The Annals of Iowa

Front Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 74 no.3 Summer 2015

Review of: Lincoln’s Bishop: A President, A Priest, and the Fate of 300 Dakota Sioux Warriors, by Gustav Niebuhr

Clemmons, Linda

Lincoln's Bishop: A President, A Priest, and the Fate of 300 Dakota Sioux Warriors

Review of: Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870, by Dana Elizabeth Weiner

Anderson, Kristen

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 
Book Reviews and Notices      325 
into the laws. As a result, the struggle against slavery in the region also 
became part of a larger struggle for black rights that attempted to over-
turn laws limiting the lives of blacks in the area or attempting to keep 
them from even moving there. Weiner argues that abolitionists incor-
porated this struggle for black rights into their larger struggle against 
slavery, as they argued that the black codes of the Old Northwest states 
were examples of how the power of the slaveholding states affected 
even what was done in supposedly free states. She further argues that 
these antislavery activists expressed ideas about civil liberties that 
helped shift the ways Americans thought about and talked about rights. 
 The book is organized both thematically and chronologically. Two 
opening chapters provide background on black rights in the Old North-
west and on the origins of antislavery activism there. The book contin-
ues with three thematic chapters, each devoted to one of the rights that 
activists struggled for and utilized in the course of their fight against 
slavery: freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and freedom of 
speech. Weiner details the ways antiabolition forces in the Old North-
west contested all three of these rights. Antiabolitionists denied that 
abolitionists had a right to write or speak publicly against slavery or in 
favor of black rights on the grounds that doing so challenged widely 
held community norms and threatened the peace of the region and na-
tion. As a result, white and black abolitionists not only had to make a 
case against slavery, but even had to convince their communities that 
they had a right to do so. The book concludes with two chapters on the 
immediate pre–Civil War period and the persistence of racism in the 
region after emancipation. 
 Weiner’s book represents a useful expansion of the literature on the 
abolitionist movement. Although much of the story will be familiar to 
those conversant with that literature, Weiner demonstrates how a focus 
on the Old Northwest adds depth. In addition to demonstrating the in-
separable link between abolitionism and the struggle for black rights in 
the region, she also examines abolition in a rural setting of small com-
munities rather than in the large cities of the Northeast. She argues that 
the experience she describes here might actually be the more typical one, 
given that most Americans lived in communities that looked more like 
the small towns and dispersed rural communities of Ohio than they did 
like Boston or Philadelphia. 
 The book will be of interest to those interested in the history of the 
Midwest more generally, as it is an excellent study of race relations and 
the struggle over slavery in that region. Weiner demonstrates clearly 
that the Midwest was not removed from the struggle over slavery but 
rather was very much involved in and divided by it. The book is a good 
326      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
example of a regional study that is also very local in its focus. Weiner 
does talk about the region in general but often focuses on certain spe-
cific communities in some detail, providing a good example of how to 
link the local, regional, and national in a scholarly study. 
 
 
Soldiering for Freedom: How the Union Army Recruited, Trained, and Deployed 
the U.S. Colored Troops, by Bob Luke and John David Smith. Baltimore: 
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. How Things Worked series. x, 131 
pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $39.95 hardcover, 
$19.95 paperback.  
Reviewer David Brodnax Sr. is professor of history at Trinity Christian College, 
Palos Heights, Illinois. He is the author of “ ‘Will They Fight? Ask the Enemy’: 
Iowa’s African American Regiment in the Civil War” (Annals of Iowa, 2007). 
Early in the Civil War, Iowa Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood rejected a 
proposal to place a company of black men into a white regiment, but by 
1863 he supported the creation of a separate black regiment, declaring, 
“When this war is over & we have summed up the entire loss of life it 
has imposed on the country I shall not have any regrets if it is found 
that a part of the dead are niggers and that all are not white men” 
(quoted in Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Free-
dom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War [1998], 86). 
Such mixed and changing attitudes held by many government officials 
about whether and eventually how to use black troops is the subject of 
this short monograph by historians Bob Luke and John David Smith. 
Published as part of Johns Hopkins University Press’s How Things 
Worked series, Soldiering for Freedom employs a wide array of secondary 
sources and some published military documents and other primary 
sources to summarizes the process by which African Americans joined 
and served in the Union Army during the Civil War. 
 In the first two years of the war, Luke and Smith argue, Northern 
blacks who attempted to join the military were turned away, while a 
handful of officers in the South who tried to recruit blacks were thwarted 
by government resistance and by their own strong-arm tactics. After the 
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, the government 
massively expanded recruitment into the United States Colored Troops 
(USCT). Here Luke and Smith give special attention to the efforts of Ad-
jutant General Lorenzo Thomas, who played an important role in the 
formation of Iowa’s 60th U.S. Colored Infantry. The authors next focus 
on the white officers who led USCT regiments, describing their varying 
motives for seeking such positions and how they were chosen and 
trained; there is also a brief description of the largely unsuccessful efforts 


