Iowa Research Online

Review of:  The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West,  by by Jennifer Graber

Knock, Michael

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 78 Number 1 (Winter 2018) pps. 96-97 
The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the 
American West 
Michael Knock 
Clarke University, Dubuque, Iowa 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2019 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Knock, Michael. "The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American 
West." The Annals of Iowa 78 (2019), 96-97. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12554 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
96      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West, 
by Jennifer Graber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xxii, 288 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Michael Knock is associate professor of history at Clarke Univer-
sity in Dubuque, Iowa. His Ph.D. dissertation (University of Notre Dame, 
1996) was “ ‘Alone with Sitting Bull’s People’: The Dakota Indian Mission 
of the Congregational Church, 1870–1937.” 
According to Jennifer Graber, religion played a key role in the dispos-
session of American Indians. Protestant and Catholic efforts to convert 
the native peoples of the American West to their respective faiths went 
hand-in-hand with the movement to take their lands and transform 
them into small independent farmers. That part of Graber’s story is not 
surprising to anyone familiar with President Grant’s so-called Peace 
Policy and other events in the nineteenth-century history of the Ameri-
can West. What is interesting, however, is her contention that native 
peoples also used spirituality to survive, sometimes by clinging to tra-
ditional beliefs and sometimes by showing a remarkable flexibility in 
their willingness to adapt those beliefs to a changing world.  
 Graber’s focus is on the Kiowa of the southern Great Plains. The 
history of the Kiowa is one of regular adaptation. Before migrating 
south, she argues, the Kiowa adopted the Sun Dance from the Crow. 
They later began to practice some elements of Christianity while con-
tinuing to celebrate the Sun Dance and other ceremonies critical to their 
identity as a people. As Graber writes, “Ritual practices that engaged 
sacred power played a crucial role in that persistence. Kiowas came to 
churches, peyote meetings, and Feather Dance circles. They drew near 
to the gods of Indian Country. They asked to be sustained within, if not 
delivered from, an increasingly perilous situation” (201).  
 To tell the Kiowas’ story, Graber focuses on the nineteenth century, 
beginning her story in 1803 and ending it in 1903. That structure allows 
her to describe the Kiowas’ first encounter with white Americans fol-
lowing the Louisiana Purchase and to end with allotment. In between, 
the world of the Kiowa was completely transformed by events includ-
ing the Red River War, the aforementioned Peace Policy, Richard Henry 
Pratt’s attempt to “kill the Indian and save the man” at his Carlisle In-
dian School, and the Ghost Dance movement. 
 Of particular interest to students of Iowa and the Midwest may be 
the story of an Iowa Quaker named Lawrie Tatum. Tatum arrived in 
Kiowa country in May 1869 after being appointed reservation agent. 
In that capacity, Tatum was also an agent of civilization and Christian-
ization. Graber reports that the young Quaker often grew frustrated by 
the Kiowas’ insistence that they continue to celebrate the Sun Dance and 
Book Reviews and Notices      97 
to raid other tribes. In response, Tatum sometimes withheld rations, 
including sugar. In a letter to his Quaker superiors in 1870, he declared, 
“I did it to punish them and . . . I believe it had a very salutary effect 
upon them. They have not appeared to be nearer conquered since I have 
been here than they did on that day” (89).  
 Graber skillfully uses a variety of sources, including Kiowa calendar 
drawings and shield art, enabling her to reveal Kiowa hopes and fears. 
Those sources also reveal the process of assimilation and cultural sur-
vival. For example, toward the end of her story, Graber analyzes a fas-
cinating letter written to a Kiowa student at the Carlisle Indian School 
from his family on the reservation. The letter used a combination of 
symbols and drawings to deliver news of Christianity’s presence on the 
reservation, the local peyote society, and pieces of family news (199–200).  
 Overall, The Gods of Indian Country is a welcome addition to the schol-
arship on American Indian spirituality as well the history of nineteenth-
century U.S. Indian policy on the southern plains.  
  
