The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Des Moines Architecture and Design," by Jay Pridmore

Leslie, Thomas

Book Reviews and Notices      149 
Des Moines Architecture and Design, by Jay Pridmore. Charleston, SC: 
The History Press, 2015. 174 pp. Illustrations (many in color), bibliog-
raphy, index. $24.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Thomas Leslie, AIA, is Pickard Chilton Professor in Architecture at 
Iowa State University. His research and writing have focused on the integration 
of building sciences and arts both historically and in contemporary practice. 
Residents of Iowa’s cultural, economic, and political capital take for 
granted an astonishing array of architecture. Since Benjamin Franklin 
Allen commissioned Chicago architect William Boyington to design 
Terrace Hill in 1869, Des Moines residents have hired leading architects, 
many of whom have done some of their best work there. This tradition 
has also inspired a parallel history of home-grown design excellence, 
creating a collection of buildings and a culture of architectural practice 
that is the equal of any comparably sized city in the country. 
 David Gebhard and Gerald Mansheim’s Buildings of Iowa (1993) cat-
alogued Des Moines’s notable buildings for the Society of Architectural 
Historians’ Buildings of the United States series, but a focused history 
of Des Moines’s architecture has been lacking. Chicago-based architec-
tural writer and journalist Jay Pridmore has risen to the task with Des 
Moines Architecture and Design, 12 essays that thematically document the 
city’s best—and best-known—buildings while providing a succinct nar-
rative of the city’s development itself. 
 Beginning with Terrace Hill, Pridmore shows how the city estab-
lished a tradition of high-minded civic and residential design, how in-
fluences from Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exhibition found fertile terri-
tory here, and how civic classicism was challenged by both Prairie Style 
and Modernist ideas. Throughout, progressive clients, a thriving econ-
omy, and visionary city government allowed some of the Midwest’s 
finest architects to shape Des Moines. 
 But the city’s own designers soon equaled these works. Proudfoot 
and Bird produced classical monuments that were matched by com-
mercial buildings of exceptional quality from Liebbe, Nourse, and Ras-
mussen. Homes around Grand Avenue matched the splendor and qual-
ity of the Midwest’s larger cities, and Des Moines’s investment in archi-
tecture was extended to its religious buildings; Pridmore devotes one 
essay to the acropolis of church buildings overlooking the city’s finan-
cial center known as “Piety Hill.” 
 Only after World War II, however, did Des Moines gain interna-
tionally recognized architecture. The Art Center’s original building by 
Eliel and Eero Saarinen (1948) inspired other institutions in the city to 
seek out world-class architects. Drake University hired the younger 
Saarinen in 1949 for buildings that are among his most thoughtful 
150      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
works. Drake and a local bank hired Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s, 
and the Art Center continued its patronage by hiring I. M. Pei and, in 
the 1980s, Richard Meier. Again, these were joined by local work of sim-
ilar quality. Chick Herbert, Ray Crites, and Brooks, Borg, and Skiles all 
combined international modernism with pragmatism and restraint; if it 
is possible to realize a modest monumentality, Herbert’s Civic Center 
(1975) toes this delicate line with grace and power. 
 Pridmore’s approach is admirable for its ability to show that these 
buildings were not isolated drawing-board exercises but rather were 
the result of social, financial, and cultural connections that were fos-
tered by Des Moines’s tightly knit business and civic community. He 
explains these buildings gracefully and legibly, and his choice of themes 
is apt, covering nearly every aspect of the city’s design history. Readers 
may wish for more emphasis on the vernacular, as Pridmore’s emphasis 
is on the monuments and mansions that exemplify the city’s outstand-
ing moments and characters. And scholars may regret the absence of 
footnotes, which might have inspired others to delve more deeply into 
some of the building histories that Pridmore tells so lucidly. Finally, any 
reader contemplating a driving tour will need some supplemental 
research to place these buildings into geographical context; the city’s 
relationship to its rivers and its hinterland has influenced parks and 
infrastructure that could have formed an additional essay or map. 
 Still, Pridmore has written what will deservedly be the standard his-
tory of the city’s architecture. It will be a vital source for any student of 
the city, and it lives up to the rich legacy of built work produced there 
over the last 150 years. Gebhard and Mansheim’s guidebook will still find 
a place in the back seat of any windshield historian’s car, but it has, after 
20 years, found a worthy companion that ties its catalog of Des Moines’s 
buildings into readable, enlightening, and richly elucidating essays. 
 
 
Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during 
the Cold War, by Eric Bennett. The New American Canon: The Iowa Se-
ries in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Iowa City: University of 
Iowa Press, 2015. xi, 232 pp. Notes, index. $22.50 paperback. 
Reviewer Catherine Stewart is professor of history at Cornell College. She is the 
author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (2016). 
Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire has an ambitious agenda: to prove 
that the writing programs that flourished in the wake of World War II, 
particularly at the University of Iowa and Stanford University, were the 
result of Cold War objectives. Bennett aims to identify the various intel-


English

Des Moines Architecture and Design

Review of: "Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837-1860," by Greg Olson

Bowes, John P.

118      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
bellum Northwest state constitutional conventions and analyzing the re-
sulting debates in and out of these conventions, Siddali has broadened 
the scholarly focus and made a fine contribution to standard accounts. 
  
