The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression," by Cara A. Finnegan

Raeburn, John

Book Reviews and Notices      79 
Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the 
Great Depression, by Cara A. Finnegan. Urbana, Chicago, and Spring-
field: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xiii, 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, 
bibliography, index. $50.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer John Raeburn is professor emeritus of English and American studies 
at the University of Iowa. His books include Ben Shahn’s American Scene: Pho-
tographs 1938 (2010) and A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties 
Photography (2006). 
What historical viewers made of photographs publicly displayed—how 
they interpreted and then assimilated them to their own experiences 
and belief systems—is the daunting topic explored by Cara Finnegan 
in Making Photography Matter. Much is known about individual pho-
tographers and their ambitions, a fair amount about the institutional 
structures that expedited and displayed their work, but practically 
nothing about responses by the vast number of individuals who, since 
the medium’s invention in 1839, have viewed photographs in books, 
periodicals, and exhibitions. The reason for this deficit is simple enough: 
typically, few discursive traces of those viewing experiences remain. 
In contrast to other expressive arts such as drama or painting, more-
over, until recently photography has not even elicited a rich vein of pro-
fessional criticism that could at least hint at the public reception of 
specific bodies of work. 
 Finnegan’s subtitle, A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great 
Depression, was likely inscribed at the publisher’s insistence because 
her introduction explicitly disavows such a comprehensive historical 
ambition. Instead, she develops four case studies of photographic 
reception, two from the nineteenth century centered on Civil War 
photographs and a Lincoln portrait, and two from the twentieth fea-
turing pictures of child labor and Depression-era poverty; in each case, 
the photographic corpus elicited a textual response that has survived. 
That residue is essential to Finnegan’s method of deploying rhetorical 
analysis of those texts to reconstruct how viewers understood the pho-
tographs and what contemporary cultural concerns their responses 
addressed. This method allows her to demonstrate that, far from being 
passive ciphers as often supposed, viewers actively engaged in com-
plex acts of interpretation. Her analysis thereby “recover[s] the viewer 
as a key participant in the event of photography” (170).  
 Only relatively few viewers would have seen photographs shot 
on Civil War battlefields, most by Mathew Brady’s staff, because the 
technique for reproducing them in printed matter did not yet exist. 
More commonly, audiences encountered verbal renditions of the pho-
tographs and magazine engravings based on them. Finnegan argues 
80      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
persuasively that, from these encounters and the interpretive work 
they encouraged, audiences imbibed a sense of “presence” that helped 
them negotiate the war’s uncertainties.  
 In 1895 McClure’s magazine reproduced a daguerreotype of a 
thirtyish Abraham Lincoln to accompany an installment of Ida Tar-
bell’s biography of Lincoln; the photograph had not been displayed 
publicly before and is still Lincoln’s earliest surviving portrait. It stim-
ulated a vigorous discourse that subsequently filled several of the 
magazine’s pages with letters offering interpretations of it. Most writers, 
representatives of the white male elite, pronounced on how the por-
trait embedded the future president’s character, drawing heavily on 
the popular pseudoscientific discourses of phrenology and physiog-
nomy. Their interpretations made the young Lincoln represent a new 
ideal in the nation’s character development, forged by his frontier up-
bringing. The urgency with which this interpretation was advanced, 
says Finnegan, was attributable to the racial and class anxieties that 
undergirded it. 
 In 1912 T. R. Dawley, a former inspector for the U.S. Bureau of 
Labor, used Lewis Hine’s photographs to illustrate his book-length 
polemic against child labor reformers such as Hine. Factory work, 
Dawley argued, benefited southern children who would otherwise 
languish in abysmally ignorant poverty. Finnegan’s circumstantial 
account of Dawley’s project amply unpacks a crucial paradox of pho-
tography: that its apparently unimpeachable representation of some 
concrete fact can without image tampering be appropriated to serve a 
contrasting and even antithetical purpose.  
 In 1938 government photographers of the Farm Security Admin-
istration (FSA) exhibited about 75 of their pictures of Depression-era 
scenes at a massive, week-long photographic exhibition in New York’s 
Grand Central Palace; a fair number of them have since become iconic. 
The agency invited viewers to submit written comments about the 
pictures, and 540 did so. Remarkably, for all the subsequent attention 
to FSA photography, no one until Finnegan had investigated those re-
sponses. Her training in rhetorical theory made her ideal for the task. 
Her nuanced analysis reveals how viewers interpreted what they had 
seen and “insert[ed] themselves as active agents in the stories the pho-
tographs had to tell” (168).  
 Largely because it depends on such a richly qualitative and quan-
titative sample of audience response, the FSA case study is the book’s 
strongest and provides a fine model for future reception studies. The 
archives of state historical societies and local institutions hold numer-
ous photographic collections that possibly have accompanying textual 
Book Reviews and Notices      81 
evidence that has been neglected or perhaps not even recognized. Dis-
covering whether they do could productively amplify the “viewer’s 
history” Finnegan has begun. 
 