 
Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation, 
by Thomas Biolsi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. xxii, 
340 pp. Maps, graphs, tables, illustrations, notes, index. $30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Harvey Markowitz is associate professor of anthropology at 
Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Converting the Rosebud: 
Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 (2018). 
During the past three decades, a sizeable portion of anthropologist-
ethnohistorian Thomas Biolsi’s scholarship has focused on political, 
economic, and jurisdictional issues affecting the Pine Ridge and Rose-
bud Lakota Reservations of South Dakota. In Organizing the Lakota (1993), 
Biolsi analyzed why the Oglala and Sicangu Lakotas of those reserva-
tions ultimately voted to formalize their political life under the Indian 
Reorganization Act of 1934 and how that decision further politically fac-
tionalized their populations and diminished their tribes’ power over res-
ervation affairs. In Deadliest Enemies (2001), he demonstrated the various 
ways federal courts have systematically posed the interests of Rosebud 
Indian against those of non-Indians in neighboring counties, thus exac-
erbating racial tensions between the two groups.  
 In his latest effort, Power and Progress on the Prairie, Biolsi again 
returns to the Rosebud Reservation and its surrounding South Dakota 
counties to explore how federal officials, local bureaucrats, and social 
experts collaborated on programs of directed change that they believed 
would improve the lives of the state’s Indians and non-Indians and the 
often destructive consequences of those initiatives. As he explains in his 


English

The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

This photo features #46 out of uniform and late for practice. I wanted to showcase she is a bit eccentric from the other girls.https://ir.uiowa.edu/costume_design/1261/thumbnail.jp

Simmons, Zamora

The Wolves

The photo features Jason, with white supremacist tattoos, a black eye, and busted lip. I designed printable temporary tattoos and used ready-made temporary tattoos that allowed for quick application and removal to achieve the desired tattooed skin.https://ir.uiowa.edu/makeup_design/1015/thumbnail.jp

Sweat

University of Iowa Libraries

Bidnings Summer 2019

Review of: Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1870, by David Andrew Nichols

Skinner, Claiborne

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 78 Number 3 (Summer 2019) pps. 299-300 
Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in 
the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 
Claiborne Skinner 
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2019 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Skinner, Claiborne. "Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the 
Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870." The Annals of Iowa 78 (2019), 299-300. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12593 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
Book Reviews and Notices      299 
spective biological similarities make the potential for organ transplants 
promising yet also ethically controversial. Anderson is hopeful about 
such developments, but the growing animal rights movement may create 
significant roadblocks. Nevertheless, this topic demonstrates, as do so 
many discussed in the book, not only pigs’ importance in our food cul-
ture but also their central role in the evolution of the American economy.  
 
 
Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes 
Region, 1600–1870, by David Andrew Nichols. New Approaches to Mid-
western Studies Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. xiii, 271 pp. 
Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Claiborne Skinner is an instructor at the Illinois Mathematics and 
Science Academy. He is the author of The Upper Country: French Enterprise 
in the Colonial Great Lakes (2008). 
In Harpers Ferry, in the northeast corner of Iowa, stands Effigy Mounds 
National Monument: silent, mysterious designs of bears, birds, turtles, 
and panthers raised by the Ho Chunk and other nations some 1,400 
years ago. Old as these mounds are, they are Johnny-Come-Latelies to 
Iowa, whose human history actually begins more than 10,000 years 
earlier in the Pleistocene Era. Few Iowans, or anyone else for that matter, 
have any conception of this story. It is said that “history is written by the 
victors,” but it is also written by those who can write. Early Europeans 
concluded, therefore, that the Indians were a people without a history, 
with all that that implied and still does.  
 David Andrew Nichols has produced a potent corrective to this 
misconception with his extraordinary Peoples of the Inland Sea. The peri-
odization in the title is ambitious enough, but Nichols, an ethnohistorian, 
draws deeply on archeology, environmental science, and ethnology to 
push the dates back to the Ice Age. The Mastodon Hunters are here, the 
Copper Age, the Archaic agricultural revolution, and the Hopewell 
Mound Builders. Nichols fills the region with a history rarely seen in 
such a short survey. His coverage is as wide as it is deep: The Great 
Lakes “region” is stretched to include much of the Mississippi Valley. 
His treatment of the historic period is of a piece, with sharp analysis 
grounded in good sources. His choice of when to close his study is 
significant. Where many treatments conclude with a significant date in 
Euro-American history, Nichols ends with the execution of 38 Dakota 
warriors in 1862 and the return to Wisconsin of the Ho Chunk people, 
who had staked their claim to the country more than a thousand years 
before, thus bringing the story full circle. This might seem anticlimactic 
300      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
given the scope of his study, but this is Indian history, with its own mile-
stones, rather than those of the invading whites.  
 By the author’s own admission, this is a work of synthesis rather 
than original research, but what a synthesis! Conventional history rubs 
elbows with “The Ceremonial Landscape of the Newark Earthworks 
and the Raccoon Creek Valley.” The bibliography alone is worth the 
purchase price. If I had a complaint, which I really do not, it would be 
that perhaps Nichols has tried to do too much: events, nations, individ-
uals, and numbers relentlessly confront the reader. I have an advanced 
degree in the subject and I often found myself having to come up for 
air. I offer this only as a warning to the casual reader. Peoples of the Inland 
Sea offers a comprehensive, succinct analysis of a vast and complex topic. 
Nichols has done a great service for teachers and students alike. This 
will be the standard short survey for many years to come.  
 