  
Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837–1860, by Greg Olson. Civilization 
of the American Indian Series 275. Norman: University of Oklahoma 
Press, 2016. xx, 163 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 
$29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer John P. Bowes is professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University. 
He is the author of Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (2016) and 
Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (2007). 
In Ioway Life, Greg Olson focuses on a brief period of critical transitions 
and transformations in the history of the Ioways. A treaty signed with 
the federal government in 1836 formalized a cession of their lands in 
Missouri and arranged for their removal to a reserve in what is now 
Nebraska and Kansas. Over the next 20-plus years the federal govern-
ment and its agents sought to alter the Ioway way of life. In short, the 
federal government wanted the Ioways to become Christian farmers. 
Despite successful Ioway resistance to such measures, Olson argues, 
these years before the Civil War laid the foundation for the cultural 
changes that would occur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. Colonialism is a powerful force. Olson asserts that, although “the 
accomplishments of the agents and missionaries were decidedly mixed,” 
the seeds for the success of their overall policies were planted during the 
years they operated under the auspices of the Great Nemaha Agency. 
 This book is brief, with only about 135 pages of text, and the chap-
ters are organized more along thematic than strictly chronological lines. 
Following a short chapter to explain events leading to the Ioway relo-
cation to the reservation on the south bank of the Great Nemaha River, 
Olson examines the impact of Christian missionaries and their unsuc-
cessful efforts to convert Indians in their first decade on the reserve. As 
the next chapter demonstrates, the school established by Presbyterian 
missionaries in the mid-1840s experienced similar failures as a result 
of weak government support, missionary miscalculation, and Ioway 
resistance. In the fourth and fifth chapters Olson focuses on politics, first 
illustrating the transformation in Ioway leadership and then explaining 
how bureaucratic incompetence and corruption undermined the fed-
eral government’s Indian policy on the reservation. This narrative 
draws to a conclusion with an examination of events that compromised 
the Ioway reservation, specifically the Kansas-Nebraska Act and federal 
efforts to institute allotment. The Ioways signed their last treaty with 
Book Reviews and Notices      119 
the federal government in 1861. Since then, they have maintained a 
smaller reservation that still exists. Yet, as of 1883, a separate Ioway res-
ervation was established farther south in Indian Territory for those who 
left the Great Nemaha River after the Civil War.  
 Ioway Life contributes to the literature on Ioway history but ulti-
mately misses an opportunity to describe an Ioway perspective on the 
transformative events of the mid–nineteenth century. In most chapters 
the narrative focuses on the work, ideas, and failures of government 
agents and does not provide substantial explanations of Ioway efforts 
during the same time. To the extent that Ioway resistance shaped events 
on the reservation, readers will not find a full picture of that resistance 
over time. The narrative also suffers somewhat from organizational 
issues. Because the book is structured along thematic lines, events such 
as the Platte Purchase and the Kansas-Nebraska Act are discussed in 
some depth twice over. A different narrative framework could have 
prevented this repetition. In discussing the mid–nineteenth century 
experience of the Ioways and how that historical period laid a distinct 
foundation for the following decades, Olson has explored an important 
topic. The book as written, however, does not always do enough to sup-
port the argument the author wants to make. 
 
  
Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters, 
edited by Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz. Urbana and Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2016. xviii, 219 pp. Family tree, maps, illustra-
tions, notes, references, index. $40.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bryon C. Andreasen is a historian at the LDS Church History Mu-
seum, Salt Lake City, Utah; he was formerly research historian at the Abraham 
Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois. 
In 1840 the Dumville family emigrated from England to the United States. 
They purchased land in west central Illinois in a small new settlement in 
Macoupin County. In 1842 Thomas Dumville died, leaving his wife, Ann 
(age 46), and daughters Elizabeth (13), Jemima (11), and Hephzibah (9) 
in financial straits. They lost their land and moved to the small county 
seat, Carlinville. Ann’s meager income proved insufficient, prompting 
the girls to seek employment away from home. Elizabeth married a 
farmer, John Williams, and eventually moved to Poweshiek County, 
Iowa. Jemima and Hephzibah went north 50 miles to the more substan-
tial city of Jacksonville, Illinois. There, Jemima taught primary school 
(later moving to nearby Lynnville), and Hephzibah worked as a domes-
tic for the family with whom she boarded. Both girls attended the local 


Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837-1860

Review of: "The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class," by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake

Putz, Paul Emory

Book Reviews and Notices      145 
The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, 
edited by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Gior-
dano Drake. The Working Class in American History Series. Urbana 
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xiv, 249 pp. Notes, index. 
$95.00 hardcover; $28.00 paperback.  
Reviewer Paul Emory Putz is a doctoral candidate in history at Baylor University. 
His research focuses on urban Protestant reform movements in Iowa, Nebraska, 
and Kansas during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, addressing intersecting 
themes of religion, region, race, class, urbanization, and consumer culture. 
Coming 50 years after Herbert Gutman’s essay “Protestantism and the 
American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age” in 
the American Historical Review, The Pew and the Picket Line represents a 
full flowering of Gutman’s suggestion that historians pay more atten-
tion to the religious lives of working people. To be sure, some historians 
in the intervening years—such as Ken Fones-Wolf, who writes the fore-
word to this book—have heeded Gutman’s call. But more often than 
not, labor and religious historians have operated on separate tracks. 
With The Pew and the Picket Line, Christopher Cantwell, Heath Carter, 
and Janine Giordano Drake bring together an impressive group of 
(mostly) younger scholars in an attempt to demonstrate that “there is 
not a history of religion in America that is not also a history of labor 
. . .  [and] there is no history of labor in America that is not also a history 
of religion” (12). Along with linking labor and religious history, this vol-
ume’s ten essays emphasize the contingency and complexity of working-
class religious life. Puncturing broad claims about the relationship 
between Christianity and working people—for example, the notion that 
religion served as a form of social control imposed on the laboring masses, 
or that the working classes turned to religion out of desperation—the 
essayists refuse to make any overarching claims about working-class 
religious life except to say, “It depends” (13).  
 Collectively, the chronological focus of the essays ranges from the 
early nineteenth century through the 1970s. The majority, however—six 
of the nine—are set in the years following the Great Depression. The em-
phasis on place is another shared characteristic; eight are historical case 
studies set in a specific city or region. And, as the title of the book makes 
clear, all of the essays focus on Christianity. Despite these shared themes, 
the book covers a wide range of people and places. Three essays (by Erik 
Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, and Kerry Pimblott) give substantial at-
tention to African Americans; a fourth (by Matthew Pehl) includes them 
within the narrative. Latinos/as are primary subjects for Brett Hendrick-
son and Arlene Sánchez-Walsh. And places stretching from Rhode Island 
to California and Detroit to San Antonio are given prominence.  
146      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Scholars interested in the Midwest will be pleased to see four essays 
connected to the region. Matthew Pehl looks at Detroit autoworkers in 
the 1950s, exploring how the experience of industrial work shaped their 
religious practices. Kerry Pimblott uses Cairo, Illinois, to show how Black 
Power activism relied heavily on the town’s black churches. Erik Gellman 
also highlights the religious dimensions of Black Power activism, exam-
ining the 1960s life of Chicago’s Urban Training Center for Christian Mis-
sion. Jarod Roll, on the other hand, looks at a more rural setting: the min-
ing town of Galena, Kansas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries. He explores the “belief world” of the town’s miners and how 
their faith in the myths of capitalism shaped the development of Pente-
costalism. Dan McKanan’s essay is somewhat connected to the Midwest 
as well: it provides a close reading of the popular fiction of George Lip-
pard (a Pennsylvanian) and Ignatius Donnelly (a Minnesotan). But 
McKanan’s piece is largely devoid of a sense of place, striking a bit of a 
discordant note compared to the other essays in the book. 
 Essay collections have a negative reputation in some quarters; they 
can be perceived as superfluous or incoherent, lacking thematic unity. 
But The Pew and the Picket Line is an example of a collection done right. 
With an outstanding introductory essay on the historiography of reli-
gion and labor by Cantwell, Carter, and Drake, along with cutting-edge 
research throughout the rest of the book, this collection should be 
essential reading for historians of American religion and labor. With 
substantial attention given to communities in Illinois, Kansas, and 
Michigan, it should also be of interest to scholars of the Midwest. 
 
