The Annals of Iowa

Rasmussen, Anders Bo

English

The Spoils of the Victors: Captain Ferdinand Winslow and the 1863 Curtis Court of Inquiry

Review of: "Twenty-five Years among the Indians and Buffalo: A Frontier Memoir", by William D. Street, edited by Warren R. Street with an introduction by Richard W. Etulain

Murphy, J. T.

238      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
was a former physician from Sioux City, Iowa, before he took the posi-
tion as agent at Red Cloud, a position selected and administered by 
the Episcopal church.  
 Buckley’s photo collection includes a number of images of Camp 
Robinson, natural features of the surrounding area, and Arapahoe and 
Lakota (Teton Sioux) camps and people. Of special interest are two 
images of the Brule Chief Spotted Tail, his wife, and one of his daugh-
ters at the residence of Camp Robinson trader J. W. Paddock. One im-
age shows the chief and members of his family seated at the table tak-
ing breakfast in Paddock’s home. Noticeable is the absence of an image 
of Red Cloud, the agency’s Oglala Lakota namesake. Another image of 
considerable interest is one of the “Grave of Crazy Horse.” The grave 
consists of a low scaffold with a blanket covering a wooden box sur-
rounded by a crude wooden fence. This photograph was taken by 
soldier-photographer Pvt. Charles Howard overlooking Camp Sheri-
dan, the military camp guarding the Brule Lakota Spotted Tail Agency 
located 40 miles northwest of Red Cloud Agency. This image was one 
of two probably taken less than a month after Crazy Horse’s death. 
 The images in the Buckley collection vary greatly in quality from 
excellent to poor. What is consistent, however, is Buecker’s exacting 
guide and identification of each image, including details difficult to dis-
tinguish without his aid. This visual source is another piece presented 
here, much of it for the first time, that is important for understanding 
the white-Indian cultural interaction surrounding the agencies and their 
attendant military posts in northwestern Nebraska.  
 
 
Twenty-five Years among the Indians and Buffalo: A Frontier Memoir, by 
William D. Street, edited by Warren R. Street with an introduction by 
Richard W. Etulain. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. xxxi, 
525 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South Bend. 
His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the Oregon Trail, 
and the military history of the nineteenth-century U.S. West, among other topics. 
In April 1870, William D. Street remembered, “A party from Iowa 
came out onto the frontier in search of homesteads” (161). They were 
greenhorns on the Kansas plains and sought out Street, an experi-
enced pioneer though only 19 years old. Born in Ohio, Street grew up 
in Kansas, went to work as a teamster in 1867, and, as a member of the 
Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, participated in the winter cam-
paign of 1868–69 against the Cheyenne. After his military service, he 
filed a homestead claim in Jewell County and later added land in De-
Book Reviews and Notices      239 
catur County. Over the subsequent decade, Street worked as a buffalo 
hunter, a cowboy, and a messenger for the army. He describes those 
experiences in a memoir of meticulous detail. His account of the hide 
trade is a treatise, informative and thorough, and although he laments 
the diminishing herds, he recalls being “puffed up” (140) over his first 
buffalo kill. Relating his busy life, Street name-drops the famous peo-
ple he knew or saw from afar. In doing so, he places himself within 
the West’s mythic narrative.  
 Street intended to share his story with interested readers, but final 
preparations for publishing the manuscript were left to his great-
grandson Warren R. Street, a professor emeritus of psychology at Cen-
tral Washington University. This edition includes a foreword and notes, 
and an introduction by historian Richard W. Etulain places Street’s 
memories within a broader context, rightly concluding that “his is a 
Huckleberry Finn story of a boy becoming a man” (xxvii).  
 
 
Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the 
Nineteenth Century, by Matthew N. Johnston. The Charles M. Russell 
Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West. Norman: 
University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. 242 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Joni Kinsey is professor of American art history in the University of 
Iowa’s School of Art and Art History. Her books include Thomas Moran’s West: 
Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste (2005) and Plain Pictures: Images 
of the American Prairie (1996). 
In contrast to the sweep suggested by its title, Narrating the Landscape 
does not offer a broad treatment of printed landscape portrayals with-
in the larger framework of national expansion but rather considers 
aspects of “the narrative structuring of spectatorship . . . by which land-
scape images conveyed concepts of history, consumption, and identity” 
in nineteenth-century America (87). A revision of the author’s 2004 
dissertation, the book asserts that printed images established “new 
temporal frameworks” for understanding terrain in ways that were 
substantially different from paintings of the same period. Readers 
looking for discussions of the origins, production, and dissemination 
of published imagery, or even a sustained analysis of the differences 
between landscape paintings and prints, should look elsewhere; John-
ston is more interested in how structuralist theory explains how printed 
images functioned in a culture where relationships with land were 
rapidly changing. 


Twenty-five Years among the Indians and Buffalo: A Frontier Memoir

Larew, James C.

Larimer, Christopher W.

Explaining Gubernatorial Stability in Iowa: A Review Essay and Author's Response

Review of: "Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869", by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore

Book Reviews and Notices      345 
is entirely appropriate. Anyone wishing further detail on the Icarians is 
advised to read Robert Sutton’s study, Les Icariens: The Utopian Dream in 
Europe and America (1994).  
 Jennings’s work culminates in an interesting, complete, and largely 
error-free chapter on the Oneida Community, which flourished in up-
state New York under the leadership of the enigmatic John Humphrey 
Noyes from the 1840s to the 1880s. This episode of utopian history is of 
interest to social historians but has limited relationship to the history of 
Iowa other than as a unique, if not spectacular, flowering of nineteenth-
century utopianism and millennial anticipation.  
 Errors and omissions aside, Paradise Now is enjoyable, fresh, and a 
worthy introduction to American utopianism. It is not a complete his-
tory of utopianism in the United States, but it springs to the forefront of 
the books that I would recommend to anyone with even a passing inter-
est in these movements or in the history of the early nineteenth century.  
 