 
Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during 
the Civil War, by William Marvel. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions 
of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2018. 
xviii, 329 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $48 hard-
cover. 
Reviewer Donald C. Elder III is professor of history at Eastern New Mexico 
University. He is the editor of Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of 
William and Mary Vermilion (2003) and A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil 
War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton (1998). 
After reading Lincoln’s Mercenaries, students of the Civil War may have 
to reconsider their conclusions regarding the primary reason why indi-
viduals from Northern states decided to enlist in the military. Author 
William Marvel challenges the widely held notion that individuals who 
volunteered for service in the Union Army did so largely for patriotic 
reasons. He argues instead that economic considerations played a far 
larger role than historians have realized or acknowledged. His well-
crafted monograph should cause anyone interested in the motivation of 
Union Civil War volunteers to reexamine long-held assumptions. 
 Marvel begins by examining the historiography relating to enlist-
ment, noting that many authors discount evidence of volunteers enter-
ing military service for financial reasons; they choose instead to focus 
on other considerations, usually patriotism or mere wanderlust. Since 
these authors could only do rudimentary statistical computations based 
on the census of 1860 to inform their analyses, many of them discounted 
such evidence, instead using memoirs or regimental histories as the 


Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870

Review of: The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876, by William D. Green

Coleman, Dwain

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 78 Number 3 (Summer 2019) pps. 304-306 
The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black 
Opportunity in Minnesota 
Dwain Coleman 
University of Iowa 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2019 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Coleman, Dwain. "The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black 
Opportunity in Minnesota." The Annals of Iowa 78 (2019), 304-306. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12596 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
304      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
However, given the high stakes involved, the Leagues’ actions seem 
eminently reasonable. The book ends with a chapter on the spread of 
Union Leagues in the South, as they struggled unsuccessfully to graft 
Northern fraternal ideals onto a society riven by racial division. 
 The signal virtue of this book is its abundant research. Scholars 
seeking to build our still limited understanding of Union political 
thought, among other topics, will do well to use this book’s footnotes 
as a guide. Iowans such as Samuel Kirkwood appear in cameo roles, but 
the book is predominantly shaped by debates in more established states. 
Taylor’s prose is reasonably accessible, but the audience for this book is 
scholars and the most highly motivated lay readers. 
 