 
Carnival in the Countryside: The History of the Iowa State Fair, by Chris 
Rasmussen. Iowa and the Midwest Experience Series. Iowa City: 
University of Iowa Press, 2015. vii, 206 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. 
$27.50 paperback. 
Reviewer Tom Morain is director of government relations at Graceland Uni-
versity and former administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa. He 
has taught Iowa history at several institutions and online and has been active 
in public history projects around the state.  
Good histories spark curiosity on questions that their audiences may 
never have considered. On that scale, Chris Rasmussen plows new 
ground in his Carnival in the Countryside: The History of the Iowa State 
Fair. It is a good guess that among the record 1,117,398 visitors who 
passed through the gates at the 2015 fair, very few have ever given even 
passing consideration to the enormous complexities its production 
entails and fewer still to the philosophy behind its rise to become such 
an iconic tradition. Rasmussen, an American cultural and intellectual 
historian, is an Iowa native who earned a B.A. at Grinnell College and 
a Ph.D. at Rutgers. His passion for the fair is genetic. His father raced 
stock cars at the Iowa State Fair, he writes in his acknowledgments, 
and his mother “went for the country music.”  
 The book takes a chronological approach. The fair’s earliest advo-
cates were local agricultural societies whose mission was to promote 
better farming by displaying the results of superior methods: bigger 
ears of corn, fatter hogs, bigger and faster horses. Through the rest of 
the year, the societies promoted “book farming” through lectures and 
papers, but the fair was where they put their products into competi-
tion to prove their superiority. 
 But their high-minded motives for agricultural exhibitions had to 
contend with the stubborn reality that the public wanted something 
else, or at least something more. Fair visitors wanted entertainment. A 
day spent looking at longer carrots or the latest cream separators just 
didn’t do it, especially for mom and the kids. Rasmussen documents 
the continuing struggle between those who promoted the fair as an 
educational experience and those who looked to entertainments to 
increase gate receipts that would pay the bills. Vendors and performers 
of every variety also coveted the dollars that fairgoers brought with 
them. At one time, vendors, tent shows, and games of chance were 


English

Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 75 no.4 Fall 2016

Review of: "Red Cloud: Oglala Legend," by John D. McDermott

Smith, Denny

Book Reviews and Notices      443 
late nineteenth century and working at Kansas City’s packinghouses in 
the early twentieth century. Despite these oversights, Campney’s book 
is an important corrective to the still prevailing belief that racial vio-
lence was a uniquely southern problem. 
 
 
Red Cloud: Oglala Legend, by John D. McDermott. South Dakota Bi-
ography Series. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2015. xv, 
194 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Denny Smith is associate professor of history and director of Native 
American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research and 
writing have focused on Plains Indians. 
With three major scholarly biographies of Oglala Lakota war and civil 
chief Red Cloud already published by 1997, the South Dakota Historical 
Society Press nonetheless has wisely selected Red Cloud as the fourth 
person in their state biography series. Equally thoughtfully they invited 
distinguished frontier and “Indian wars” historian John D. McDermott 
to write it. 
 Red Cloud was a towering figure as war chief, but after 1868, when 
he dedicated himself to reservation life, he became a polarizing tribal 
leader, both within Lakota circles and in Lakota–federal Indian policy 
affairs. McDermott safely navigates these turbulent waters to focus 
mainly on Red Cloud’s story. 
 In the first two chapters on Red Cloud’s early years, McDermott 
presents unique insights. Using interviews with Red Cloud late in his 
life by historians Doane Robinson and R. Eli Paul, McDermott presents 
rare details such as Red Cloud’s extensive war honors and his special 
affinity with horses. 
 In chapters 4–6 McDermott recounts the well-known 1865–1868 
Lakota–U.S. Army wars in the Powder River region. He knows this 
story well, having written two fine studies on this period: Circle of Fire 
(2003) and Red Cloud’s War (2010). 
 Red Cloud’s formative years at the newly established Red Cloud 
Agencies were based primarily in neighboring Nebraska. After forcing 
the U.S. Army to abandon Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith in 
the summer of 1868, Red Cloud traveled to Fort Laramie and signed the 
1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.  
 In chapters 7–9 McDermott addresses the turbulent 1869–1877 years 
as Red Cloud battled the Indian Affairs Office over the negligent treat-
ment of Oglalas at two different Red Cloud Agencies. The author em-
phasizes that these agencies were in fact situated in western Nebraska. 
Red Cloud refused to relocate to the Great Sioux Reservation (in present 
444      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
South and North Dakota west of the Missouri River) established by the 
1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, of which Red Cloud was the most important 
signatory. 
 The last three chapters (excluding the author’s concluding remarks) 
cover Red Cloud’s agency life after 1878 at the newly established Pine 
Ridge Reservation, finally situated on the Great Sioux Reservation. 
McDermott concisely sifts through the well-studied 1878–1889 period 
of catastrophic land losses: the Black Hills in 1877 and dismemberment 
into six smaller Sioux reservations in 1889. After 1889, Pine Ridge Lakotas 
sadly forgot their great leader, and Red Cloud died in 1909 an impov-
erished Lakota. 
 McDermott emphasizes two of Red Cloud’s crucial qualities: after 
1868 he dedicated his life to peace with non-Indians, and he spent his 
whole life defending Lakota traditional ways.  
 In this marvelously researched study, McDermott provides a clear 
and concise narrative. I agree with his positive assessments of Red Cloud, 
but we still need a culturally sophisticated biography of the Lakota chief. 
Red Cloud deserves an interpretation that explains why he was in fact 
so greatly revered as the Oglalas’ agency leader: every political battle 
he fought and every decision he made was predicated on the long-term 
interest of his people, not his own fortunes. That is what great tribal 
leaders do. 
 