English

Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830-1870

Review of: "With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era," by William A. Blair

Bryant Stewart, Victoria

Book Reviews and Notices      193 
each letter with extensive footnotes that provide even more clarity 
regarding the individuals and events mentioned. Reinhart’s expertly 
woven combination of primary and secondary sources makes this a 
highly recommended volume for anyone interested in the Civil War or 
German American immigrants in the Midwest.  
 
 
With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era, by Wil-
liam A. Blair. The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 432 pp. Appendixes, graphs, 
notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Victoria Bryant Stewart is a Ph.D. history student at Northern Illinois 
University and adjunct history professor at the College of DuPage.  
The American Civil War fostered a sense of anxiety in the North that 
resulted in a desire to locate, detect, and eliminate treasonous activity. 
William Blair’s monograph outlines the evolution of treason law and its 
prosecution. He explains that treason is the only crime specifically 
addressed in the U.S. Constitution. Despite that presence in America’s 
foundational document, treason is difficult to prosecute.  
 Blair opens his discussion by addressing the treatment of treason 
under British rule, when treason was treated as a political and individ-
ual crime. In the United States, treason was seen as the attempt to levy 
war against the government of the United States or to provide aid to its 
enemies.  
 Blair focuses on the social and political ramifications of treason ra-
ther than on constitutional theory. He skillfully describes the under-
standing and interpretations of treason for President Abraham Lin-
coln’s administration, the courts, and civilians and explains how the 
military was used to define treason and capture treasonous individuals. 
According to Blair, the military served as an “instigator” of the Lincoln 
administration’s civil liberty policies. The Union’s efforts, in Confeder-
ate regions and areas sympathetic to the Southern cause, consisted of 
maintaining loyalty as “a struggle over the security of households.” 
Blair addresses the postwar treatment of Confederate officers and sol-
diers, who were granted clemency once their loyalty was certified.    
 For those interested in local and Iowa history, Blair addresses sig-
nificant events and themes. Iowans responded enthusiastically to calls 
for troops, and Iowa had an extensive support network on the home 
front that secured supplies, operated farms in soldiers’ absences, and 
treated sick and wounded soldiers. Blair recounts a particular event in 
February 1863 in Keokuk, Iowa, when approximately 75 wounded sol-
diers banded together to focus their displeasure on the Keokuk Daily 
194      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Constitution. Upset with the newspaper’s disloyal articles, they entered 
the office and destroyed the printing presses. The soldiers were eventu-
ally disbanded, but their actions show local efforts to punish and prevent 
disloyalty. Blair notes the significance of destroying printing presses to 
curb treason since such actions show public concern for the contents of 
printed materials.  
 Blair addresses Copperhead actions throughout the Union that 
were perceived as disloyal and dangerous to the U.S. government and 
those based on the home front. He notes the treatment of Copperheads 
and the responses to their actions. Iowa’s history contains instances of 
Copperhead activity that directly confronted the authority of provost 
marshals. In one instance, such activity resulted in the deaths of Deputy 
Provost Marshal John Bashore and Special Agent Josiah Woodruff, who 
were murdered when attempting to arrest three draft evaders. Blair 
skillfully describes the duties and responsibilities of provost marshals, 
explaining the dangers provost marshals faced when performing their 
duties. These dangers included the enforcement of policies, but also 
rested in their duties to police and prevent treason.   
 Blair has constructed an impressive body of scholarship regarding 
the treatment and perceptions of treason among different sectors of so-
ciety. He shows how civilians responded more quickly than the federal 
government, causing a reevaluation of legal standards regarding trea-
son and other dangerous activities that threaten the state. Northerners, 
fearful of treason in their communities and displeased by the federal 
government’s assessment and punishment of treason, showed their dis-
approval of disloyal activities. They sought, for example, to limit the 
printing of newspaper articles with questionable contents and, after 
the war, to prevent former Confederates from voting. Blair skillfully 
demonstrates how ex-Confederates were required to accept the Four-
teenth and Fifteenth Amendments.  
 The strength of this work lies in the extensiveness of the research. 
Government documents, court cases, and period periodicals recount in-
stances of treason but also expose how events were connected through-
out the nation. Extensive appendixes list political arrests and those court-
marshalled for treason or disloyalty. Blair’s work is a welcome addition 
to Civil War scholarship, an excellent resource for those interested in 
the treatment of treason and Northern perceptions of disloyalty.  
The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, by Jared Peatman. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. xvii, 244. Illustrations, 
notes, bibliography, index. $34.50 hardcover and e-book. 