 
The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity 
in Minnesota, 1860–1876, by William D. Green. Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, 2018. xi, 498 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 
hardcover. 
Reviewer Dwain Coleman is a Ph.D. history student at the University of 
Iowa. The Iowa History Center recognized his master’s thesis, “Still in the 
Fight: The Struggle for Community in the Upper Midwest for African Amer-
ican Civil War Veterans” as the outstanding master’s thesis in Iowa history 
for 2017.  
William Green’s Children of Lincoln is a welcome addition to the grow-
ing historiography of emancipation and Reconstruction studies. Green 
reveals the rich history of racial politics in Minnesota and the rest of the 
Midwest and the critical role racial politics played in the political and 
demographic development of the nation during Reconstruction. At the 
same time, Green explores the often paradoxical positions that white 
“Lincoln Republicans” took concerning race. 
 At over 400 pages containing meticulously researched information 
taken from newspapers, journals, and letters, Green’s book makes a 
statement about the rich history of Reconstruction in Minnesota and the 
Midwest and the transformative role it played. Green takes great care 
to reconstruct the national, state, and local context in which Minnesota’s 
Republican Party stalwarts developed and espoused their political and 
social views on race during Reconstruction. Green’s examination chal-
lenges the standard narrative of Northern racial progressivism during 
this period and reveals the often complicated reality of racial politics 
and the limits of white paternalism. Green scrutinizes four prominent 
white Lincoln Republicans from Minnesota as he charts the multi-
faceted nature of the efforts of white Republicans to reform the political, 
social, and demographic makeup of the state and nation. 
Book Reviews and Notices      305 
 The first Lincoln Republican Green analyzes is Morton S. Wilkin-
son, a prominent U.S. Senator from Minnesota who championed black 
suffrage. During the Civil War he worked tirelessly to abolish slavery 
in the District of Columbia and throughout the nation. At the same time, 
he was also a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and 
advocated the protection of property of Indians who adopted the habits 
of “civilized life.” Green uses the reactions of Wilkinson and other 
Lincoln Republicans to the U.S. Dakota War, the mock trial and exe-
cution of those accused of atrocities during the war, and the expulsion 
of Native Americans and confiscation of their lands to the benefit of 
white businessmen and settlers to demonstrate the limits of their egali-
tarianism.  
 Another of Green’s subjects is Thomas Montgomery, an Irish immi-
grant farmer turned soldier during the U.S. Dakota War and an officer 
of a U.S. colored regiment during the Civil War. Green uses Montgom-
ery’s letters to examine his reasons for serving, perceptions concerning 
the black soldiers he commanded, and his continuing self-interest and 
paternalist mindset after service.  
 Daniel D. Merrill is another similar example Green uses to demon-
strate the limits of Republican paternalism. As a church and business 
leader in St. Paul, Merrill enables Green to explore the complex racial 
divisions within the state capital’s churches and education system. Mer-
rill and other white Baptist churchgoers of the community supported 
the creation of a black Baptist church in St. Paul. They were, however, 
unwilling to relinquish control to black congregants to choose their own 
black leader.  
 The fourth prominent leader that Green explores is Sarah Burger 
Stearns, a woman suffragist in Minnesota. Through his examination of 
Stearns’s rhetoric and her fight for women’s voting rights, Green dem-
onstrates the heated tension and widening chasm that emerged between 
advocates of black male suffrage and those supporting white woman 
suffrage. 
 For those interested in Iowa history during this period, Green’s 
examination of Minnesota’s Lincoln Republicans provides rich parity 
with other midwestern states. Like Minnesota, Iowa passed black laws 
and exclusionary acts to control black residents living in the state and to 
prevent further immigration. Like Wilkinson, Iowa Republican leaders 
—Governor Samuel Kirkwood and others—worked during and after 
the Civil War to convince a reluctant white constituency to support the 
formation of a black regiment as well as Reconstruction reforms like 
the state passage of black male suffrage, which became law just months 
before Minnesotans’ similar reform.  
306      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Green’s dense narrative, although an extensive read that is occa-
sionally encumbered by the inclusion of extensive quotations, reveals 
the complex realities of state, regional, and national politics during the 
Reconstruction Era. Green’s work joins a growing chorus of historians, 
such as Leslie Schwalm, Elliott West, and Steven Hahn, who argue for a 
“Greater Reconstruction” narrative that examines the whole continent 
and the effects of Reconstruction rather than an isolated Southern ac-
count. Green’s work should become required reading for those inter-
ested in the contradictory positions taken by white Republicans who 
championed black suffrage and equal citizenship rights but eventually 
abandoned black citizens to navigate by themselves continuing racial 
hostility and inequalities in both the North and South.  
 