 
Out Where the West Begins: Profiles, Visions, and Strategies of Early Western 
Business Leaders, by Philip F. Anschutz. Denver: Cloud Camp Press, 2015. 
392 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $34.95 hardcover.  
Reviewer J. T. Murphy is professor of history at Indiana University South Bend. 
His research and writing have focused on the military history of the nineteenth-
century U.S. West, the Oregon Trail, and frontier settlement, among other topics. 
In his initial sentence, Philip F. Anschutz asks, “Who created the American 
West?” (13). Because he is a successful, Denver-based, corporate execu-
tive ranked 108th on Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s billionaires, 
the answer seems simple enough—people like him. “It will come as no 
particular surprise to my friends,” he writes, admitting this conceit, 
“that I selected entrepreneurs and businessmen to write about” (14). 
Forbes scores Anschutz’s wealth as primarily self-made. He grew up in 
western Kansas, where his mother was a teacher who inspired his in-
terest in history and the arts (he dedicates this book to her); his father, 
an oilfield wildcatter, laid the groundwork for his future business 
career. From his start in the oilfields, he expanded his corporation to 
include enterprises associated with the modern American West. He 


Red Cloud: Oglala Legend

Review of: "A Settler’s Year: Pioneer Life Through the Seasons," by Kathleen Ernst; photographs by Loyd Heath

Bremer, Jeff

A Settler's Year: Pioneer Life Through the Seasons

Douglas, Bill R.

Making Iowa Safe for Differences: Barnstorming Iowa on Behalf of Religious Tolerance, 1936-1943

Review of: "Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture," by Sharon Ann Musher

Grieve, Victoria M.

Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture

Review of: "The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark," by Jo Ann Trogdo

Wood, W. Raymond

Book Reviews and Notices      431 
a certain inevitability. For example, in concluding a section on the 1825 
treaty of Prairie du Chien, Saler writes that “the conclusion of this treaty 
in mid-August 1825 suggested the degree to which Wisconsin Indian 
bands met federal authorities on unequal ground, conforming to Euro-
American notions of territoriality and of their (Indian) subject nation-
hood” (107). Indian nations are, in this interpretation, already on a losing 
footing. This sits oddly with the fact that a large number of Native 
nations completely ignored the boundaries set by the treaty after it was 
signed. Happily, much greater Native agency can be found in Saler’s 
chapter on mission work in the region, where the author details the mis-
sionaries’ generally losing efforts to convert Native people to the Chris-
tian faith. 
 The Settlers’ Empire is an engaging text that paints a vibrant picture 
of the Midwest’s past as many settler-colonist Americans understood it. 
I recommend it for enthusiasts of federal policy and those with an interest 
in midwestern history and for purchase by university libraries.  
 