 
Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–
1869, by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. Race and Culture in the American 
West Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xv, 368 pp. 
Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South Bend. 
His research and writing have focused on frontier settlement, the Oregon Trail, 
and the military history of the nineteenth-century U.S. West, among other topics. 
On Christmas Day, 1849, Jacob Y. Stover and 26 other gold seekers from 
Iowa City stumbled into Rancho Cucamonga, a 13,000-acre cattle ranch 
and vineyard east of Los Angeles. They had traveled the overland trail 
to Salt Lake City, then taken the Old Spanish Trail over the desert into 
California. The ranch manager, an African American named Jackson, 
welcomed the visitors, fed them, and let them fill their tin cups with 
wine, which Stover remembered drinking “as fast as the Indians could 
tramp it,” even though their host suggested moderation. “Gentlemen, 
you have had a hard time of it,” he recalled Jackson saying, “but de first 
ting you know[,] you will know noting” (83). Despite his hospitality and 
apparent skill in managing a large ranching operation, Jackson had only 
a minor place in Stover’s memory; he was simply part of a humorous 
interlude. This is one of many stories related by Shirley Ann Wilson 
Moore in her informative study of African American participation in 
the westward migrations. She wants us to recognize their presence and 
understand their significance; otherwise they will remain hidden from 
our collective memory.   
346      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 In telling the history of the trail years, Moore gives herself a running 
start with brief narratives about earlier people of African ancestry who 
ventured into the West. These include Esteban, a Moroccan slave and 
survivor of a failed sixteenth-century Spanish expedition along the Gulf 
Coast, and York, William Clark’s slave and a member of the Corps of 
Discovery. Esteban became an “interpreter, ambassador, and negotiator 
with the Native population” (20), yet was still a slave when he died 
serving the Spanish king. Moore credits York with being a “full member 
of the Corps and engaged in all decision making, voting, and hunting 
activities with the group” (23). Placing him within a Corps of Democ-
racy, a common trope since the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, is wishful 
thinking, though Moore understands that slavery and obscurity defined 
his story afterward. Moore believes that the West allowed “ability and 
fortitude” to “prevail over racial pedigree” (31), and the journey westward 
meant “independence, dignity, and personhood for African Americans” 
(160). Yet she understands slavery’s power. It shaped American law 
and culture, so African Americans had much to overcome in seeking 
freedom and opportunity.  
 In 1844, when George W. Bush traveled to Oregon with his wife 
and five sons, he sought the same chance as his fellow migrants, but, as 
John Minto remembered, “It was not in the nature of things that he 
should be permitted to forget his color” (206). Oregon as a territory, 
then as a state, forbade blacks and mulattos to settle there. Bush went 
north to Puget Sound, and in 1855 Congress authorized his right to a 
land claim, although he still could not vote. Despite being a free state, 
California tolerated slavery. In 1852 three hundred African Americans 
toiled in the gold fields for their owners. Alvin Coffey, a Kentucky-born 
slave and well-known California pioneer, first went west in 1849 as an 
ox driver. At the diggings, he saved $616, hoping to acquire his free-
dom, but was cheated by his master and sold. After a second trip over 
the trail and three years in the mines, he earned enough to purchase his 
liberty and that of his family. Together, they returned to California. 
Moore rightfully celebrates these successes, but she is mindful of the costs. 
Freed at age 56, Clara Brown proved a savvy and successful business-
person during Colorado’s gold boom; with her increasing wealth, she 
helped others gain their freedom, travel west, and obtain educations. 
But her husband and four children had been sold and separated years 
before. At age 82, after three decades of searching, Brown found a 
daughter living in Council Bluffs. 
 For anyone interested in African American history or the American 
West, this is a sound and thorough study. Moore’s prose can be stiff, 
but it is always instructive as she covers a lot of ground, relating stories 
Book Reviews and Notices      347 
of better-known figures and including people barely identified in his-
tory except by skin color. Her strength is in laying out slavery’s strict 
parameters and reminding us of its constrictive power, yet she seems 
inspired by the people in this book, and so should her readers. 
 