With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era

Ball, Durwood

Beyond Traverse des Sioux: Captain Edwin V. Sumner's Expedition to Devil's Lake in 1845

Mokrzycki, Paul

Lost in the Heartland: Childhood, Region, and Iowa's Missing Paperboys

Review of: Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, by Laura Ingalls Wilder; ed-ited by Pamela Smith Hill

Fry, John J.

426     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
preciation of their dedication to justice (324). Readers can even imagine, 
he says, that “maybe there’s a hint of vigilante heritage in all of us” (324). 
 Even if Johnston does not pretend to be an academic, it is still in-
conceivable to me that he could so thoroughly romanticize the venge-
ance and terror in our past. We live in a world where the extralegal use 
of violence is making justice impossible to achieve in many places both 
close to home and far away. Indeed, Johnston can only create such a 
romantic story about vigilantism by leaving a major part of the story 
out. He “avoided stories of racism” and all examples of “racially moti-
vated violence, especially leading to lynchings” (11). But why did he do 
so? And how are racially motivated lynchings different from those he 
describes and glorifies? In each case, people in power use extralegal vi-
olence to terrorize the community’s “others” or “outsiders”—some per-
fectly innocent of the charges, if there were any—and to maintain their 
power in society. But with stories of black bodies hanging from trees 
included in the narrative, Johnston’s entire premise would fall apart. 
With racially motivated lynchings included, Johnston could not reason-
ably conclude that Americans “love the democracy” of the vigilante 
story (323). Nor could he assert that “the overriding story of Missouri’s 
vigilantes is the story of good people in good families, yearning for hap-
piness and peace” (11). The violence in our past needs not to be roman-
ticized but interrogated and reconciled, now more than ever. 
 