 
The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark, by Jo Ann 
Trogdon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. xxii, 469 pp. Illus-
trations, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $36.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer W. Raymond Wood is professor emeritus of anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Missouri, Columbia. His most recent book (with Robert M. Lindholm) 
is Karl Bodmer’s America Revisited: Landscape Views Across Time (2013). 
William Clark’s role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Meriwether 
Lewis renders him one of the iconic figures of nineteenth-century 
America. The bicentennial of that expedition resulted in a number of 
books detailing his life and his accomplishments in government service. 
But documents continue to turn up that illuminate his life; one of the 
most important is the journal that he kept (1798–1801) on a flatboat jour-
ney from his home in Louisville, Kentucky, to New Orleans. The journal 
also contained a map showing many details of features along the Mis-
sissippi. The document, housed in the State Historical Society of Missouri 
in Columbia, was virtually overlooked after it arrived there in 1928 until 
Jo Ann Trogdon discovered it in 1992. 
 Clark left Louisville on March 9, 1798, his two flatboats containing 
cargoes of tobacco, furs, and salted pork. Having left the army, and hoping 
to begin a profitable business, he would sell the cargoes in New Orleans, 
which was then in Spanish Louisiana. Trogdon poses several interesting 
questions about Clark’s activities at his destination. Those questions re-
volve around whether he was somehow involved with what became 
known as the Spanish Conspiracy. The term refers to efforts by Spanish 
432      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
officials in New Orleans to detach Kentucky and nearby territory from 
the United States and to create a buffer state between the United States 
and Spanish Louisiana. Spanish sources even secretly paid U.S. Army 
General James Wilkinson (known to the Spanish as Agent 13) to act trai-
torously on its behalf in the scheme; Wilkinson even secretly shifted his 
allegiance from the United States to the king of Spain. 
 No fewer than 22 other individuals were involved in this seditious 
project, most of them well known to Clark. Prominent among them 
were Benjamin Sebastian (a family friend), Daniel Clark Jr. (no relation), 
Andrew Ellicott, John McKee, and Stephen Minor, all of whom knew 
about the conspiracy, and whom William met in New Orleans. Although 
the journal contains many details of the trip downriver, once Clark ar-
rived in New Orleans its entries diminish; indeed, Clark records that 
“nothing extraordinary happened” between his arrival and his depar-
ture in August. But details regarding this period of Clark’s life are pre-
served in Spanish documents, records that Trogdon has mined to offer 
a series of conjectures about what took place there in Clark’s contacts 
with the conspirators. They record, however, only his commercial ac-
tivities while he was in the city. 
 Was Clark acting, knowingly or not, as an agent for his friend Gen-
eral Wilkinson? The information that Clark inscribed on his map would 
have been immensely useful in Wilkinson’s schemes. Clark’s return 
home was delayed by his return upriver to Natchez, where he smuggled 
a secret Spanish payoff of 670 Spanish dollars to an unnamed corrupt 
American official (surely General Wilkinson) by illegally transporting 
those Spanish coins across the U.S. border. What did he know of this 
transaction? 
 Returning to New Orleans, Clark turned for home by sea, taking 
passage on the schooner Star, arriving in New Castle, Delaware, after 
sailing around Florida and up the East Coast, suffering from malaria en 
route. He continued on by land to Virginia and then returned to Louis-
ville by way of the Ohio River, reaching home on Christmas Eve. 
 Trogdon continues her narrative of Clark’s life, including the trip he 
made to Washington in 1801, recorded in later entries in his Mississippi 
journal. There he met President Jefferson’s secretary, Meriwether Lewis 
(his old subordinate in the army), and likely told him of his Mississippi 
River experiences, perhaps thereby paving the way for Lewis to choose 
him as his second-in-command on the Corps of Discovery. 
 Trogdon’s narrative of William Clark’s travels demonstrates how 
important it is to consult alternate sources in presenting a story. Her 
account is enriched by her careful and cautious analysis and interpreta-
tion of those primary documents. She has successfully woven diverse 
Book Reviews and Notices      433 
sources into a comprehensive account of some of the dangers that faced 
the newly formed United States at that time, an account that casts new 
light on the life of one of America’s most famous figures between late 
1797 and 1803. The voyage down the Mississippi helped shape the river 
experiences and skills that Clark put to such good use on what he 
would call his “western travels”—the Lewis and Clark Expedition. 
 
 
Brown Water: A Narrative of My Personal Journey in the Wake of Lewis and 
Clark, by Butch Bouvier. Onawa, Iowa: Butch Bouvier (keelboat@long-
lines.com), 2015. xv, 186 pp. Illustrations, glossary. $20.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Norman Fry is a retired Southeastern Community College American 
history instructor with a longstanding interest in life in Iowa’s small towns and 
along the Mississippi River. 
Brown Water is Butch Bouvier’s personal narrative of his boat journey 
along the route taken by Lewis and Clark on the Missouri River. Bouvier 
describes himself as a “hands on” historian with a passion for living 
history, and his goal is not only to take the journey but to recreate the 
boats used by early river explorers. The narrative of Brown Water is com-
posed of three parts. The first is Bouvier’s own narrative describing the 
boat building and the journey. The second narrative, written in journals 
given to the crew by the author, offers the volunteer crew’s perspective 
on the river journey. The third narrative includes “Knowledge Nooks,” 
short explanatory inserts that illustrate the history and techniques of 
boat building. 
 Rather than a standard history, Brown Water is a modern boat-
wright’s account of the building of traditional riverboats. Bouvier gives 
abundant details on the selection of wood for boat construction, the con-
struction process, and the navigation by shallow draft keelboats and pi-
rogues. Readers interested in riverboat architecture will find Bouvier’s 
book an informative read. Readers fascinated by a personal adventure 
story, one that relates that adventure to the history of early Iowa and the 
perils of navigating the Missouri River, will find Brown Water a racon-
teur’s delight. 
 