 
Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration, 
by Sigrid Lien, translated by Barbara Sjohom. Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, 2018. x, 290 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $120 hardcover, $29.95 paperback. 
Reviewer L. DeAne Lagerquist is Harold H. Ditmanson Distinguished Pro-
fessor of Religion at St. Olaf College. She is the author of In America the Men 
Milk the Cows: Factors of Gender, Ethnicity, and Religion in the Americanization 
of Norwegian-American Women (1991). 
Photography and photographs convey anticipation and memory in 
Sweetland, Ali Selim’s film adaptation of Will Weaver’s short story “A 
Gravestone Made of Wheat.” When his parents arrange for him to marry 
German Inge Altenberg, Olaf Torvik, a Norwegian farmer in the Red 
River Valley, sends her a letter, enclosing a photograph of himself. She 
carries both with her to Minnesota. But, because a crease in the folded 
photograph obscured his face, initially Inge does not recognize him. In 
the train station she mistakes his friend Franzen for Olaf. At Olaf’s farm, 
Franzen makes a photograph of Inge in her traveling clothes in front 
of the house. Before the film ends, we see Franzen and Inge looking at 
the photo after Olaf’s funeral and then watch her grandson gaze at her 
image as a young woman as he considers selling the farm. None of this 
appears in Sigrid Lien’s intriguing book, and yet her nuanced, detailed, 
and theoretically rich exploration of photography and Norwegian 
American migration suggests the absolute rightness of Selim’s use of 
photographs and photography to convey a range of emotions, including 
longing—both for what is not yet and for what is no longer. 
 Although its format is small for the genre, this volume offers far 
more than what might be expected from a coffee-table book illustrated 
with interesting, old photographs. Certainly there are interesting, old 


The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota

Review of: St. Louis and the Great War, by S. Patrick Allie

Van Ells, Mark D.

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 78 Number 4 (Fall 2019) pps. 414-413 
St. Louis and the Great War 
Mark D. Van Ells 
Queensborough Community College, New York 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2019 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Van Ells, Mark D.. "St. Louis and the Great War." The Annals of Iowa 78 (2019), 414-413. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12625 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
414      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Ultimately, Ramirez’s commentary leaves readers with two-dimen-
sional impressions of the Clouds. They shape-shift from victims to sub-
versives but are seldom presented as self-assured individuals who con-
trolled their destinies and were at peace with their choices. Standing Up 
to Colonial Power will not supplant Joel Pfister’s The Yale Indian: The 
Education of Henry Roe Cloud. On the other hand, Ramirez’s study may 
remind midwestern biographers of the pitfalls of present-mindedness 
and its tendency to distort historical subjects. For while Ramirez makes 
clear that she is “standing up to colonial power,” readers will feel less 
certain that her grandparents shared her passion.  
 
 
St. Louis and the Great War, by S. Patrick Allie. St. Louis: Missouri His-
torical Society Press, 2018. 191 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. $35 
paperback. 
Reviewer Mark D. Van Ells is professor of history at Queensborough Com-
munity College of the City University of New York. He is the author of 
America and World War I: A Traveler’s Guide (2014). 
The recent World War I centennial inspired numerous commemora-
tions across America and the world. In St. Louis the Soldiers Memorial 
Military Museum developed an exhibition about the war years in that 
city. It also produced a companion book for the exhibit: St. Louis and the 
Great War by curator S. Patrick Allie.  
 St. Louis and the Great War encompasses the entirety of the American 
wartime experience, but from a midwestern perspective. Included are the 
origins of U.S. involvement, the Mexican border troubles, the fighting, 
the home front, and the postwar world. It is primarily a pictorial work, 
with striking color images of wartime artifacts ranging from political 
buttons to machine guns. Manuscripts and photographs are also fea-
tured. The text is brief but clearly written and generally accurate, 
although there are some interpretive issues, such as referring to Mexican 
revolutionaries by the simplistic and inflammatory term bandits (14). 
Adding a personal dimension are vignettes of individual St. Louisans, 
such as that of Dr. Esther Leonard, one of just seven female physicians 
to work for the army overseas. Allie goes beyond tales of heroism and 
patriotism to explore the darker aspects of the war, such as the ethnic 
and racial violence that was prevalent on the home front.  
 St. Louis and the Great War offers a broad and informative look at 
how one major midwestern city experienced “the war to end all wars.” 
As the museum exhibit does, artifacts and manuscripts tell the story in 
this book. It is a visual treat. 
 