 
Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-
Century America, by Kristen Layne Anderson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana 
State University Press, 2016. viii, 278 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. $48.00 hardcover and e-book. 
Reviewer Darrel E. Bigham is professor of history and director of Historic 
Southern Indiana emeritus, University of Southern Indiana. He is the author of 
On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (2005) 
and Reflections on a Heritage: The German Americans in Southwestern Indiana (1980). 
The title of this work is a bit unfortunate. Besides the awkward first word, 
the study is much narrower than it suggests. It is not about all Germans 
but about “German radicals” in St. Louis between 1848 and about 1868. 
It does not, moreover, offer much by way of context—that is, how these 
people and this place compared to or with their counterparts in other 
places, especially in river border cities such as Cincinnati, Evansville, 
Louisville, and upriver communities in Iowa.  
 Kristen Anderson asserts, without much evidence, that her book is 
the first analysis of such Germans’ opposition to slavery and how the 
Civil War and emancipation affected their views on race. She acknowl-
edges that the “radicals” represented a fraction of the larger German-
speaking communities of St. Louis, which, like other midwestern cities, 
gained a large number of German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. 
St. Louis had a large Roman Catholic population, as well as “Old Lu-
therans” who built the Missouri Synod. It was also a center for the ecu-
menical Evangelical Synod of North America. There were also the 
“Forty-Eighters,” free-thinking liberals like Carl Schurz. The “Grays” or 
“church Germans” thought quite differently from “Greens” like Schurz 
about the Union, emancipation, and race, and their leaders were prom-
inent opponents of the Irish bishops in the East who urged Catholics to 
become acculturated. The dynamics of intra–German American St. Louis, 
in short, need a fuller discussion. 
 Having offered this cautionary note about the author’s claims, I 
should acknowledge that her extensive use of German-language primary 
sources is impressive. She relies heavily on the Anzeiger des Westens and 
the Westliche Post, two prominent German-language newspapers. The 
former, originally Democratic, became Republican after the passage of 
the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was a prominent supporter of German 


Sweet Freedom's Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1869

Review of: "The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family", by Tom Shroder

Noe, Marcia

370      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 In the final chapter, Buggeln describes the fates of these churches 
since the 1960s. Some are treasured “historic” parts of larger church 
complexes; others, such as Messiah Lutheran Church in Burlington, Iowa, 
have undergone extensive restoration; still others, such as St. Augustine 
Episcopal Church in Gary, Indiana, are now included on the National 
Register of Historic Places. 
 Buggeln’s previous book, Temples of Grace, is the definitive work on 
the iconic New England meetinghouse. This exhaustively researched 
book is likely to become the go-to work on postwar churches, and not 
only modernist ones. Mark Torgerson’s Architecture of Immanence and 
Jay Price’s Temples for a Modern God are still important supplements, but 
Buggeln’s work stands out for its detailed analysis of specific church 
buildings, richly illustrated pages, and consideration of the buildings’ 
place in the culture of the suburb. Her case studies give substance to the 
movement and help us see how these churches came alive. Preserva-
tionists, church members, historians, and students of suburbs should all 
rely on this essential work. 
 
 
The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family, by 
Tom Shroder. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016. 402 pp. Family tree, 
photographs, index. $28.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Marcia Noe is professor of English and director of women’s studies at 
the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is a senior editor of The Diction-
ary of Midwestern Literature, volumes one and two, and is editor of MidAmerica, 
an annual publication of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.  
The reader who glances at the title of this very readable book and as-
sumes that it must be about Shakespeare is in for a rude awakening. Its 
subject is actually Iowa native MacKinlay Kantor, who wrote the New 
York Times best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Andersonville. 
But once immersed in the book, the reader comes to understand that 
the title reflects Kantor’s conception of himself rather than any critical 
or popular consensus, and that outsized self-image and its consequences 
function as a thematic emphasis of the book. 
 Born in 1904 in Webster City, Iowa, Kantor was abandoned by a 
sociopathic father and raised by an impoverished single mother. A high 
school dropout, he worked as a reporter for the Webster City Daily News 
and the Cedar Rapids Republican, as a columnist for the Des Moines Tribune, 
and as a war correspondent, screenwriter, and novelist, publishing 40 
books, including the aforementioned Civil War novel and Glory for Me, 
on which the Academy Award–winning film The Best Years of Our Lives 
was based. For the better part of four decades, Kantor hobnobbed with 
Book Reviews and Notices      371 
movie stars, artists, generals, writers, and politicians, mentored young 
writers, appeared on television and was featured in liquor ads, and 
lived high and drank hard. He died of cancer in 1977, broke and nearly 
forgotten, in Sarasota, Florida, where he and his wife had built a beach 
home when he became a best-selling author.  
 Hybrids are trending these days, and this book fits right into that 
trend. Rather than organize the book chronologically, from the begin-
ning of MacKinlay Kantor’s life until its end, Kantor’s grandson Tom 
Shroder has structured it according to the process he followed in re-
searching and writing it and the parallels he discovered between his 
grandfather’s life and his own. Thus, The Most Famous Writer Who Ever 
Lived is more of a memoir-biography than a straight biography. In fact, 
the book is as much about Tom Shroder and his Kantor and MacKinlay 
ancestors and relatives as it is about his famous grandfather.  
 It is this hybridity that makes me so ambivalent about this book. As 
a scholar, I would have appreciated a detailed, chronologically orga-
nized critical biography; as a reader, I found the memoir-biography for-
mat to be engaging and a welcome respite from my regular academic 
reading. Shroder doesn’t seek to make a complete record of Kantor’s life; 
for example, there is nothing in this book about Kantor’s work with the 
New York City Police Department (an experience upon which he drew 
for many of his crime stories), his association with the Boys Scouts of 
America, or his musicianship. However, the absence of copious facts and 
details has the effect of foregrounding key incidents, arguably creating 
a more vivid and memorable MacKinlay Kantor: a 13-year-old Mack, 
humiliated by his scamster father at a fancy Chicago luncheon; a 23-
year-old Mack pounding out one short story after another in a tiny 
apartment in Chicago; a 45-year-old Mack, reacting viscerally to what 
he found when he entered Buchenwald.  
 One of the best features of this book is its honesty. Shroder does a 
good job of putting family loyalty and personal feelings aside to give us 
a warts-and-all portrait of Kantor. His love for his grandfather and his 
respect for his work are evident but do not blind him to Kantor’s failings 
or tempt him to gloss over them, many of which he discovered while 
undertaking thoroughgoing research at the Library of Congress, the main 
repository of Kantor’s papers. He offers many examples of Kantor’s kind-
ness, perseverance, and generosity, as well as of his egotism, selfish-
ness, womanizing, reactionary politics, and financial irresponsibility. 
 Although I would have liked to have seen less Tom Shroder and 
more MacKinlay Kantor in this book, I can certainly recommend it, 
although less as a scholarly resource than as a captivating cautionary 
tale about a gifted writer whose disdain for intellectual growth, fond- 
372      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
ness for alcohol, and love of a lavish lifestyle kept him out of contention 
for literary longevity. The book could have been more carefully fact-
checked: Hemingway’s third wife was Martha Gelhorn, not “Mary,” as 
Shroder states; and Sidney Poitier is not an “African American actor”— 
he was born to Bahamian parents and spent his early years in the Car-
ibbean. But these are minor flaws. Anyone making a study of MacKin-
lay Kantor, Iowa authors, Civil War writers, or Pulitzer Prize–winning 
novelists should find Shroder’s book useful. Anyone wishing to learn 
how to write a compelling memoir would also be wise to take a look at it. 
 