 
Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River, by Bonnie 
Stepenoff. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. xxii, 182 pp. 
Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $36.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Patrick Nunnally is editor of Open Rivers: Rethinking the Mississippi, a 
digital journal published by the University of Minnesota.  


The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark

Review of: The Two-Wheeled World of George B. Thayer, by Kevin J. Haye

Whiteside, James

186      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The author alludes to many important developments. The society’s 
early leaders held contesting visions, with one group favoring a restricted 
membership that conferred social status and recognized cultural at-
tainment, while others advocated a more democratic society with an 
open, dues-paying membership. The latter concept won the day. That, 
in turn, led to the issue of state funding. The first directors, Lyman 
Draper and Reuben Gold Thwaites, disagreed: Draper wanted the 
society to be self-sustaining; Thwaites looked to the state for funding. 
Thwaites’s triumph helped to make the WHS different from “its older 
more conservative sisters in the Eastern States” (22). Another relation-
ship established by Thwaites also contributed to the society’s distinc-
tiveness. Recognizing that most of the users of the library were Univer-
sity of Wisconsin students and faculty, he chose to “hitch the Society’s 
star” (23) to the rapidly growing university. That was mutually bene-
ficial, as the WHS library became the university’s American history 
library.  
 In time, as its rich library and archival resources increased, the 
WHS focused on serving the needs of scholars. The founding idea of 
serving as the people’s society faded but never disappeared. Begin-
ning with the tenures of the post–World War II directors—Kenneth 
Alexander, Clifford Lord, and Leslie H. Fishel Jr.—the WHS reconnected 
with this important aspect of its past. These leaders committed to 
making the WHS more accessible to the state’s residents. Historic 
preservation, a new Wisconsin Magazine of History, greater involvement 
with local historical societies and communities, and, above all, the de-
velopment of an extensive historic sites program, brought the society 
closer to its roots: the general public. The library and archives signifi-
cantly bolstered the society’s public presence by catering to genealogists 
and history buffs. The WHS has again embraced both its scholarly and 
public roles.  
 
 
The Two-Wheeled World of George B. Thayer, by Kevin J. Hayes. Lincoln: 
University of Nebraska Press, 2015. xv, 257 pp. Illustrations, notes, 
index. $28.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer James Whiteside is a retired history professor and the author of Old 
Blue’s Road: A Historian’s Motorcycle Journeys in the American West. 
In his 2002 book, An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887, Kevin Hayes 
chronicled the cross-country bicycle adventure of newspaperman 
George Nellis. In The Two-Wheeled World of George B. Thayer, Hayes 
follows with the biography of a very different, and more prolific, bicy-
Book Reviews and Notices      187 
cling tourist who also crossed the United States and then followed up 
with tours of eastern Canada and Europe. 
 Born in 1853, George Thayer was the son of a Connecticut textile 
mill owner. Thayer had several careers—as a grocer, a journalist, and, 
eventually, a lawyer—but his lifelong avocation was adventure touring. 
Too young to serve in the Civil War, Thayer thought of tourism, espe-
cially on a bicycle, as his moral equivalent of the challenge and excite-
ment of going to war. (In his middle and senior years, actual military 
service during the Spanish-American War and as a civilian volunteer in 
post–World War I Europe disabused him of that notion.) Thayer also 
was a lifelong devotee of physical fitness. Bicycling combined his pas-
sions for touring and fitness in a single activity. 
 Thayer acquired his first “wheel,” a velocipede, in 1870. He used his 
“boneshaker,” with its steel-rimmed wooden wheels, for three years to 
deliver groceries and for short day tours, but then quit riding for ten 
years. Thayer’s bicycle touring career began in 1883, when he bought a 
high-wheeled “ordinary” bicycle. His rides around Connecticut ex-
panded into neighboring New England states. By 1886, he had set his 
mind on a cross-country adventure. 
 Thayer left his Connecticut home in April 1886, bound for San 
Francisco. Unlike George Nellis, whose 1887 cross-country tour aimed 
for a speed record, Thayer took his time, reaching San Francisco in 
August (almost two months longer than Nellis’s journey) and arriving 
back home in October. Unlike Nellis, who was determined to cross the 
country entirely by bicycle, Thayer often dismounted and rode trains 
when the terrain was not to his liking or to meet some self-imposed 
deadline. Like Nellis, Thayer paid for his trip in part by writing dis-
patches to his hometown newspaper. (When he ran low on funds, he 
stopped in Des Moines, Iowa, and peddled peanuts on the street.) 
 Hayes uses Thayer’s accounts to describe the thrills and perils of 
nineteenth-century bicycle touring. Dogs, skittish horses, hills, and 
muddy roads were banes of the cyclist’s life but were made up for by 
long downhill stretches and the kindness and camaraderie of farmers, 
hoteliers, and fellow cyclists encountered along the way. Where 
Thayer’s own narrative proves to be too sketchy, Hayes supplements 
it with accounts by other contemporary cyclists. Thayer’s and other 
cyclists’ accounts are the real heart of the book, enabling Hayes to ana-
lyze late nineteenth-century cycling more successfully than in his pre-
vious book. 
 Thayer’s adventures are well contextualized in an American (and 
European) culture undergoing rapid transformation from a rural to an 
urban society. Social and cultural themes of class, gender, and the im-
188      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
pact of technological change, among others, are illuminated through 
the lens of cycling and cycling culture. Lively writing and thorough 
research in original sources make The Two-Wheeled World of George B. 
Thayer a worthwhile addition to the literatures of late nineteenth- and 
early twentieth-century sports and cultural history. 
 
