S. Infantry, commanded nearby Fort Meade, Dakota Territory, during construction of that post in 1878–1879. An 1855 graduate of West Point, Lazelle served in the Southwest before the Civil War; was surrendered to the Confederates by General David Twiggs, along with many other federal troops in Texas; and had to wait some eighteen months to … William.dobak{at}verizon.net

“We are writing this letter seeking your help”: Dakotas, ABCFM Missionaries, and Their Uses of Literacy, 1863–1866

At the age of twenty-three, Mr. Uses a Cane was imprisoned at Camp Kearney, in Davenport, Iowa, for his alleged role in the Dakota War of 1862. At Camp Kearney, missionaries affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), as well as camp elders, taught him to read and write in the Dakota language. With his newfound knowledge, he penned a letter to Stephen R. Riggs, an ABCFM missionary, on behalf of the prisoners. He wrote, “We are writing this letter seeking your help … we want to see our relatives, and we need your help to talk for us.”1 Mr. Uses a Cane entreated Riggs to fight for his release from prison and reunite him with his family, who he had not seen for over three years. Other letters by Dakota prisoners made similar demands. ABCFM missionaries, however, viewed literacy from a different perspective. At the time these missionaries first established stations (consisting of schools, churches, mission family homes, and plowed fields) in Minnesota in 1835, they planned to use literacy to promote the Dakotas’ Christianization and civilization. But Dakotas had other goals in mind when they appropriated the missionaries’ plan in the years following the U.S.-Dakota War.2 In the postwar era, Dakota kin found themselves separated from each other by hundreds of miles at Camp Kearney and at the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory. (See figure 1.) From these two locations, literate Dakotas demanded better …

A Most Glorious Ride: The Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877‐1886. Edited by Edward P.Kohn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. 284 pp.

A Most Glorious Ride: The Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877-1886. Edited by Edward P. Kohn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. 284 pp. Edward P. Kohn, assistant professor of history at Bilkent University in Turkey and author of two previous books on early political career of Theodore Roosevelt (or TR), has edited and annotated a collection of Roosevelt's diaries from 1877 to 1886, covering TR's Harvard years, early married life, entry into New York politics, first hunting trip to Dakota territory, years in New York state legislature, and escape to Western territories after tragic loss of his mother and wife on same day in 1884. Remarkably, considering how much has been written about fascinating and eventful of twenty-sixth president of United States, A Most Glorious Ride is first publication of his diaries. Kohn notes in book's preface that Carleton Putnam in Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), Edmund Morris in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Modern Library Paperbacks, 2001), and David McCullough in Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, A Vanished Way of Life and Unique Child who Became Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) made good use of diaries in writing about TR's early years but claims that, for most part, diaries have been underused in exploring Roosevelt's early life (p. viii). Roosevelt began diaries in January 1877, when he eighteen years old and a first-year student at Harvard. The entries for that year are very brief and relate to observations of natural history (bird specimens and wildlife), vacations, friends, wrestling and boxing, sailing and rowing, and fishing and hunting. The diary entries show Roosevelt's intense interest in natural sciences and his very active outdoor life. The next year's entries are dominated by death of his father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., at age of forty-six, a devastating blow to young Roosevelt who worshipped his father. Three days after his father's death, Roosevelt wrote, felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my had been taken away (p. 19). A month later, he wrote that day his father died the blackest day of my life and oh, how I shall miss his sweet, sympathetic advice! (p. 22). At end of March, TR noted that his father was everything to me; father, companion, friend (p. 25). In early April, he wrote that realize now that days of unalloyed happiness are now forever over, and [s]ometimes when I fully realize my loss I feel as if I shall go wild (p. 26). In June, his grief continued: It is impossible to tell in words how terribly I miss him; O, Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you; [t]here comes a dull pain at my heart whenever I think of dear lost one (p. 34). This mourning went on, month after month, his only solace being his Christian faith and his father's comforting words, Trust in Lord, and do good. …

Pioneer girl: the annotated autobiography

Long hidden in archives, Laura Ingalls Wilder's original handwritten autobiography is a tribute to her family and her experiences as a pioneer. Written for an older audience, Pioneer Girl is her first-person narrative of the settling of Dakota Territory, the building of the railroad west, and life as a pioneer. The stories in this autobiography formed the basis of Wilder's international best-selling autobiographical novels, known as the Little House Series. For the first time, readers will have full access to the original manuscript that began it all. Written in six tablets on lined paper, Pioneer Girl follows the Ingalls family through Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory over a sixteen-year period. Using revised Pioneer Girl manuscripts edited by Wilder's daughter Rose Wilder Lane, letters written between Wilder and Lane, photographs, newspapers, and other sources, Pamela Smith Hill and other editors of the Pioneer Girl Project lead readers through Wilder's early recollections and her first attempts at publication. While Laura Ingalls Wilder is a familiar figure, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography re-introduces readers to the woman who defines the pioneer experience and gives new insight into her motivations and experiences. For more information visit: www.pioneergirlproject.org

Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889

Journal Article Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879–1889 Get access Jon K. Lauck. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. xx, 281 pp. $32.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Page 1291, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav109 Published: 01 March 2015