 
All the Wild that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American 
West, by David Gessner. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. 
354 pp. Illustrations, notes on sources, index. $16.95 paperback. 
Reviewer James A. Pritchard is adjunct associate professor in the Department 
of Landscape Architecture and the Department of Natural Resource Ecology 
and Management at Iowa State University. He is a coauthor of A Green and Per-
manent Land (2001). 
This wonderful book is not only an enlightening literary tour through 
two well-known authors’ works but also a thoughtful exploration of the 
western landscapes they portrayed. Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey, 
argues Gessner, “far from being regional or outdated, have never been 
more relevant” (3).  
 Using extensive interviews, the author transports readers far beyond 
the “mummified” reputations of “Saint Wallace the Good and Randy 
Ed, Wild Man” (279). Stegner’s reputation remains more traditionalist, 
especially contrasted with the free-wheeling Abbey. Yet Stegner broke 
boundaries, questioning the status quo of the West, striving to “strip 
away myth” from the ethos of rugged individualism and to “see things 
as they were” (37). And Abbey, despite trending toward the cantanker-
ous on the written page, was “actually quiet and reserved in person” 
(7). Abbey accepted himself, embracing his id, while Stegner continually 
wanted better, embracing culture. Gessner capably engages with biog-
raphy, following Stegner in understanding our world through people’s 
lives. 
 Abbey and Stegner (who attended the first Iowa Writers’ Workshop) 
shared a “relish for hard work” with focused creative time, and both 
taught writing at a university (145). They were informed by Bernard 
DeVoto’s The Western Paradox and his view of “too many places where 
the citizenry was suckered in by the dream of riches, only to be left 
empty in the end” (120). Gessner engagingly illuminates the literary 
landscape, describing a continuous heritage from John Wesley Powell, 


The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family

Review of: "Amana Colonies, 1932–1945", by Peter Hoehnle

Foerstner, Abigail

Book Reviews and Notices      245 
particular, his keen grasp of the role of Iowa and the Midwest in these 
past debates makes Planning Democracy a must-read for historians of 
the New Deal, regionalism, policy, and politics generally.  
 
 
Amana Colonies, 1932–1945, by Peter Hoehnle. Images of America Series. 
Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2016. 127 pp. Illustrations, bibli-
ography. $21.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Abigail Foerstner is co-coordinator of the science journalism special-
ization at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is the 
author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers (2000).  
Cedar Rapids photographer John Barry captured Lucille Schaefer 
Kraus dressed for church in the 1930s. Her floor-length calico, with a 
black shawl, apron, and cap reveres the legacy of her past as she grace-
fully embraces the new world of the Great Change in the Amana Col-
onies. Communal societies historian Peter Hoehnle, an Amana native, 
draws on photographs by Barry, trusted Amana leader William Noé, 
West Amana brothers Rudolph and Paul Kellenberger, and others to 
tell the story of the critical and often overlooked reorganization of life 
for people in the Amanas. In grand American fashion, the Great Change 
transformed their communal religious utopia into a for-profit corpora-
tion, designating ownership shares to colonists for their years of ser-
vice and offering wages for farming, carpentry, baking, factory work, 
and all of the other colony jobs—10 cents per hour at first, as Hoehnle 
tells us.  
 Hoehnle’s book documents in text and photo portfolios the rapid-
fire pace of the Great Change from 1932, when Amana residents over-
whelmingly voted for it, to 1945. The book shows how the colonies 
quickly offered a high school education to children for the first time 
and opened the doors to private businesses, scout troops, modern 
dress, and Amana’s first newsletter. From a national perspective, the 
book fills a gap in the Midwest’s depression-era history. We see the 
sweeping force of social and economic change and the faces of people 
who met it with dignity, courage, and determination to build a brighter 
future during one of the darkest periods of American life.  
 Anyone who visits the Amanas for family-style dinners and hand-
crafted goods soon learns how the Community of True Inspiration 
fled religious persecution in Germany in the 1840s and, in the 1850s, 
settled on 26,000 acres along the Iowa River to establish the seven vil-
lages of the communal Amana Colonies. Community kitchens fed the 
body, and 11 church services every week nourished the spirit.  
246      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Kraus’s portrait and many other images in the book capture the 
blend of revered traditions with fresh opportunities. Amana’s centuries-
old Pietist religion remained alive and well, headed by a separate 
Amana Church Society. The ethereal light sifting through a room of 
plain wooden benches for daily prayer services shown in a Paul Kellen-
berger photo suggests an allegory of faith flowing strong. Still, the 
Great Change streamlined religion, too, as the mandatory 11 services 
dropped to one on Sundays. 
 Hoehnle’s chapters cover religion, farming, industry, crafts, schools, 
tourism, the home scene, and several other topics. Captions carry ad-
ditional details of everyday life preserved in lyrical compositions and 
lively snapshots such as one of two little girl sitting atop a Ford. “The 
first large purchase made after the reorganization by many Amana 
families was an automobile,” Hoehnle reports (84).  
 True to the mission of recovering this lost era, Hoehnle painstak-
ingly identifies every person shown in the photos, thanking more than 
30 people for their assistance with this momentous effort. The photo-
essay format for chapters offers a front-row seat to history and is a 
signature of Arcadia’s Images of America series.  
 