St. Louis and the Great War

Folsom, Ed

Volume 36 Number 4 ( 2019) pp. 261 - 265 
The Centennial of Horace Traubel's Death: Editor's Introduction 
Ed Folsom 
ed-folsom@uiowa.edu 
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print) 
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online) 
Recommended Citation 
Folsom, Ed. "The Centennial of Horace Traubel's Death: Editor's Introduction." Walt Whitman 
Quarterly Review 36 (2019), 261-265. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2336 
This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion 
in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, 
please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
WWQR VOL. 36 NO. 4 (SPRING 2019)
261
In our understandable excitement over the bicentennial of Whitman’s 
birth, we may easily lose sight of the fact that 2019 is also the centen-
nial of Horace Traubel’s death. The fact that Traubel managed to live 
to celebrate the centennial of Whitman’s birth is itself a remarkable 
story. In ill health the last several years of his life, he dedicated himself 
to staying alive so he could contribute to and experience the conclu-
sion of the first Whitman century. In honor of Horace Traubel, the 
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review is reprinting in this issue his final 
extended piece of writing about Whitman, a piece that he published 
in the Whitman Centennial Issue of his magazine, The Conservator, 
a magazine he began after Whitman’s death to keep Whitman’s work 
alive and to associate that work with progressive causes. The Whit-
man Centennial Issue of The Conservator appeared in May 1919, just 
a couple of months before Traubel’s own death. This socialist disci-
ple of Whitman had quit his job at a bank in order to devote himself 
to developing Whitman’s reputation, which he did by recruiting his 
wife Anne and daughter Gertrude to help edit The Conservator, by 
carrying on a nonstop correspondence with admirers of Whitman 
from around the world, and by creating an International Whitman 
Fellowship that would assure Whitman’s continuing influence.
Here is how I described Traubel’s final days in my preface to the 
final volume of his monumental With Walt Whitman in Camden, his 
nine-volume work recording his daily conversations with Whitman 
over the final four years of the poet’s life:
For the decade after Traubel quit his bank job, he lived an energetic life. He 
would read most nights until 4 or 5 a.m., then sleep for four or five hours. Each 
morning he would take the ferry to Philadelphia and work in his garret office on 
THE CENTENNIAL OF 
HORACE TRAUBEL’S DEATH:
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
262
WWQR VOL. 36 NO. 4 (SPRING 2019)
Chestnut Street, where he would write letters, edit The Conservator, and set type. 
He met regularly with a group of fellow radicals at a Market Street restaurant, 
his own version of Pfaff’s, Whitman’s bohemian beer hall. Like Whitman, he 
loved crowds, and could often be found at baseball games or concerts or on the 
ferry, absorbing the energy of the masses. It was while riding the Camden ferry 
in 1909 that Horace faced his first major physical trauma: he was trampled by 
a horse and suffered severe rib injuries. By 1914 his health had become a major 
concern, as rheumatic fever had left him with a weakened heart. The outbreak 
of the Great War was particularly wrenching for this pacifist and believer in 
universal brotherhood, and over the next few years he declined steadily, suffer-
ing his first heart attack in June of 1917, the night before Gertrude’s wedding in 
New York. He suffered additional heart attacks during the next year, and in the 
summer of 1918, he had a cerebral hemorrhage and was confined to his home. 
At this point few of his friends expected him to live more than a few weeks.
But with the centenary celebration of Whitman’s birth on the horizon, 
Traubel’s notorious stubbornness came into play: he refused to die on any but his 
own terms. He and Anne moved to New York in the spring of 1919 to be close to 
Gertrude and their new grandson. They stayed in the home of their good friends 
David and Rose Karsner, whose five-year-old daughter, Walta Whitman Kars-
ner, brightened Traubel’s last months. Horace sat at a window looking out on the 
East River and over to Whitman’s Brooklyn. He ate at the very table that his old 
friend Eugene Debs had used while in prison—Karsner, who wrote Deb’s biog-
raphy, had procured it and made it available to Traubel. On Whitman’s birthday 
he attended the celebration at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue and was given 
a standing ovation by the two hundred Whitmanites in attendance, after which 
Helen Keller, meeting Traubel for the first time and touching his lips to under-