 
Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations, by Henry Adams. 
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. xi, 364 pp. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Breanne Robertson is a historian at Marine Corps University. She has 
published two articles in the Annals of Iowa (2011 and 2015) about New Deal 
murals. 
Thomas Hart Benton: Discoveries and Interpretations provides a retrospec-
tive look at art historian Henry Adams’s career-long fascination with 
Missouri muralist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). One of American 
Regionalism’s “Big Three,” along with Grant Wood and John Steuart 
Curry, Benton painted narrative scenes of midwestern history, mythol-
ogy, and modern life that resonated with Depression-era audiences; in 
December 1934 he became the first American artist to appear on the 
cover of Time magazine. Yet Benton also regularly defied expectations 
and provoked critics with candid depictions of controversial subject 


The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class

Review of: "Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln's Country: The Dumville Family Letters," edited by Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz

Andreasen, Bryon C.

Book Reviews and Notices      119 
the federal government in 1861. Since then, they have maintained a 
smaller reservation that still exists. Yet, as of 1883, a separate Ioway res-
ervation was established farther south in Indian Territory for those who 
left the Great Nemaha River after the Civil War.  
 Ioway Life contributes to the literature on Ioway history but ulti-
mately misses an opportunity to describe an Ioway perspective on the 
transformative events of the mid–nineteenth century. In most chapters 
the narrative focuses on the work, ideas, and failures of government 
agents and does not provide substantial explanations of Ioway efforts 
during the same time. To the extent that Ioway resistance shaped events 
on the reservation, readers will not find a full picture of that resistance 
over time. The narrative also suffers somewhat from organizational 
issues. Because the book is structured along thematic lines, events such 
as the Platte Purchase and the Kansas-Nebraska Act are discussed in 
some depth twice over. A different narrative framework could have 
prevented this repetition. In discussing the mid–nineteenth century 
experience of the Ioways and how that historical period laid a distinct 
foundation for the following decades, Olson has explored an important 
topic. The book as written, however, does not always do enough to sup-
port the argument the author wants to make. 
 
  
Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters, 
edited by Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz. Urbana and Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2016. xviii, 219 pp. Family tree, maps, illustra-
tions, notes, references, index. $40.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bryon C. Andreasen is a historian at the LDS Church History Mu-
seum, Salt Lake City, Utah; he was formerly research historian at the Abraham 
Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois. 
In 1840 the Dumville family emigrated from England to the United States. 
They purchased land in west central Illinois in a small new settlement in 
Macoupin County. In 1842 Thomas Dumville died, leaving his wife, Ann 
(age 46), and daughters Elizabeth (13), Jemima (11), and Hephzibah (9) 
in financial straits. They lost their land and moved to the small county 
seat, Carlinville. Ann’s meager income proved insufficient, prompting 
the girls to seek employment away from home. Elizabeth married a 
farmer, John Williams, and eventually moved to Poweshiek County, 
Iowa. Jemima and Hephzibah went north 50 miles to the more substan-
tial city of Jacksonville, Illinois. There, Jemima taught primary school 
(later moving to nearby Lynnville), and Hephzibah worked as a domes-
tic for the family with whom she boarded. Both girls attended the local 
120      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Methodist female college off and on as circumstances permitted. The sep-
aration of mother and daughters instigated over a decade’s worth of 
correspondence, the surviving portion of which today is archived at the 
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. 
 The Dumville Collection consists of 117 letters, 100 of which are in-
cluded in this volume. They are presented chronologically, beginning 
in June 1851 and ending in December 1863. The excluded letters were 
deemed “less informative” by the editors (xii). Moreover, in several 
letters they deleted passages they considered “extraneous, repetitious, 
fragmentary, or otherwise of little use in telling the story” (xii). They 
also added punctuation and paragraphing for ease of reading. This 
methodology may raise eyebrows among some documentary editing 
purists. Original spellings are retained, however. As the editors them-
selves suggest, “Scholars who want to use the letters as primary sources 
should of course consult the originals” (xii). But certainly the volume 
provides convenient, time-saving access to the collection for the pur-
pose of learning what is there. 
 In the opening chapter, the editors quickly review the Dumville 
family story up to the point where the surviving correspondence begins, 
and they provide brief character profiles of Ann and her three daughters. 
Then they identify, discuss, and provide context for six topics they be-
lieve are particularly illuminated in the letters: religion (particularly the 
attitudes of Methodists), education, social mobility, politics, the Civil 
War, and gender roles. The rest of the book consists of five chapters 
presenting the letters in roughly two- or three-year increments, with 
helpful chapter introductions that update family happenings and pro-
vide context on such things as cholera epidemics, technological innova-
tions, growing tensions over abolition, and the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry. 
 These letters are valuable in that they provide the voices of nine-
teenth-century immigrant women working their way toward middle-
class respectability in a society transitioning from frontier settlements 
into small-town agrarian communities that seek stronger connections 
to the market economy. The letters reveal a surprising degree of politi-
cal awareness among working women of the time. 
 Students of Iowa history will be particularly interested in the 13 
letters sent from Elizabeth’s isolated farm in Poweshiek County, dated 
from January 1855 through July 1863. Elizabeth was “barely literate, if 
at all” (4). Her husband, John Williams, wrote all of the letters but one, 
the last being written by their very literate 12-year-old daughter Mar-
garet. Their six wartime letters are replete with anguished references to 
rife Copperhead sentiment in the area. 
Book Reviews and Notices      121 
 A brief concluding chapter nicely recaps the correspondents’ stories 
beyond 1863 and summarizes the importance of the letters in docu-
menting how one set of women “transformed themselves from immi- 
grants to Americans” and how “they progressed from rural poverty to 
ownership of homes and farms” (167)—a perspective that can some-
times be hard to document. 
 