 
Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heart-
land, by Stephen Meyer. The Working Class in American History Se-
ries. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xiii, 247 
pp. Notes, index. $95.00 hardcover, $28.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Dennis Deslippe is associate professor of American Studies and 
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is 
the author of Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the 
Civil Rights Revolution (2012) and Rights, Not Roses: Women, Industrial Unions, 
and the Law of Equality in the United States, 1945–1980 (2000). 
When automobile union leader Walter Reuther was elected president 
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1952, Life magazine pub-
lished a photograph of the labor leader, cigar in hand, taking a swig of 
beer. A buzz went through the crowd: “The ‘red head’ drinks beer!” 
Reuther, who abstained from alcohol and tobacco, cut an unlikely figure 
in the rough-and-tumble world of factories, union halls, and picket lines. 
 Although Stephen Meyer does not discuss Reuther’s celebratory 
drink, his richly detailed Manhood on the Line joins a growing list of 
studies on twentieth-century working-class masculinity. Meyer, a sure-
footed labor historian whose long list of publications includes a study 
of Henry Ford’s “five-dollar day,” captures the raw and often violent 
way white male workers constructed and maintained their masculine 


Amana Colonies, 1932-1945

Review of: "Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland", by Stephen Meyer

Deslippe, Dennis

246      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Kraus’s portrait and many other images in the book capture the 
blend of revered traditions with fresh opportunities. Amana’s centuries-
old Pietist religion remained alive and well, headed by a separate 
Amana Church Society. The ethereal light sifting through a room of 
plain wooden benches for daily prayer services shown in a Paul Kellen-
berger photo suggests an allegory of faith flowing strong. Still, the 
Great Change streamlined religion, too, as the mandatory 11 services 
dropped to one on Sundays. 
 Hoehnle’s chapters cover religion, farming, industry, crafts, schools, 
tourism, the home scene, and several other topics. Captions carry ad-
ditional details of everyday life preserved in lyrical compositions and 
lively snapshots such as one of two little girl sitting atop a Ford. “The 
first large purchase made after the reorganization by many Amana 
families was an automobile,” Hoehnle reports (84).  
 True to the mission of recovering this lost era, Hoehnle painstak-
ingly identifies every person shown in the photos, thanking more than 
30 people for their assistance with this momentous effort. The photo-
essay format for chapters offers a front-row seat to history and is a 
signature of Arcadia’s Images of America series.  
 