 
Moments of Impact: Injury, Racialized Memory, and Reconciliation in College 
Football, by Jaime Schultz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 
xiii, 198 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer S Zebulon Baker is associate director of the University Honors Pro-
gram at Miami University in Ohio. He received the State Historical Society of 
Iowa’s Throne-Aldrich Award in 2014 for his article, “ ‘This affair is about 
something bigger than John Bright’: Iowans Confront the Jim Crow South, 1946–
1951,” published in the Annals of Iowa (Spring 2013).  
Jaime Schultz’s Moments of Impact is, at its center, a study of the pro-
cesses through which historical memory is generated and subsequently 
put to use. She focuses her critical gaze primarily on the latter—
particularly how the racialized violence visited upon three African 
American football players at Iowa universities in the first half of the 
twentieth century was later appropriated by those institutions to 
commemorate notions of progress beyond those outrages and to ab-
solve the present of its own sins. Warning her readers against “utopian 
visions that posit some post-racist, post-racial society,” Schultz scrapes 
away the patina of myth and legend that encrusts the historical mem-
ories of the three athletes in question—Jack Trice, Ozzie Simmons, and 
John Bright—to understand how and why Iowans have chosen to re-
member—and forget—them and their injuries, as well as what those 
choices reveal about the ways Iowans engage with their racial history 
(146).  
 Like many other athletes of color in the early twentieth century, 
Trice, Simmons, and Bright fell victim to injuries that revealed a delib-
erate attempt by their white opponents to target them, or treat them 
roughly, because of their race. On October 6, 1923, in a game at the 
University of Minnesota, Trice sustained a broken clavicle in the first 
half, and then was cleated in the abdomen in the second, causing severe 
internal bleeding. After an excruciating train ride back from Minneap-
olis to Ames, he was checked into the student infirmary at Iowa State, 
where he eventually died. Eleven years later, Minnesota was again the 
perpetrator of so-called “rough tactics,” this time against Simmons in 
their game at Iowa City, which so infuriated Hawkeye supporters that 
threats of retaliation against the Gopher team and its fans were made 


The Two-Wheeled World of George B. Thayer

Review of: Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West, by Peter Gough

Bindas, Kenneth J.

436     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
of the Great Depression. Unable to make ends meet, Margaret Kaqua-
tosh sent nine-year-old Raymond to the Menominee Boarding School at 
Keshena. After his return home a year later, Raymond worked various 
odd jobs to help provide for his family. During the winter of 1935 he 
encountered a lone timber wolf that he tamed and befriended. The wolf, 
whom Raymond named Kernel, became a close companion and protec-
tor for the next 20 years. Following U.S. entry into World War II, Ray-
mond enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in the South Pacific, 
where he was wounded in action and contracted malaria. Upon his 
demobilization and return home, Raymond attended high school in 
Wausau. There he met and married his wife, Elaine. In 1947, at Elaine’s 
urging, Raymond entered flight school; in August of that year he be-
came one of the first Menominee Indians to earn a pilot’s license.  
 Little Hawk and the Lone Wolf provides an important Native Ameri-
can perspective on the trials and tribulations many midwesterners 
faced during the Great Depression and World War II eras. Although he 
was the occasional victim of racism and racially inspired stereotyping, 
Kaquatosh also experienced compassion, respect, and kindness from 
boarding school personnel, military officials, and hospital staff. His 
memoir is invariably upbeat and optimistic. Because of the graphic 
nature of some of his wartime recollections and periodic irreverent 
humor, the book is not appropriate for young children but would cer-
tainly be suitable for high schoolers and above.  
 