stand his words, spoke movingly of this “great Optimist” and “his scheme of a 
better world.” He was pleased to hear speeches that night celebrating Debs and 
Emma Goldman; his many efforts to bring Whitman and the radicals together 
seemed at this moment to have succeeded.
There was yet one more centenary event that Traubel was determined to 
attend—the August dedication of a mighty three-hundred-foot granite cliff at 
the Bon Echo estate in Canada, to be named “Old Walt” and inscribed with 
Whitman’s words in giant letters. The dedication had been arranged by the Ca-
nadian branch of the Walt Whitman Fellowship, and Traubel saw it as a sign 
of the growing international reverence for Whitman. The frail Horace sat in a 
specially constructed chair on a rowboat that took him across a lake to the base 
of the giant rock, where he and Flora MacDonald Denison, the owner of Bon 
Echo, placed their hands on the spot where the inscription was to be and intoned 
the words “Old Walt.”
For the next few days Traubel struggled through dinners, receptions, speech-
es, and meetings at Bon Echo. He wrote David Karsner in New York: “Here 
safe. Tired. Hopeful. . . . Tired still. Damned tired. God damned tired.” Flora 
MacDonald Denison wrote that on August 28th Horace, while sitting in a tower 
room where he could look out on Old Walt, rapped his cane and shouted that 
Whitman had just appeared above the granite cliff “head and shoulders and hat 
WWQR VOL. 36 NO. 4 (SPRING 2019)
263
on, in a golden glory—brilliant and splendid. He reassured me, beckoned to 
me, and spoke to me. I heard his voice but did not understand all he said, only 
‘Come on.’” Following this Traubel began to fail quickly, suffering yet another 
cerebral hemorrhage, and took to his deathbed, nursed continually by Anne. On 
September 3rd Flora was sitting next to his bed when Traubel claimed he heard 
Walt’s voice again: “Walt says come on, come on.” Anne stayed by his bedside, 
held his hand, smiled, and repeated, “No regrets, Horace.” In her account of 
her husband’s death, written to J. W. Wallace, she does not mention visitations 
from Walt. She recalls only that, on September 8th, “he didn’t drift, he went”:
Afterwards, he had a very tender and beautiful expression, not as if he had 
less spirit but as if he had more. There was in fact very little flesh left—but he 
did not look shrunken, or wasted. He looked exceedingly young. Even then 
as he laid on the bed unmoving he drew love from my heart. Even then he 
made the great affirmation. He devoted himself to the art that is life—and to 
the life that is love—and he has made love as common as bread.
Once again, beginnings and endings fused: Traubel’s death one hundred years 
after Whitman’s birth emphatically closed the first Whitman century. But be-
fore he departed, Horace left behind a final poem, written for the dedication 
of Old Walt. In this poem he did what he had done so well for so long, what he 
had recorded in nine large volumes. He sat down and talked, one last time, with 
Walt Whitman: 
Well, Walt, here I am again, wanting to say something to you: 
In a strange place, at the considerable north, talking again:
. . . 
I just feel like as if I was having another chat with you 
as you sit in the big chair and with me in the bed opposite: 
Oh! those blessed times, Walt! they’re sacreder to me than 
the scriptures of races: 
They’re the scriptures of our two personal souls made one in a 
single supreme vision: 
That’s all for this moment, Walt: but it’s the whole 
world of appearance and illumination, for all that.
*
Today, as we look back from the beginning of the Third Whitman 
Century to the celebration of the start of the Second Whitman Centu-
ry, we present two pieces in honor of the centenary of Traubel’s death. 
First is the remarkable address by Helen Keller (1880-1968) about 
Traubel that she delivered at the Whitman Fellowship Internation-
al dinner on Whitman’s one-hundredth birthday. Keller frequently 
264
WWQR VOL. 36 NO. 4 (SPRING 2019)
acknowledged Whitman’s tremendous impact on her, writing in one 
volume of her autobiography that she first heard Whitman’s poetry 
when she was “still a little girl”:
[H]is verses have the quality of exquisite physical sensations. They wave like 
flowers, they quiver like fountains, or rush on like mountain torrents. He sings 
unconquerable life. He is in the middle of the stream. He marches with the 
world’s thought, not against it. To me he seems incomparably our greatest poet. 
He is a prophet, a voice crying the wilderness. . . . As the sea reflects the sky’s 
immensity, so Leaves of Grass reflects the glowing, potential soul of America.
On Whitman’s ninety-ninth birthday, in 1918, at a commemorative 