 
Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heart-
land, by Stephen Meyer. The Working Class in American History Se-
ries. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xiii, 247 
pp. Notes, index. $95.00 hardcover, $28.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Dennis Deslippe is associate professor of American Studies and 
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is 
the author of Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the 
Civil Rights Revolution (2012) and Rights, Not Roses: Women, Industrial Unions, 
and the Law of Equality in the United States, 1945–1980 (2000). 
When automobile union leader Walter Reuther was elected president 
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1952, Life magazine pub-
lished a photograph of the labor leader, cigar in hand, taking a swig of 
beer. A buzz went through the crowd: “The ‘red head’ drinks beer!” 
Reuther, who abstained from alcohol and tobacco, cut an unlikely figure 
in the rough-and-tumble world of factories, union halls, and picket lines. 
 Although Stephen Meyer does not discuss Reuther’s celebratory 
drink, his richly detailed Manhood on the Line joins a growing list of 
studies on twentieth-century working-class masculinity. Meyer, a sure-
footed labor historian whose long list of publications includes a study 
of Henry Ford’s “five-dollar day,” captures the raw and often violent 
way white male workers constructed and maintained their masculine 
Book Reviews and Notices      247 
identities. The book’s title, however, is a bit misleading: Meyer’s 
“American Heartland” is, for the most part, Detroit-area automobile 
plants. Therefore, scholars concerned with the history of masculinity in 
Iowa’s packinghouses, coal mines, railroads, and other worksites will 
welcome Meyer’s new book more as a general contribution to their 
interests. 
 Manhood on the Line explores the origins of workers’ masculinity. 
Meyer tells us that, as mass production came to dominate the indus-
trial landscape, workers expressed a masculinity that was an unwieldy 
amalgamation of the older, upright artisan republican notion of man-
hood, as well as a volatile, muscular form of the “bachelor man” 
common in the nineteenth century. He illustrates how this new mas-
culinity emerged in the context of a transient workforce. Southern and 
eastern European men came to toil on the factory floor alongside native-
born white men as well as Irish and German Americans. Young men 
from farm communities in the Midwest joined them, as did African 
Americans and whites from the South. They drank, fought, played 
endless pranks, and frequented houses of prostitution. When they 
weren’t competing for jobs, they were fighting to combat management 
favoritism and to secure wages sufficient to support themselves and 
their families. Class solidarity came into focus as much as a result of 
rejecting company spies and hired thugs as through ideological ap-
peals to social unionism. 
 Gender and racial inequality helped to define the dominant white, 
working-class masculinity. Meyer’s discussion of the influx of minority 
men—and women of all races—into factories during World War II is 
a familiar one. He reminds us that masculinity is relational in nature: 
white men contrasted their masculinity to both management and new 
wartime workers. Their protests took the form of unauthorized “hate 
strikes,” which came less from economic competition during the war 
and more from anxiety over social equality. The unrest cut several 
ways; white women workers participated in these walkouts as well. 
African American men defended African American women’s right to 
work alongside white women. Yet, as other scholars have shown in 
studies of various occupations in the 1960s and ’70s, they, too, balked at 
gender equality. 
 Meyer ends his study with a survey of working-class masculinity 
since the 1940s. While acknowledging improved status for marginal-
ized workers, he offers a portrait of masculinity in crisis as autoworkers 
were buffeted by a shrinking workforce, aggressive anti-unionism, and 
the grueling effects of automation.  
248      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The strength of Manhood on the Line is its unvarnished examination 
of the power of masculinity. At the same time, it slights other forms of 
masculinity present at the height of industrial America. The Associa-
tion of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), for example, played a pow-
erful role in unionizing efforts and in opposing communists in the labor 
movement. In a different context, Meyer identifies Paul Ste. Marie as a 
militant union leader but does not note that he was an ACTU leader as 
well. Beyond their ability to shut down Charles Coughlin, the “Radio 
Priest” who voiced anti-Semitic and pro-fascist sentiments by the late 
1930s, and to mobilize priests to participate in organizing Ford Motor 
Company workers in neighborhood parishes, the ACTU offered a 
model of masculinity inflected with Catholic notions of fatherhood and 
respectability. Informed by Meyer’s impressive book, other scholars 
will come to study a fuller range of working-class masculinities. 
 
 
Pesticides, A Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals, 
by Michelle Mart. CultureAmerica Series. Lawrence: University Press 
of Kansas, 2015. 344 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer David D. Vail is assistant professor of history at the University of 
Nebraska at Kearney. His book, Chemical Lands: A History of Pesticides, Aerial 
Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands, is forthcoming from the 
University of Alabama Press in 2018.  
In 1945 Capper’s Weekly reported that many residents agonized over 
the rise of agricultural chemicals such as DDT and 2,4-D. An October 
editorial captured those anxieties: “Little is known about the toxic 
effect of DDT on humans. . . . Much confusion has resulted over the 
popular sale of DDT recently. Most users will have to learn what form 
or with what solution they want to buy it. There’s a very specialized 
from of DDT for each use. Some dealers are reported[ly] selling very 
weak solutions and making exaggerated claims for it. To protect 
themselves purchasers are advised to read the labels carefully and 
acquaint themselves with the potency needed for the job to be done” 
(Capper’s Weekly, October 13, 1945). Pesticides could protect crops, but 
landowners and agriculturalists worried about the risks. 
 A growing group of scholars such as Frederick Rowe Davis 
(Banned), David Kinkela (DDT and the American Century), and Nancy 
Langston (Toxic Bodies) has been exploring the scientific, political, and 
ecological histories of the toxic chemicals so ubiquitous on Iowa, Ne-
braska, and Kansas farms. Michelle Mart adds a new cultural synthesis 
to help explain an ongoing paradox: How, even in the midst of caution 
and skepticism, can Americans view pesticides with such “remarkable 


Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland

Review of: "Pesticides, A Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals", by Michelle Mart

Vail, David D.

248      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The strength of Manhood on the Line is its unvarnished examination 
of the power of masculinity. At the same time, it slights other forms of 
masculinity present at the height of industrial America. The Associa-
tion of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), for example, played a pow-
erful role in unionizing efforts and in opposing communists in the labor 
movement. In a different context, Meyer identifies Paul Ste. Marie as a 
militant union leader but does not note that he was an ACTU leader as 
well. Beyond their ability to shut down Charles Coughlin, the “Radio 
Priest” who voiced anti-Semitic and pro-fascist sentiments by the late 
1930s, and to mobilize priests to participate in organizing Ford Motor 
Company workers in neighborhood parishes, the ACTU offered a 
model of masculinity inflected with Catholic notions of fatherhood and 
respectability. Informed by Meyer’s impressive book, other scholars 
will come to study a fuller range of working-class masculinities. 
 