 
Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland, by 
Bridget Ford. Civil War America Series. Chapel Hill: University of 
North Carolina Press, 2016. xxiii, 398 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. $45.00 hardcover. 
The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American 
Middle Border, by Christopher Phillips. New York: Oxford University 
Press, 2016. xviii, 460 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Nicole Etcheson is the Alexander M. Bracken Professor of History at 
Ball State University. She is the author of A Generation at War: The Civil War Era 
in a Northern Community (2011); Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War 
Era (2004); and The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture 
of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (1996). 
Does a river divide or unite? In the postrevolutionary period, Congress 
created territories northwest and southwest of the Ohio River. The 
Northwest Ordinance forbade slavery, but the peculiar institution flour-
ished south of the river. So it would seem that the river was a border 
dividing the middle of the country. But migrants from south of the Ohio 
traveled down the river and settled on its northern banks. Residents on 
both sides of the river shared many values, including racism. And there 
was no clear division during the Civil War between Union and Confed-
erate. In the free states, proslavery Copperheads protested the federal 
government’s prosecution of the war while, south of the river, many 
slaveowners opposed secession, and men from Union slave states fought 
to suppress the rebellion. 
  Bridget Ford and Christopher Phillips grapple with these complex-
ities in their respective books. Ford examines Cincinnati and Louisville 
to understand the Ohio-Kentucky border. Phillips’s “Middle Border” 
includes not just the Ohio River states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and 
Kentucky but also Kansas and Missouri. Both authors complicate our 
understanding of the sectional, cultural, and political bonds and divi-
sions in the region. 
 Ford uses Abraham Lincoln’s reference to the “bonds of Union,” a 
phrase with religious as well as political overtones in the mid-1800s, as 
a springboard to understand the communities north and south of the 


Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln's Country: The Dumville Family Letters

Review of: A New Deal for South Dakota: Drought, Depression, and Relief, 1920–1941, by R. Alton Le

Stock, Catherine McNicol

Book Reviews and Notices      449 
aspirations of the town’s residents in ways that words alone cannot, and 
Chase’s pairing of photographs with quotations from former residents’ 
oral histories serves to further elucidate the images’ meanings. 
 Chase provides a balanced assessment of Buxton as “utopia” ver-
sus a “dangerous” coal town. She acknowledges that Buxton experi-
enced its share of gambling, drinking, and violent crime but points out 
that its legacy was shaped in large part by the politics of racial identity. 
Both black and white residents of the town described Buxton as a good 
place to live and work, but for African Americans its demise repre-
sented a much greater blow, the loss of one place where they could 
work, live, shop, and learn free from extreme racism and oppression. 
Lost Buxton provides a window onto the promise of racial harmony that 
Buxton represented, albeit fleetingly, and asks its readers to contem-
plate the lessons that it might continue to offer today. 
 
 
A New Deal for South Dakota: Drought, Depression, and Relief, 1920–1941, 
by R. Alton Lee. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2016. xii, 
269 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Catherine McNicol Stock is professor of history and director of the 
American Studies program at Connecticut College. She is the author of Rural 
Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (1996) and Main Street in Crisis: The 
Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (1992). 
Nearly two decades have passed since a full-length treatment of the ex-
perience of the people of South Dakota in the “Dirty Thirties” has been 
published; the library shelf of recent monographs considering the Great 
Depression years in nearby midwestern states is similarly strikingly 
bare. But that is only one reason to welcome University of South Dakota 
professor emeritus of history R. Alton Lee’s book, A New Deal for South 
Dakota. Lee does not just put a new gloss on familiar—if still heart- 
wrenching—stories of grasshopper plagues, dust storms, starving cattle, 
itinerant men and women riding the rails, abandoned farms, “penny 
auctions,” and utterly overwhelmed local charity organizations. Lee dives 
deeper and explains how local people responded to the crisis politically. 
Given the recent “discovery” of white conservatism in rural America by 
journalists and pundits, it is high time for a scholar based in a rural state 
to put this political heritage in full historical context. 
 Although it might have been better placed in the introduction, Lee 
waits until the conclusion to ask the big question about South Dakota 
politics during the Great Depression: How could the people of South 
Dakota have accepted relief from the New Deal and then “[bit] the hand 
that fed them” by voting against state Democrats in 1936 and 1938 and 
450      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
even against Roosevelt himself in 1940 (216)? After all, the situation in 
South Dakota was so desperate that in 1932 Lorena Hickok told Eleanor 
Roosevelt that the state was the “Siberia of the United States. . . . A more 
hopeless place I never saw” (26). In a different letter to Roosevelt, she 
said of the state: “What a country—to keep out of” (3). The New Deal 
did in many respects come to the rescue of farmers, ranchers, and towns-
people on the northern plains. Between 1932 and 1938, South Dakota 
received funds from the federal government far in excess of the propor-
tion of their population. At the height of the Depression, 39 percent of 
South Dakota’s population was on relief, compared to an average of 13 
percent in the United States as a whole (x). Why then weren’t South 
Dakotans more grateful to the government? Why didn’t they, like poor 
whites in Appalachia or the cotton South, help to form the backbone of 
the Democratic Party for a generation to come? 
 Lee answers these questions, demonstrating that, however much 
the people of South Dakota needed federal relief, they nevertheless 
neither liked New Deal programs nor the eastern bureaucrats who 
designed them. They didn’t just resent the programs. They were not just 
ashamed of their need. They believed the programs were poorly orga-
nized, poorly conceived, and poorly administered. Lee provides example 
after example: South Dakotans argued that FERA stock-buying programs 
instituted limits so low that they made it impossible for beneficiaries to 
continue ranching; FERA and WPA salaries for men on relief were too 
low while for men selected to be in charge of the programs, they were 
too high; CCC men’s families could not live on 20 dollars per month, 
and as a result they sometimes became wards of the state; Social Secu-
rity payments for the elderly sometimes did not go to people who were 
old. In other words, while people in South Dakota may have needed 
temporary relief (mostly, they also believed, due to circumstances be-
yond their control), they never thought the federal government did a 
competent job of providing it. Like Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: 
The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (2009), Lee’s study sug-
gests that the beginning of the antigovernment movement on the right 
and the belief that government was “part of the problem” go back many 
decades before the so-called Reagan Revolution. 
 Lee also compiles information on relief programs for local indige-
nous people, a topic that has also seen little ink in recent years. For the 
many bands of Sioux in South Dakota, deciding whether or not to comply 
with the “Indian New Deal” was politically complicated. Why should 
Indians trust the government this time, when in the past federal au-
thorities had proven themselves to be untrustworthy time and again? 
Unfortunately, Lee does not discuss the ways the splits that developed 
Book Reviews and Notices      451 
in several bands over the Indian New Deal controversy continued 
through the late twentieth century, contributing to the rise of the Amer-
ican Indian movement, the occupation of Wounded Knee, and the vio-
lence on the Pine Ridge reservation that followed. Furthermore, Lee 
should have let this important chapter stand on its own, rather than 
combining it with material about programs for youth.  
 Overall, this important book reminds us of the long-lasting nature 
of the reforms brought during the New Deal years—as well as the long-
lasting nature of American resistance to them. 
 