dinner that Traubel was too ill to attend, she gave what the host, Fred 
Hier, described as “the miracle”: “Helen Keller, sightless and without 
hearing, spoke like a spirit from another planet about Walt Whitman. 
On her beautiful face shone out the lights and fires from her hidden 
world. In this, what seemed like an immediate communion with the 
great poet, I saw the only visible human immortality that I have ever 
known.” Keller that night said he wanted “to pay my deep homage to 
the memory of the poet of all poets whom I love the best, Walt Whit-
man. I think we radicals should seek and emphasize much more than 
we do that which unites us rather than that which divides us. One 
of the happiest meeting-grounds available is out common love and 
appreciation of Whitman.” She went on to portray Whitman as the 
very figure who guided her out of her world of darkness and silence, 
a kind of wondrous poetic counterpart to her teacher and companion 
Anne Sullivan, who had taught her to communicate:
Whitman came to me like a wonderful friend out of the great world, and he 
opened many windows in my dark house and flooded it with clear, penetrating 
light. Impetuously I put my hand in his, and he led me out into his world, the 
world of men and women where I could feel the eager, turbulent tramp of life—
the roar, the adventure, the zest, the gladness, the sorrows, the revolts and the 
peace won out of strife. By his side I went forth in the dark to prove my spirit 
equal to that world.
I like to think of Whitman as a sort of adorable vagabond. In imagination I walk 
the open road with him. We have splendid times together! Our hearts throb high, 
the rolling earth under our feet seems to respond to our mood. The strong, sweet 
wind runs before us, and the scent of pine and sea and lilac is in the air. The 
world is full of gladness and beauty. What a comrade he is! How stimulating! 
How common things turn to miracles under his touch! How tenderly he guides 
WWQR VOL. 36 NO. 4 (SPRING 2019)
265
my groping feet! He quickens a sense deeper than seeing, and opens the spirit’s 
ear to undreamed music. His imagination has foothold as well as wings. . . .
Keller continued, poignantly, to suggest that not only has Whitman 
taught her to see and to hear, but so many people have refused his 
lessons and thus remain in darkness and silence:
He bestows upon all men and all women the gifts of the universe. Not all men 
and women have accepted his generosity. Many are blind to his vision, deaf to 
his message. The lover of all men and “maker of poems, the Answerer,” still 
chants the new day, the coming world of freemen. He still proclaims the cosmic 
sympathy, his reverberating declaration of love—love that believes all things, 
hopes all things, breaks down all blind hostilities of castes, schools, religions, 
philosophies and races.
One year later, Keller delivered another talk at the Whitman Birthday 
Dinner, this time on Whitman’s one-hundredth birthday, and this 
time more in honor of Horace Traubel than of Whitman himself. We 
offer that brief address here, followed by Traubel’s own spirited prose 
piece that he wrote for the centennial of Whitman’s birth, a piece as 
relevant today, on the bicentennial, as it was then.
The University of Iowa  ED FOLSOM


The Centennial of Horace Traubel\u27s Death: Editor\u27s Introduction

Riley, Scott

Volume 36 
Number 2 ( 2019) Double Issue pps. 179-188 
Keats’s Prophecy of Whitman, Whitman’s Critique of Keats 
Scott Riley 
scriley@ucsc.edu 
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print) 
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online) 
Recommended Citation 
Riley, Scott. "Keats’s Prophecy of Whitman, Whitman’s Critique of Keats." Walt Whitman 
Quarterly Review 36 (2019), 179-188. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2321 
This Note is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, 
please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 












Keats’s Prophecy of Whitman, Whitman’s Critique of Keats

Waitinas, Catherine

Volume 36 
Number 2 ( 2019) Double Issue pps. 128-154 
Great Audiences “absorb, adopt it”: Walt Whitman’s “The Old 
Bowery” 
Catherine Waitinas 
California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo, cwaitina@calpoly.edu 
ISSN 0737-0679 (Print) 
ISSN 2153-3695 (Online) 
Recommended Citation 
Waitinas, Catherine. "Great Audiences “absorb, adopt it”: Walt Whitman’s “The Old Bowery”." Walt 
Whitman Quarterly Review 36 (2019), 128-154. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2319 
This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion 
in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, 
please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 





























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