 
Pesticides, A Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals, 
by Michelle Mart. CultureAmerica Series. Lawrence: University Press 
of Kansas, 2015. 344 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer David D. Vail is assistant professor of history at the University of 
Nebraska at Kearney. His book, Chemical Lands: A History of Pesticides, Aerial 
Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands, is forthcoming from the 
University of Alabama Press in 2018.  
In 1945 Capper’s Weekly reported that many residents agonized over 
the rise of agricultural chemicals such as DDT and 2,4-D. An October 
editorial captured those anxieties: “Little is known about the toxic 
effect of DDT on humans. . . . Much confusion has resulted over the 
popular sale of DDT recently. Most users will have to learn what form 
or with what solution they want to buy it. There’s a very specialized 
from of DDT for each use. Some dealers are reported[ly] selling very 
weak solutions and making exaggerated claims for it. To protect 
themselves purchasers are advised to read the labels carefully and 
acquaint themselves with the potency needed for the job to be done” 
(Capper’s Weekly, October 13, 1945). Pesticides could protect crops, but 
landowners and agriculturalists worried about the risks. 
 A growing group of scholars such as Frederick Rowe Davis 
(Banned), David Kinkela (DDT and the American Century), and Nancy 
Langston (Toxic Bodies) has been exploring the scientific, political, and 
ecological histories of the toxic chemicals so ubiquitous on Iowa, Ne-
braska, and Kansas farms. Michelle Mart adds a new cultural synthesis 
to help explain an ongoing paradox: How, even in the midst of caution 
and skepticism, can Americans view pesticides with such “remarkable 
Book Reviews and Notices      249 
continuity” in “how attitudes toward pesticide use remained relatively 
stable from the 1940s to the present day” (2)? Mart argues that this 
“love” for chemicals throughout the postwar era and beyond may be 
long lasting, but it is certainly not static. “Even articles that warned 
readers to be careful about safety,” Mart points out, “never implied 
that there was any danger if all directions were followed. . . . In sum, 
magazine and newspaper articles—despite occasional words of caution 
—shaped popular attitudes toward pesticides by celebrating their ef-
fectiveness and advocating their use” (27).  
 In subsequent chapters, Mart explores how, throughout the post-
war era and beyond, agricultural chemicals were welcomed tools in 
farming at home and in foreign policy efforts abroad. Even as Rachel 
Carson warned against the dangers of DDT in her 1962 book Silent 
Spring, which helped spark the American environmental movement 
and led to the insecticide’s eventual banning a decade later, agricul-
tural chemicals remained central to protecting fields and sterilizing 
homes. That commitment, according to Mart, only strengthened in the 
following decades despite disasters such as Bhopal and Love Canal. 
By the 1980s, a potent combination of scientific reports, extension re-
lationships, and general environmental awareness failed to diminish 
Americans’ cultural embrace of insecticides and herbicides: “Once ex-
tremist voices were quieted, people could settle back into a comfortable 
confidence that environmental issues were being addressed, the new 
laws of the 1970s gave many false confidence and obscured the sys-
temic and philosophical impact of industrialization on the environ-
ment” (178).  
 For readers of the Annals of Iowa, Mart’s book supports some his-
torical complexities of midwestern agriculture while conflicting with 
others. Editorials in Capper’s Weekly, Kansas Farmer, and the Nebraska 
Farmer described pesticides as “poisonous medicine” that healed sick 
fields from insect invasions or noxious weed advances. Deep concerns 
about toxicity, shady aerial sprayers, or chemical drifts all powerfully 
shaped the region’s inclinations toward pesticides. Use obviously in-
creased, but not in predictable ways. Pesticides, a Love Story serves as a 
crucial history for understanding the challenging cultural, scientific, 
environmental, and agricultural relationships around pesticides that 
continue to afflict Iowa and the Midwest in the present.  
 
 
 


Pesticides, A Love Story: America's Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals

Review of: Crusading Iowa Journalist Verne Marshall: Exposing Graft and the 1936 Pulitzer Prize, by Jerry Harringto

Nichols, Jeff

Book Reviews and Notices      453 
Crusading Iowa Journalist Verne Marshall: Exposing Graft and the 1936 
Pulitzer Prize, by Jerry Harrington. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2017. 
141 pp. Photographs, notes, index. $21.99 paperback. 
Reviewer Jeff Nichols is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illi-
nois at Chicago. His research has included investigating the role of newspapers 
in wartime Chicago. 
On December 12, 1934, police raided a Cedar Rapids canning factory 
that housed an illegal bar. In addition to a slot machine, a punch board, 
and a stash of liquor valued at $2,000, more than 200 Iowa state liquor 
seals were discovered. A letter from the chair of the Iowa Liquor 
Control Commission to J. Leroy Farmer, the owner of the cannery, 
explained that the seals were for Farmer’s personal stock of alcohol. 
Farmer begged not be taken in, as it would “blow the lid off the state.”  
 Jerry Harrington traces how Verne Marshall, the editor of the Cedar 
Rapids Gazette, subsequently uncovered a statewide protection racket 
in which public officials facilitated the illegal sale of hard liquor and 
shielded gambling and other forms of vice in exchange for campaign 
contributions and bribes. Marshall’s exposés, which won the 1936 Pu-
litzer Prize, “ripped off the gentle fabric of Iowa life and exposed an un-
dercurrent of graft and corruption few in the state knew existed” (49).  
 Well before he set out to investigate how J. Leroy Farmer could 
clear $45,000 to $70,000 per month running an illegal bar, Marshall had 
developed a statewide reputation as an implacable watchdog against 
graft, most notably breaking stories involving corruption at the Iowa 
State Dairy and Food Commission and the University of Iowa. At the 
time of Farmer’s arrest, only beer could be sold by the glass in taverns. 
State-managed stores held a monopoly on bottled liquor. On paper a 
judicious compromise between wet and dry forces after the passage of 
the Twenty-first Amendment, in practice the state monopoly invited 
the sort of graft associated with Chicago or Kansas City, not Iowa.  
 Rather than limit his paper’s reporting to Linn County, Marshall 
took his investigation to Sioux City. Then the state’s second-largest city, 
Sioux City was a wide-open cattle town with a long history of indiffer-
ence to dry laws. Hiring a private investigator, Marshall found which 
dozens of tavern owners paid local officials to turn a blind eye to gam-
bling, prostitution, and the sale of hard liquor. Even the Sioux City press 
seemed to be on the take.  
 For all the recent talk about objective journalism, Verne Marshall 
was willing not only to throw the resources of his paper into building 
public pressure for prosecutions but also into reimbursing prosecutors 
for witness expenses. As Marshall testified before a Sioux City grand jury, 
it was a journalist’s job “to go after any dishonest public official who is 
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 