 
American Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American 
Culture, by Wendy Griswold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
2016. xiv, 361 pp. Maps, tables, illustrations, appendixes, notes, refer-
ences, indexes. $35.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Michael Edmonds is director of programs and outreach at the Wis-
consin Historical Society. He is the author of “The Federal Writers’ Project in 
Wisconsin, 1935–1942” (Wisconsin Magazine of History, 2011). 
The Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s and 1940s has always been in-
fused with a romantic glow. Poet W. H. Auden called it “one of the no-
blest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted” because it tried to 
use unemployed lay people to research, write, and edit books. It also 
nurtured young authors, including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, 
John Cheever, and Richard Wright, whose later work would shape how 
Americans saw themselves during the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury. Between 1935 and 1943, the project’s 6,500 staff produced more 
than 600 books about local American life and culture, the most famous 
of which are the American Guides discussed in this book. It was a utopian 
dream conceived behind rose-colored glasses, led by visionary idealists, 
and carried out during a political maelstrom. The sheer optimism of it 
has spawned a small industry of memoirs, histories, and literary criticism.  
 Sociologist Wendy Griswold takes a different and much more prag-
matic approach. She simply asks, what did the Writers’ Project try to 
do, was it successful, and how did it affect American culture? To find 
answers she not only exploited all of the relevant documentary sources 
but collated and analyzed reams of raw data. Her previous work in-
cludes books on Renaissance London and post-colonial Nigeria, with a 
focus on how material objects of culture influence the transmission of 
ideas and values. Applying that perspective here, she has given us by 
far the best book on the Federal Writers’ Project and why it mattered. 
 In 1935, two years into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, nearly 
ten million Americans were out of work, so Congress funded the Works 


A New Deal for South Dakota: Drought, Depression, and Relief, 1920–1941

Index to Volume 76 and Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 4 Fall 2017

Review of: The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland, by Patrick Bottige

Ironstrack, George

Book Reviews and Notices      435 
 In the end, it seems churlish to quibble about definitions in such a 
comprehensive volume. Better to sit back and take it all in. In future 
decades, the Dictionary of Middle Western Literature is likely to play the 
same authoritative role in regional literary definition as the earlier an-
thologies edited by John T. Frederick (Out of the Midwest in 1944) and 
John T. Flanagan (America Is West in 1945) did for the regionalist literary 
flowering of the Great Depression. The Society for the Study of Mid-
western Literature can be proud of the herculean effort that produced 
this comprehensive survey of regional literature. They set out to dem-
onstrate that the Midwest is neither homogeneous nor static nor cultur-
ally backward. With Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination, 
they have undoubtedly succeeded. 
 
 
The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the 
Miami Homeland, by Patrick Bottiger. Borderlands and Transcultural 
Studies Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. xix, 244 pp. 
Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer George Ironstrack is assistant director/program director of the Edu-
cation and Outreach Office at the Myaamia Center, Miami University (Ohio). 
His research has focused on the history of the Miami Indians. 
In a quickly paced and engaging narrative history, Patrick Bottiger lays 
out his case for “pervasive lying among Indian, French, and American 
communities” in the early eighteenth century. Bottiger focuses on what 
he identifies as widespread falsehoods about the village of Prophets-
town within the “Miami-American borderland” of the Wabash River 
valley in what later became the state of Indiana (8, 12). The village, which 
existed from 1808 to 1813, was led by the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwa-
tawa and inhabited by members of multiple tribal communities who 
shared his vision of a Pan-Indian nativist revitalization movement.  
 Bottiger begins his narrative by outlining what he calls the “longue 
durée of Miami history” and attempts to assume the perspective of Mi-
ami Indian people prior to the creation of Prophetstown. By the 1800s, 
Bottiger argues, American aggression had transformed this Miami home-
land into a Miami-American borderland (8). In that space, Miami Indians, 
French fur traders, and American settlers often focused on the needs of 
their villages and towns over the interests of their respective nations (5, 
113). Violence in this period arose not out of intercommunal hostility 
but instead out of intracommunal competition among factions seeking 
control of their respective towns and villages. The narrative of these intra-
communal disputes spins off the four battles of Tippecanoe: the conflict 
of words to “determine the intentions of the Prophet’s community at 
436      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Tippecanoe” (1808–1811); the actual Battle of Tippecanoe on November 
7, 1811; the immediate aftermath of the battle in which “local factions 
used the fight to their advantage”; and, finally, the decades-long struggle 
across the nineteenth century to “rework” the memory of the battle in 
order to explain and excuse the regional changes that followed the War 
of 1812 (136–37). 
 It is within this arena of intracommunal factional conflicts centered 
around Prophetstown that Bottiger highlights the endemic lying that he 
identifies as obscuring the true intentions of the residents of that village. 
Those lies led all of the residents of the Wabash River valley down the 
road to war. Bottiger argues that it was in the interests of one faction of 
the Americans, led by William Henry Harrison, and one faction of the 
Miami, led by Little Turtle, to lie about the militancy of the movement 
led by the Shawnee brothers Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh. For Harri-
son, this lie was used against tribal leaders—like the Miami leader Pa-
canne, who resisted land cession treaties—to paint them with the same 
“militant” brush. The lie was also used against Harrison’s American op-
ponents in Vincennes, especially against those who perceived Harrison 
as a proslavery elitist. For Little Turtle, those lies were an attempt to 
secure his influence over the Miami Nation as a whole, over his nation’s 
relationship with the Americans, and over the economic and social 
changes engendered by the large-scale cession of Miami lands between 
1795 and 1809. Given the centrality of the analysis of the factional divi-
sion between Little Turtle and Pacanne, it is unfortunate that Bottiger 
fails to note that the two men were kin. They each shared one parent in 
common with the important female Miami leader Tahkamwa.  
 “In the end,” Bottiger concludes, “Euroamericans laid claim to an 
American borderland and secured their sovereignty not simply by oc-
cupying space but by lying together with the Miamis about their past” 
(179). Unfortunately, Bottiger’s analysis of the Miami Indian culture 
and politics of the early 1800s suffers from a lack of depth. He ascribes 
false meanings and folk etymologies to words like minjipi (miincipi/ 
maize) and Sahg-wah-se-pe (saakiiweesiipi/Saint Joseph River). He also 
struggles to capture the diversity of Miami-speaking communities in the 
early 1800s and to accurately represent the underlying village-centered 
economy that sustained these diverse villages prior to the treaty period 
(16, 87). Additionally, the top-down focus on a few male leaders ob-
scures the lack of a singular or even dual Miami community that could 
give a voice to a focused set of political policies or coordinate a series of 
false statements made with the intent to deceive. 
 For those working with the histories of indigenous nations, Bottiger 
leaves some challenging questions unanswered. How do we go about 
Book Reviews and Notices      437 
separating rumors, exaggerations, and honest misunderstandings from 
lies? And what is the value of talking to contemporary indigenous com-
munity leaders and scholars about the reliability of the historical record? 
Indigenous scholars have unique perspectives and knowledge about their 
histories, ancestors, languages, and homelands, as well as about the 
archival record and secondary literature. Collaborative engagement 
between indigenous and nonindigenous scholars can only enrich our 
collective understanding of the past.  
 