 
Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West, by Peter 
Gough. Music in American Life. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2015. xvi, 259 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $50.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Kenneth J. Bindas is professor of history and chair of the History De-
partment at Kent State University. His books include All of This Music Belongs to 
the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society, 1935–1939 (1996). 
Sounds of the New Deal is an interesting and informative book about the 
WPA’s Federal Music Project (FMP) and its influence and effect on the 
American West. In it Peter Gough argues that “the WPA music pro-
grams in the West left behind an enduring legacy that has shaped the 
region’s social, cultural, political, and even historical progress to the 
present day” (88). 
 Many sections of the book are enlightening. The discussion of the 
FMP in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington best captures the 
essence of Gough’s argument, as he does well in that chapter to define 
what he means by the West and how the FMP projects in those states 
Book Reviews and Notices     437 
exemplified that definition. Also, his discussions of Paul Lawrence 
Dunbar and William Grant Still resonate with the FMP ideal of inclu-
sion. The same holds true for the section on Take Your Choice, produced 
by the Northern California Project in late 1936. In those sections and 
others the writing is clear and focused. 
 However, Sounds of the New Deal suffers from general overstate-
ments. On page 5, for example, Gough writes that the FMP “can only be 
understood through a regional lens” (italics his). Later he adds that only 
by looking at the FMP through that lens can it be understood because 
of the “preeminence of regionalist thought during the Depression era” 
(192). While regionalism was significant, this assertion lacks credibility 
for several reasons. First, although Gough does define his notion of the 
West in the chapter identified above, he devotes a significant amount of 
space to discussing the FMP in the South, the Plains, and even the 
Northeast, suggesting a far more national program. A regional or even 
local study of the FMP or any New Deal program may certainly add to 
our understanding of its operation and effect, but that is not the only 
legitimate way to study it. Second, the FMP was a federal project until it 
transferred more control to states in 1939. Until then, localities, states, 
and regions had to get approval from the federal office before any ac-
tivities could start. In fact, Gough discusses those negotiations in detail, 
particularly regarding California, New Mexico, Charles Seeger, and 
folk music, all of which reinforce the level of control and oversight by 
the federal office. So to suggest that federal direction was not a keystone 
of the FMP or any New Deal project from 1933 until 1939 ignores the 
complex battles FDR, as well as national directors like Hopkins, 
Fletcher, Perkins, and many other New Deal leaders faced from gover-
nors, members of Congress, and local administrators. Gough also seems 
unsure of what the FMP as a regional exercise promoted. Often it seems 
as though he is advocating the inclusionist vision of the New Deal, es-
pecially when comparing the FMP’s activities to the ideas of the new 
western history movement. At other times he links the western region’s 
FMP to the ideals of the Popular Front, suggesting that the FMP in the 
West “best expressed the powerful Popular Front ideals that enveloped 
the expanding New Deal coalition” (9).  
 Sounds of the New Deal does succeed in challenging the reader. 
Gough makes good use of sources to weave a passionate and driven 
narrative. That being the case, perhaps one can overlook some of the 
grandiose claims and take the book for what it is—a detailed examina-
tion of the FMP’s activities in the area west of the Rocky Mountains. 
 
 


Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West

Review of: Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes and Deception on the Dakota Frontier, by Linda M. Clemmons

Knock, Michael

322      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
afforded him the best opportunity of doing so. Moreover, his family and 
old neighbors appear to have held no grudge against him for it. In per-
haps the most touching episode in the book, Pond returns home to Con-
necticut dressed in the finery of a bourgeois gentilhomme of Montreal. He 
was thought odd by the sober Calvinist merchants of the town, but there 
was no hostility to him as a Loyalist. It would seem that by the late 1780s 
the passions of war had dissipated and the world had moved on.  
 Chapin is to be congratulated for the research that went into this 
book. He has gone back to the primary documents to address a number 
of controversial previously reported incidents in Pond’s career and 
found that they probably never happened. He has also cleared up a 
number of details of where Pond was when. I suspect that this will be 
the definitive biography of the man for a long time to come. The im-
pressive detail sometimes comes at a price, however. The author’s quest 
to nail down the details of Pond’s career sometimes makes for heavy 
going for lay readers. A more serious complaint relates to the book’s 
maps. Most of Pond’s career was in the far northwest, and his geo-
graphical insights were largely associated with that region. It is unfa-
miliar territory for most of us, and the maps reproduced or interpreted 
in the text are too small to provide much help to a reader seeking to 
keep track of Pond’s vast travels. 
 