Crusading Iowa Journalist Verne Marshall: Exposing Graft and the 1936 Pulitzer Prize

Review of: Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, volume 2, Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination, general editor Philip A. Greasle

Raymond, Elizabeth

433 
Book Reviews and Notices 
Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, volume 2, Dimensions of the Midwest-
ern Literary Imagination, general editor Philip A. Greasley. Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press, 2016. xiv, 1,057 pp. Maps, illustrations, bibli-
ography, index. $85.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Elizabeth Raymond holds the Grace A. Griffen Chair in History at the 
University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author, most recently, of “Creating the 
Heartland: The Midwest Emerges in American Culture,” in The Midwestern Mo-
ment, edited by Jon Lauck (Hastings College Press, 2017).   
The Midwest, it seems, is currently enjoying something of a moment. 
Ascribed a consequential role in recent electoral politics, it is also expe-
riencing an academic publishing renaissance. The present volume, a be-
hemoth of almost five pounds, is only the second in a projected three-
volume series covering midwestern literature. It succeeds volume one 
from 2001, which included biographical information for approximately 
400 individual midwestern authors, and will be followed by a projected 
third volume that will present the region’s literary history. If readers 
hunger for even more information, they can consult a 1,890-page cousin 
from 2007, The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (also pub-
lished by Indiana University Press). It treated the 12 states of the region 
individually and then discussed topics common to all of them. Volume 
two of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature covers similar ground, but 
concentrates on literary aspects of the region. It was sponsored by the 
Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and prepared by scores 
of its members. The resulting publication is clearly a labor of love. 
 Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination covers an eclectic 
series of topics, some expected and others surprising. In addition to ar-
ticles on 35 “pivotal texts” selected by the editorial board, there are en-
tries for literary genres such as poetry and drama but also subgenres 
such as mystery and detective fiction and Arab American and Scandi-
navian American literature. Topics include popular culture texts, the 
historical development of midwestern states, important social move-
ments, eminent regional periodicals, and cities with a significant liter-
ary heritage. This last category includes obvious candidates like Chi-
cago and Detroit but also less apparent choices like Kansas City and 
Minneapolis–Saint Paul, the latter joined together into a single entry 
that will likely annoy some. Both Iowa and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop 
have extensive entries, but no Iowa city has a separate entry. There is 
434      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
an ample and detailed index that will greatly assist users who want to 
find all references to a particular text or writer.  
 According to the general editor’s introduction, the Dictionary vol-
umes are designed to serve a broad audience, including students at the 
high school and college levels but also literary scholars and casual read-
ers. Students will find full and detailed introductions to myriad move-
ments, publications, places, and themes in regional literature. Perhaps 
most useful for literary scholars will be the carefully selected bibliog-
raphy of secondary works on midwestern culture. It’s difficult to envi-
sion the casual reader who might sit down to browse a literary dictionary, 
but Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination rewards casual cu-
riosity. Iowa’s entry, for example covers almost 20 pages and includes 
comprehensive coverage of published texts relating to the state. It dis-
tinguishes carefully between the first fictional work physically pub-
lished in the state (A Home in the West; or, Emigration and Its Consequences, 
published in 1858 by M. Emilia Rockwell) and the first novel with Iowa 
as its setting (The Pet of the Settlement: A Story of Prairie-Land, by Caroline 
A. Soule in 1860). Popular literature is separated from more ambitious 
novels by writers such as Ruth Suckow or Marilynne Robinson, but 
both types are given serious coverage. Children’s literature, detective 
fiction, horror and fantasy, romantic fiction, and religious fiction are all 
discussed along with poetry and drama. The state’s entry includes cov-
erage of printing and journalism history as well as notable periodicals, 
the Iowa Federal Writers’ Project of the Depression years, and various 
state literary awards. If this comprehensive coverage stimulates further 
questions in the casual reader’s mind, there’s also a compilation of bib-
liographies of Iowa literature. Other dictionary entries are similarly ex-
pansive in scope. In this reference work, The Great Gatsby appears along 
with Black Elk Speaks and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on the list of pivotal 
midwestern literary texts. 
 This expansiveness is both a strength and a weakness. Although 
much territory is covered (Who knew there was so much midwestern 
literature centered on technology and industry, or on rivers?), there are 
also glaring omissions. While texts originally written in Scandinavian 
languages are allotted 12 pages, there is no entry at all for similar works 
in German. More fundamentally, there is no clear operating definition 
of what constitutes midwestern literature, whether writing about the 
region, writing from the region, or writing by people who have passed 
through the region. This massive reference work tends to concentrate 
on literature produced by long-term residents but also incorporates 
works about the region produced by writers living elsewhere, espe-
cially if they are native to the 12 states that constitute the Midwest.  
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 


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