 
Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War 
Era, by Mark A. Lause. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of 
Illinois Press, 2016. viii, 223 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $95 hardcover, 
$30 paperback. 
Reviewer Mark S. Schantz is professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College. 
He is the author of Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s 
Culture of Death (2008). 
Spiritualists in nineteenth-century America were more than a fringe 
group of sketchy characters obsessed with mysterious rappings on floor 
boards and the exciting lure of communicating with the dead around 
the séance table. Mark A. Lause argues that spiritualists numbered as 
many as 5 to 6 million Americans when the Civil War broke out and not 
only could be found in New England but also maintained a strong 
presence in the Midwest, from Michigan to Wisconsin and Iowa (14). 
Students of Iowa’s history will be particularly interested to learn that 
spiritualists there included Chief Justice Joseph Williams of the Iowa 
Supreme Court and that they published their own newspaper, the 
Rising Tide (33, 50–51).  More broadly, Lause contends that spiritualists 
pushed a robust earthly agenda, including support for abolitionism, 
women’s rights, free love, Fourierism, and the protection of Native 
American rights. Key in this agenda of individual freedom was support 
for the Republican Party, particularly in its most radical expressions. 
Indeed, Lause counts the spiritualists as among the Republicans’ most 
ardent supporters. “Spiritualism,” he writes, “exploded onto the scene 
simultaneously with a mass Republican Party and in the same regions” 
(43). For Lause, the emergence of the Republican Party and the rise of 
the spiritualist movement in America are inextricably intertwined. 
 The cornerstone of Lause’s contention that spiritualism and Repub-
licanism formed part of the same intellectual current is his treatment of 
Abraham Lincoln. His chapter on Lincoln demonstrates beyond doubt 
that the president was more than a dabbler in the spiritual arts; he made 
multiple personal connections with those in the spiritualist community. 


The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland

Review of: Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It, by Jack Mitchel

Coon, Stephen C.

454      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
pretending to serve the public, regardless of who it is. And when he 
gets the news he should print it, regardless of how much it costs” (7). 
Over a year of exposés in the Gazette led to 49 indictments, including 
that of State Attorney General Edward O’Connor. 
 But on the same day as the Gazette carried the story that it had won 
the Pulitzer Prize, it also shared the news that the Iowa Supreme Court 
had struck down the dozens of Sioux City indictments, based on an Iowa 
statute that prohibited prosecutors from accepting outside funding. 
Although many of Marshall’s targets escaped prosecution, their politi-
cal careers were destroyed and the political establishment of the state 
subsequently took greater care to enforce liquor and gambling laws.  
 The book ends with Marshall’s involvement with the No Foreign 
Wars Committee, a disaster that pushed Marshall into a nervous break-
down, forcing his retirement. Harrington contends that the same 
combativeness that served Marshall well in rallying Iowans against 
compromised state officials backfired in building a mass movement 
against American intervention in the Second World War.  
 Skillfully weaving research from the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Des 
Moines Register, and the Verne Marshall Papers at the Herbert Hoover 
Presidential Library, Harrington avoids the sorts of pulpy clichés that 
usually accompany popular histories of 1930s crime and journalism. 
Crusading Iowa Journalist Verne Marshall is a welcome addition to the study 
of Iowa during the Great Depression. Readers accustomed to conceiv-
ing of the New Deal in Iowa entirely in terms of thoughtful technocrats, 
beleaguered farmers, and empowered workers will be in for a surprise. 
Harrington’s study shows that the politics of alcohol did not disappear 
with the repeal of Prohibition. As a work of journalism history, the book 
also serves as a case study of the perils of checkbook journalism.  
 