 
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, by Laura Ingalls Wilder; ed-
ited by Pamela Smith Hill. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society 
Press, 2014. lxix, 400 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, appendixes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer John J. Fry is professor of history at Trinity Christian College, Palos 
Heights, Illinois. An authority on the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, he 
is also the editor of Almost Pioneers: One Couple’s Homesteading Adventure in the 
West (2013). 
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels have delighted young and old 
readers ever since they were first published during the 1930s and ‘40s. 
Based on Wilder’s own childhood, the books feature clear descriptions 
of pioneer life in multiple locations in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, 
and South Dakota from the point of view of a fictional girl who grows 
from a toddler into a young woman. 
 Before gaining fame for writing autobiographical children’s fiction, 
however, Wilder was a columnist for a Missouri farm newspaper from 
1911 to 1925. She also had several articles published in national magazines. 
She then retired from journalism to compose a memoir titled “Pioneer 
Book Reviews and Notices     427 
Girl.” The memoir begins when she was just 7 years old and ends with 
her marriage at age 18. Wilder’s daughter, novelist and biographer Rose 
Wilder Lane, typed the manuscript and attempted to get it published. 
“Pioneer Girl” eventually went through three revisions, but Lane was 
unable to secure a publisher for the work. However, a juvenile book of 
stories drawn from Laura’s earliest childhood, especially those told to 
her by her father, did land a contract. Little House in the Big Woods was 
published in 1932, and the Little House series was born. Seven addi-
tional books were published over the next 11 years. 
 The popularity of the Little House books was staggering. Millions 
of copies were sold. The books were excerpted for elementary reading 
texts and translated into dozens of languages. Historic sites were estab-
lished in five different states, and the stories inspired a television series 
during the 1970s. In the twenty-first century, the books continue to be 
loved by a devoted core of fans and enjoyed by a broader audience. 
However, while Laura’s farm newspaper columns and other writings 
have been published, Pioneer Girl was never published until this edition. 
 In 2010 the South Dakota State Historical Society created the Pio-
neer Girl Project to “create a comprehensive edition of Laura Ingalls 
Wilder’s Pioneer Girl.” By any standard, it has accomplished that goal. 
Pamela Smith Hill, author of a biography of Wilder published in 2007, 
edited the volume. The hardbound book is 9”X10”—larger than a nor-
mal trade hardcover book but smaller than a coffee table book. It begins 
with Hill’s excellent historical introduction to Wilder and Lane and to 
the history of the manuscript itself. The original manuscript is then pre-
sented and lavishly annotated. Maps created for the book give the loca-
tions of all the places the Ingalls family lived. The book also features all 
of the extant photographs of Laura and her family—and many of the 
other people and places mentioned in the memoir. A conclusion sets the 
memoir in the context of Wilder’s life and Little House scholarship. Ap-
pendixes provide a facsimile of the juvenile book that first attracted 
publishers and several extended accounts from typed editions that did 
not appear in the handwritten manuscript. The bibliography gives a 
comprehensive list of works published by and about Wilder and Lane 
and their works. The book ends with an exhaustive index. 
 Notes begin at the side of each page of manuscript, but often cover 
multiple following pages. The notes are the product of careful research; 
it appears that Hill has consulted all of the appropriate sources. Some 
notes compare Wilder’s accounts to extant public records that trace the 
Ingalls family’s life. Others provide background information on the peo-
ple, places, events, diseases, and other phenomena Wilder described. 
Still other notes compare the accounts given in Pioneer Girl to those in 
428     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
the Little House books and other writings by Wilder. Hill makes cogent 
observations about Wilder’s prose, noting the ways that it draws on her 
farm newspaper columns but lacks the polish of the finished children’s 
books. A rough estimate suggests that notes, photographs, and maps 
take up almost as much space as the text of the manuscript itself. The 
exhaustiveness of the notes at times does make reading the book an ex-
ercise in turning pages back and forth. While it is possible to read the 
memoir through by itself, the notes draw readers in, and one often finds 
oneself relying on the notes to explain background and context. 
 In sum, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is not just the pub-
lication of Wilder’s memoir. The editor and publisher have successfully 
blended two types of books for two audiences. One book is the memoir 
itself, the entertaining story of Laura’s youth, including many details 
that are not given in the Little House books. These include the birth and 
death of a younger brother, the family’s year-long stay in a small town 
in Iowa, and descriptions of several neighbors’ teenage pregnancies. 
This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in true stories about 
women and childhood in the nineteenth-century American Midwest. 
The other book is a compendium of what we know about Wilder’s life, 
how she came to write the memoir, and how Pioneer Girl fits with her 
other works. This book is a work of scholarship that will set the stand-
ard for Wilder studies for years to come.  
 
 
The Iowa Route: A History of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern Rail-
way, by Don L. Hofsommer. Railroads Past and Present. Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press, 2015. xii, 292 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, 
notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Simon Cordery is chair of the Department of History at Western Illi-
nois University. He is the author of The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of 
Illinois Railroading (forthcoming, 2016). 
Railroads opened Iowa to settlement and cultivation, integrated the 
state into a national economy, and challenged local power. By 1900, they 
were numerous and nearly omnipresent, but much of the state’s railroad 
network has disappeared since then. Don Hofsommer, a veteran histo-
rian of the midwestern railroading scene, offers a useful, informative, and 
thorough history of one of those vanished corporations, the Burlington, 
Cedar Rapids & Northern Railway (BCR&N). He builds on his earlier 
histories of the Minneapolis & St. Louis and the Iowa Central railroads, 
both of which figure prominently in the book under review, to show how 
the BCR&N was “representative of innumerable enterprises that popped 
up around the United States during the age of railways” (ix). 


Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Review of: Prohibition in Eastern Iowa, by Linda Betsinger McCann

Walch, Timothy

434     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Hospers, Orange City’s colony leader, in the Biographical Dictionary of 
Iowa and three useful articles in the Annals of Iowa on the Dutch in north-
west Iowa (Winter 1993, Spring 1996, and Spring 2003), but there is no 
discussion of Hospers or of the Dutch colony in northwest Iowa. Fi-
nally, the absence of Beltman’s Dutch Farmer in the Missouri Valley: The 
Life and Letters of Ulbe Eringa, 1866–1950 (1996) in a book about Dutch 
American identity is troubling. 
 The arc of Douma’s argument is quite plausible: “Dutch American 
identities were originally anchored in the social structure of the church, 
which served as a de facto ethnic institution. Dutch American ethnic 
identities today, however, are tied more closely to the family unit than 
to community or congregation. . . . Dutch ethnic identification in America 
has been replaced with a strong interest in Dutch heritage and ancestry, 
both largely detached from religion” (157). Yet the preponderance of his 
evidence is from western Michigan in general, and Holland in particu-
lar. He gives only a cursory nod to Wisconsin, Iowa (i.e., Pella), Chicago, 
southern California, and a few other places. Thus, the applicability of 
his argument for Dutch Americans beyond Holland, Michigan, remains 
to be shown. Western Michigan was, and still is, the center of midwest-
ern and western Dutch American culture, but it is not, and never has 
been, the entirety of that culture. 
 
  
Prohibition in Eastern Iowa, by Linda Betsinger McCann. Des Moines: 
The Iowan Books. 128 pp. Illustrations, bibliography. $19.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Timothy Walch is the director emeritus of the Herbert Hoover Presi-
dential Library and a volunteer at the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City. 
“All I know is what I read in the papers,” Will Rogers told the New York 
Times in September 1923. That humorous observation could have been 
the organizing principle for Prohibition in Eastern Iowa. In 128 pages, 
Linda Betsinger McCann provides something of a compilation of news-
paper stories about prohibition in eastern Iowa. 
 McCann may be familiar to readers with an interest in local Iowa 
history. She is the author of two dozen books, including seven on the 
history of the Cedar Valley alone. A history enthusiast who spent many 
years as a registered nurse, McCann has devoted her retirement to writ-
ing histories of various Iowa topics. Her most recent book before this 
one was on the interurban railroad between Waverly and Cedar Rapids; 
her next will be on Civilian Conservation Camps, presumably in Iowa. 
 McCann’s interest in prohibition came as a result of conversations 
with young people who have never heard of this “noble experiment.” 
As she did for her other books, McCann conducted substantial library 
Book Reviews and Notices     435 
research, arranged interviews, and began to write. The result is service-
able but far from definitive. It reflects a variety of strengths as well as 
significant limitations. The book will be informative for those who 
know little about the topic but will not meet the needs or expectations 
of academic historians. 
 Prohibition in Eastern Iowa provides a cursory overview of the imple-
mentation and enforcement of prohibition in eastern Iowa from 1920 to 
1933. McCann organized her book into eight chapters plus an introduc-
tion, conclusion, and bibliography. She includes chapters on organiza-
tions involved in the campaign, on brewers and the liquor industry, on 
the impact of prohibition on the state, and even a chapter on “loop holes.” 
 McCann writes reasonably well; most readers will have no trouble 
with her prose. Her chapters use bold type and subheads to highlight 
subtopics of particular importance. More important, many of the chap-
ters have extended quotations from numerous local newspapers. Each 
quotation block is printed in italics but not set off from the rest of the 
text. Some readers will find this use of bold type, roman type, and ex-
tended italics to be disconcerting. Although each newspaper quotation 
is identified by the title of the paper and the date of publication, 
McCann does not provide specific citations for other sources that she 
used in her research. 
 Prohibition in Eastern Iowa is one of several similar books published 
under the auspices of The Iowan, a company devoted to promoting the 
state’s culture and heritage. As a magazine, The Iowan goes back to 1952; 
in recent years, the company has branched into book publishing as well. 
With all of its publications, The Iowan relies on free-lance writers and 
historians to produce articles and books that celebrate as well as inform. 
Both the author and the publisher are to be commended for their work 
in this effort. 
Little Hawk and the Lone Wolf: A Memoir, by Raymond C. Kaquatosh. 
Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014. xi, 259 pp. $22.95 
hardcover. 
Reviewer Thomas A. Britten is associate professor of history at the University 
of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of The Lipan Apaches (2010); Black 
Warriors: A History of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts (1999); and American Indi-
ans in World War I: At War and at Home (1997). 
Raymond C. Kaquatosh (Little Hawk) was born July 25, 1924, on the 
Menominee reservation in eastern Wisconsin. The fifth of seven chil-
dren born to a Menominee medicine woman, Raymond grew up in a 
caring and stable household until his father’s death in 1933 at the height 