 
Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes and Deception on the Dakota Frontier, by 
Linda M. Clemmons. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014. 
274 pp. Map, illustrations, graphs, notes, bibliography, index. $22.95 pa-
perback; $15.99 e-book.  
Reviewer Michael Knock is assistant professor of history at Clarke University. 
His Ph.D. dissertation (University of Notre Dame, 1996) was “ ‘Alone with Sit-
ting Bull’s People’: The Dakota Indian Mission of the Congregational Church, 
1870–1937.” 
Conflict is at the heart of many cultural interactions, especially where 
religion is involved. That is not news. What is news are the conflicts that 
missionaries often have with one another, their spouses, and their par-
ent organization. In some cases it is these conflicts that pose the greatest 
challenge to mission work. That is the idea behind Linda M. Clem-
mons’s Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes and Deception on the Dakota 
Frontier. The book furthers our understanding of the sometimes turbu-
lent relationships that characterized the work of missionaries who rep-
resented the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 
(ABCFM) on the Minnesota frontier in the decades prior to the Dakota 
War of 1862. 
Book Reviews and Notices      323 
 The expected conflicts are here. For example, the missionaries often 
clashed with the Native peoples they hoped to convert and “civilize.” 
Many of those problems can be linked to the attitudes that the mission-
aries carried with them. The Dakotas’ religious beliefs, Samuel Pond 
wrote, “were a strange medley of silly whims and abominable false-
hoods; and their superstitious practices were a compound of ludicrous 
follies and disgusting absurdities” (31). The Dakota often responded to 
the missionaries’ cultural bias with a show of resistance. For example, 
when Stephen Riggs spoke out against a war party against the Ojibwe, 
a group of Dakota killed two of the mission’s cows at Lac qui Parle. One 
of the Dakota also removed his daughter from the mission school (70).  
 Less obvious—and therefore fascinating—conflicts are those that 
occurred within the mission and with the ABCFM. Clemmons tells the 
story of the missionaries’ growing appreciation for the richness and 
complexity of the Dakota language, for example, and the problems that 
change in attitude caused. Missionaries new to the frontier brought 
with them the bias that Dakota was a primitive language that would be 
easy to learn. Experience, however, taught them the complexity of the 
language. Some even claimed that Dakota was the equal of English and 
that its speakers deserved Minnesota citizenship. White settlers disa-
greed, putting the mission in conflict with its white neighbors.  
 The missionaries’ changing perceptions of the Dakota led to the 
kinds of deception referred to in the subtitle of Clemmons’s book, as 
the missionaries “consciously attempted to hide, or at least obscure, the 
reality of their work among the Dakota. They deliberately omitted in-
formation from their letters and reports. At times, they included infor-
mation that they specified was not to be published” (216). 
 It is the little conflicts that are the most interesting. The missionar-
ies’ struggle to balance maintaining a mission with learning the Dakota 
language and raising a family overwhelmed their initial evangelical 
zeal. As Mary Riggs wrote to her brother, “There is little romance in our 
circumstances” (118). Indeed, according to Clemmons, female mission-
aries were especially taxed. This is obvious in another letter written by 
Mary Riggs, who reported, “Agitation of spirits has unfitted me for 
writing, and even now, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, 
I fear that mental depression arising from a variety of causes will weigh 
me down” (60). Ultimately, the stress over inadequate salaries and a 
lack of domestic help drove a number of missionaries from the field. 
 The stories that Clemmons tells are interesting, but her manner of 
telling them sometimes proves problematic. Because each chapter begins 
with a thorough summary of the main points to come, the bulk of the 
chapter in which the author fleshes them out seems redundant.  
324      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Nor does Clemmons tell the story of conflict from the perspective 
of the Dakota. She is up front with the reader about this in her introduc-
tion. This is primarily a story of white Americans told from the perspec-
tive of white Americans.  
 Still, Conflicted Mission is an excellent resource for those interested 
in studying the challenges of mission work on the Minnesota frontier. 
It also offers an interesting take on mission work. As Clemmons writes 
in her introduction, “Antebellum missionaries were not supposed to 
change; indeed, the very nature of missionary work in the early nine-
teenth century was designed to be unidirectional, with superior mission-
aries ministering to and changing supposedly inferior heathens” (3). 
Conflicted Mission confronts that stereotype by showing a dynamic mis-
sion that was constantly in flux much to the surprise of the ABCFM, the 
government, and certainly the missionaries themselves.  
 
 
Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–
1870, by Dana Elizabeth Weiner. Early American Places Series. DeKalb: 
Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. xii, 327 pp. Maps, appendix, 
notes, bibliography, index. $38.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Kristen Anderson is assistant professor of history at Webster Univer-
sity in St. Louis. She is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Aboli-
tionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-
Century America.” 
In Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 
1830–1870, Dana Weiner examines the struggles of abolitionists and 
black rights advocates in the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Michigan, 
Indiana, and Illinois. Her goal is to expand our understanding of the 
antislavery movement by examining it in this relatively understudied 
region. She maintains that, although historians of abolition have gener-
ally focused on abolitionist activities in cities in the Northeast, many 
antislavery activists considered the Old Northwest region vital to the 
struggle against slavery; they thought that the future of the country lay 
in the West and wanted to influence its development. 
 In particular, Weiner argues that understanding the debate over 
race and slavery in the Old Northwest is necessary if we are to build a 
complete understanding of the evolution of racial politics in the United 
States during the nineteenth century. She argues that black rights were 
even more restricted in the Old Northwest than in other parts of the 
North. Officially outlawing slavery in the Northwest Ordinance did not 
remove issues of slavery or race from the region; slavery continued to 
exist in modified forms, and racial distinctions were written directly 


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