 
Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That In-
vented It, by Jack Mitchell. Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society 
Press, 2016. xi, 226 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Stephen C. Coon is emeritus associate professor, Greenlee School of 
Journalism and Mass Communication, Iowa State University. He has written 
extensively about broadcast journalism. 
Jack Mitchell, the first producer for National Public Radio’s (NPR) All 
Things Considered, has compiled an informative and entertaining chron-
ology of Wisconsin Public Broadcasting, an institution he helped shape 
as director of Wisconsin Public Radio for more than two decades from 
1976 to 1997. He mixes material from the Wisconsin State Historical 
Society Archives, public radio files at the University of Wisconsin, and 
Book Reviews and Notices      455 
documents from the Rockefeller Foundation. However, the bulk of Wis-
consin on the Air relies on numerous interviews Mitchell conducted with 
key figures instrumental to the growth of Wisconsin’s public radio and 
television, including contemporary personalities such as Michael Feld-
man of Whad’Ya Know? Mitchell also describes his own imprint on the 
institution in what is a half-historical and half-autobiographical account 
—a potential bias he concedes in the introduction. 
 The book is divided into two sections. The first half treats the first 
50 years of what the author labels educational broadcasting. The second 
part covers the era of public broadcasting made possible with the crea-
tion of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and financial sup-
port for noncommercial stations. It is a story of personalities and politics 
arising from competing historical, economic, and technological forces 
that affected the institution during a century of operation.  
 The tale begins with a nearly inaudible piano melody flowing from 
a receiver speaker in the living room of University of Wisconsin physi-
cist Earle Terry in 1917. By all accounts, the guests listening in Terry’s 
home were not impressed. Certainly they had no reason to believe they 
had witnessed the historic origin of what would become one of the na-
tion’s foremost public broadcasting operations.  
 The University of Wisconsin saw the new medium as a vehicle for 
spreading the institution’s Wisconsin Idea, a commitment to its educa-
tional mission to extend progressive ideas from the campus to homes 
across the state. Mitchell argues that the academic origin of radio con-
tinues to influence contemporary public broadcasting. Just as universi-
ties “sift and winnow” for truth among competing ideas, so, too, do 
broadcasters in their commitment to objectivity, fairness, and balance 
in verifying facts. “Public broadcasting was born in and nurtured by 
universities, and public broadcasters think like academics” (22). 
 Although there is no specific reference to Iowa, avid public broad-
casting listeners and viewers will recognize a comparable history in the 
Hawkeye State. Terry’s experiments with wireless transmissions, for 
example, mirror similar experiments at Iowa State College in Ames be-
tween 1911 and 1921—a chronology that is detailed in separate histories 
written by Dwight W. Smith, Charles Black, and longtime WOI radio 
host Don Forsling. Of interest to some Iowa readers will be descriptions 
of the tension between private and public interests in Wisconsin about 
the proper role of noncommercial radio and later television. These are 
reminiscent of the controversy in Iowa that forced the eventual sale of 
commercial television station WOI by Iowa State University. Neil Harl 
documented that tale in Arrogance and Power: The Saga of WOI-TV (2001). 
Finally, Iowa public radio listeners will relate to Wisconsin broadcasts 
of classical music, horticulture tips, and readings from popular books. 
456      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Wisconsin on the Air is a welcome contribution to the extant litera-
ture about American broadcasting, which is disproportionately devoted 
to descriptions of commercial pioneers. It is a history full of interesting 
personalities, political conflict, and struggles to recognize and adapt to 
changing competition, radio listeners’ habits, and technological change. 
The methodology is an effective and credible approach for similar insti-
tutional histories in Iowa.  
 
 
Harvest of Hazards: Family Farming, Accidents, and Expertise in the Corn 
Belt, 1940–1975, by Derek S. Oden. Iowa and the Midwest Experience 
Series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. xi, 251 pp. Illustra-
tions, notes, index. $65 paperback. 
Reviewer Katherine Jellison is professor of history at Ohio University. She is the 
author of Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963 (1993). 
In this long overdue history of the farm safety movement, Derek S. 
Oden provides a thorough accounting of how midwestern farm families, 
agricultural organizations, government agencies, safety experts, and 
farm implement manufacturers made mid–twentieth-century farming 
a less dangerous occupation. Although the various players in the cam-
paign to improve farm safety did not always seamlessly coordinate 
their efforts, their common crusade produced results: The Corn Belt 
farm was a safer place to live and work in 1975 than it had been in 1940. 
 Oden begins his study of the farm safety movement with the World 
War II–era effort to reduce farm accidents as part of the national cam-
paign to increase overall agricultural production. During that time of 
national unity, midwestern farmers, industrial safety experts, and gov-
ernment agencies shared a common premise: safer farming would max-
imize production of food, fiber, and fats for military use. Following the 
wartime emergency, interest in improving farm safety continued as 
increased mechanization and greater reliance on the use of chemicals 
raised new concerns about the hazards of postwar farming. Agricul-
tural colleges, farm implement manufacturers, and 4-H clubs were just 
a few of the institutions that raised awareness of farm safety issues 
by providing equipment demonstrations, tractor driving courses, farm 
safety contests, advice literature, and other prescriptive measures to 
lessen the dangers of farm work. During this educational phase of the 
safety movement, farm families largely embraced its principles and goals. 
Only when employee and consumer protection activists of the 1960s 
and 1970s called for greater government regulation of the conditions, 
equipment, and products of the American workplace—including the 
family-owned farm—did midwesterners begin to question the efficacy 
of the farm safety movement. Farm operators began to view safety 


Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 76 no. 3 Summer 2017

Review of: "The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrections of Francis Schlatter", by David N. Wetzel

Folk, Holly

Book Reviews and Notices      355 
Midwest, at the same time transcends the region with its strong trans-
national focus. The book is local, state, regional, and international history. 
 In evaluating Good Seeds, one begins with the title, which suggests 
seed-based agriculture. This perspective is certainly accurate for corn, 
but one might recall that potatoes, although they produce seeds, are 
usually propagated by “eyes.” The emphasis on seeds likewise accords 
with the wild rice that was important to the diets of the Menominee into 
the twentieth century. Of course, the emphasis on wild rice extends 
treatment beyond the cultivated species of Africa and Asia. 
 Good Seeds provides an important study of foodways in the upper 
Midwest, treatment that others might well extend to Iowa and other 
parts of the Midwest. Indeed, remarking about his residence in Kansas, 
Weso trains his eye on foodways of the lower Midwest so that a balanced 
treatment emerges. Given the centrality of the potato and corn to the di-
ets of the Menominee, one wonders whether similar patterns emerge in 
Iowa and other parts of the Midwest. In these ways, Good Seeds should 
command the attention of many scholars. 
 
 
The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrections of Francis Schlatter, by 
David N. Wetzel. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. xii, 279 pp. 
Map, illustrations, appendix, timeline, survey of prior works, index. 
$19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Holly Folk is associate professor of liberal studies at Western Wash-
ington University, Bellingham, Washington. She is the author of The Religion of 
Chiropractic: Populist Healing in the American Heartland (2017). 
The social marginality of lay healers has often cast twin shadows—of 
charlatanry and altruistic spirituality—on their social presentations. 
The Vanishing Messiah challenges readers by blending these categories. 
David N. Wetzel’s biography of Frances Schlatter, a Progressive Era faith 
healer, charts the author’s travel to archives and historic sites that reveal 
Schlatter’s story. Wetzel’s narrative journey beautifully depicts the expe-
rience of historic research. His proposed alternative ending for Schlatter’s 
story chronicles what Wetzel believes was Schlatter’s later life, offering 
interesting speculations about the healer’s character, and thereby the 
nature of religious healing. 
 An Alsatian immigrant, Francis Schlatter arrived in Colorado in 1892. 
In the fall of 1895 he held nationally publicized healing crusades in Al-
buquerque and Denver that delivered healing blessings to tens of thou-
sands of people. Because of his physical appearance, refusal to accept 
payment for healing blessings, and claim that healing came “from the 
Father,” Schlatter came to be seen as a Christ-like figure. 
356      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The “New Mexico Messiah” left Denver suddenly on November 13, 
1895, perhaps because he was being called as a witness in a trial for the 
fraudulent sale of healing handkerchiefs. He is believed to have traveled 
south to Datil, New Mexico, arriving at the ranch of a woman named 
Ada Morley in January 1896. Schlatter’s three-month visit provided 
Morley with the source material for a book she published in 1897. The 
Life of the Harp in the Hand of the Harper was proclaimed to be Schlat-
ter’s dictated autobiography, although its formalized conversations 
suggest that it was heavily edited by Morley. It is not clear from Wetzel’s 
book that Schlatter’s visit to Datil actually happened. I wish it were eas-
ier to access The Life of the Harp, but the fragments presented here make 
me wonder whether it was “channeled” through astral projection, as 
many esoteric messages are. 
 Assuming that he was ever there, Schlatter left Datil in the spring 
of 1896. There is a strong possibility that he died in Mexico later that year 
of self-imposed starvation. What may have been his personal effects 
were allegedly found in the desert in 1897, along with a skeleton alleged 
to be his remains. Wetzel argues compellingly that the skeleton found 
was probably not Schlatter’s. 
 Starting soon after Schlatter’s disappearance, several figures emerged 
claiming to be him. Most were recognized in their day as charlatans. 
Wetzel’s innovative hypothesis is that Schlatter did not die in Mexico 
but was interned for a time in an Ohio hospital, where he took on the 
identity of another man, John Martin, as part of a radical religious pil-
grimage toward revealing himself as a new incarnation of the Christ. 
 I question the evidence justifying Wetzel’s conclusions. He cannot 
account for the radical changes in Schlatter’s behavior between 1895 in 
Denver and his later life. The Martinesque Schlatter had a violent, un-
predictable temper and was arrested for disturbing the peace. Wetzel is 
in a position to comment on the reliability of various sources, but he 
treats materials that corroborate his interpretation selectively. If Wetzel 
is right, then Schlatter’s early life should be amenable to interpretation 
through what we know of his later character. Wetzel takes it on faith 
that the early Schlatter was as saintly as he is presented in The Life of the 
Harp. 
 Wetzel’s treatment of Schlatter’s other alleged biography is also 
puzzling. He argues that while Schlatter was in Michigan he was a 
source for the book by Ella F. Woodward, Modern Miracles of Healing. 
Wetzel asserts that Schlatter deliberately misled readers, inserting false 
elements to his biography to conceal his real whereabouts and activities. 
It is likely that John Martin acted as a source for Woodward’s book, but 
Wetzel attributes full authorship to Martin for reasons I cannot under- 
Book Reviews and Notices      357 
stand. Finally, two photos that Wetzel believes are actually of the same 
person are reprinted in his book. Readers can draw their own conclu-
sions, but to me the two men do not look remotely like each other. 
 In the late nineteenth century, people could still disappear for months 
and even years. Despite the proliferation of newspapers and government 
records, there is often limited information for reconstructing biographies, 
with available sources often containing inaccuracies. Add to this delib-
erate disambiguation, as many people changed important details in their 
identities. Ambiguities in Schlatter’s biography resemble those sur-
rounding chiropractic’s founder, Daniel David Palmer, whose life also 
presents a tantalizing but broken paper trail. In fact, several aspects of 
Schlatter’s story resonate with the early chiropractic movement, where 
boosters of the profession interwove themes of health, commerce, and 
entertainment. 
 I enjoyed reading The Vanishing Messiah, for the narrative style is 
engaging. And, in fact, I enjoyed the interpretive questions presented 
by the task of reviewing it. Although he probably has not definitively 
solved the Schlatter mystery, David Wetzel effectively shares the joy of 
intellectual discovery. 
 
 
Varmints and Victims: Predator Control in the American West, by Frank 
Van Nuys. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. xiv, 338 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer Leisl Carr Childers is assistant professor of history at the University 
of Northern Iowa. She is the author of The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple 
Use in the Great Basin (2015). 
Iowans are not used to thinking of themselves in relation to wolves, 
bears, cougars, and even coyotes, but as author Frank Van Nuys ex-
plains in Varmints and Victims: Predator Control in the American West, the 
history of those animals’ extirpation and their recent recovery reflects the 
process of western settlement, especially in the Midwest. Van Nuys’s 
study, an update of Thomas R. Dunlap’s Saving America’s Wildlife: Ecology 
and the American Mind, provides a deep look at the transformation of 
wildlife management through predator control that is as “vital to the 
region’s incorporation into the American mainstream of ideologies, eco-
nomics, politics, and culture as any other phenomenon” (4). 
 Drawing on a wide array of source material, particularly the man-
uscript collections of key wildlife biologists, including Stokely J. Ligon, 
Olaus J. Murie, Sigurd Olson, and Stanley P. Young, and state and fed-
eral wildlife agency records, Van Nuys narrates the history of predator 
control in the region west of the Mississippi River in seven chapters that 


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