Prohibition in Eastern Iowa

Cook, Robert

A War for Principle? Shifting Memories of the Union Cause in Iowa, 1865-1916

Review of: Laura Ingalls Wilder: American Writer on the Prairie, by Sallie Ketcham

Book Reviews and Notices      331 
have argued that missionaries of the era placed “grace” above “race.” 
Far from being a lone voice, Whipple’s belief that Native Americans 
could adopt Christianity and become “civilized” was common among 
evangelical Protestant missionaries of the time.  
 Lincoln’s Bishop also underplays the importance of other Protestant 
missionaries in Minnesota. Missionaries affiliated with the American 
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had worked among the 
Dakota since 1835, predating the Episcopalians by almost three decades. 
Niebuhr makes the case that Whipple was tenacious in his desire to re-
form Indian affairs and was adept at promoting his ideas, but he was not 
the only voice for reform on the Minnesota frontier. It is also important 
to examine how the Dakota responded to Whipple’s assimilationist pro-
gram, which demanded that they change their culture and religion. 
 Niebuhr introduces the public to Bishop Whipple, who played a 
key role in antebellum debates over federal Indian policy. He also dis-
cusses the Dakota War of 1862, which is often lost in the larger history 
of the Civil War. While Niebuhr successfully shows that Whipple de-
manded reform, he does not acknowledge that the bishop’s efforts were 
only part of a larger evangelical critique of U.S. Indian policy.  
 
 
Laura Ingalls Wilder: American Writer on the Prairie, by Sallie Ketcham. 
New York: Routledge, 2015. Routledge Historical Americans. x, 169 pp. 
Notes, documents, bibliography, index. $155.00 hardcover, $34.95 pa-
perback. 
Reviewer John J. Fry is professor of history at Trinity Christian College, Palos 
Heights, Illinois. An authority on the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, he 
is also the editor of Almost Pioneers: One Couple’s Homesteading Adventure in the 
West (2013). 
The life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder have an enduring fascination 
for Americans. The eight Little House books have sold millions of cop-
ies since their first publication during the 1930s and 1940s. Year after 
year, books about Wilder are enjoyed by both an enthusiastic core of fans 
and a broader group of interested readers. 
 Sallie Ketcham’s book is in a series titled Historical Americans 
meant to be purchased by academic libraries or used in college or uni-
versity history courses. Each book includes a section of primary source 
documents; in this volume, documents by and about Wilder take up 
about 40 of the book’s 160 pages of text. Each book in the series also has 
a companion website that includes images, additional documentary 
sources, and links to video.  
332      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 The six chapters of the book proceed chronologically. The first three 
chapters address the years described in the Little House books: the late 
1860s, the 1870s, and the early 1880s. Laura married Almanzo Wilder in 
1885. Chapter 4 describes the couple’s early marriage and family life 
until Laura began writing during the 1910s. Chapter 5 shows how her 
writing career developed from columns in farm newspapers to auto-
biographical children’s fiction, and ends with her death. A brief sixth 
chapter assesses Wilder’s legacy.  
 Ketcham draws on some previous biographies of Wilder and makes 
use of archival documents by and about Wilder, including Wilder’s un-
published memoir, Pioneer Girl. (That memoir has since been published 
by the South Dakota State Historical Society in 2014; the small publisher 
has struggled to keep up with demand, with 125,000 copies in print by 
early May 2015.) Ketcham provides background to the Ingalls and Wil-
der families’ lives and sets many of the events from the Little House 
books in historical context. The last chapter considers debates within 
Wilder scholarship and the broader academic community, including 
how much Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, contributed to the Lit-
tle House books and the books’ depiction of Native Americans. 
 All in all, the book provides many details about Wilder’s life and 
work. Unfortunately, there is not a firm narrative thread or theme to tie 
the material in the book together. The book’s subtitle describes Wilder 
as a writer on the prairie, and the chapter titles situate Wilder in the 
American West, but there is no overarching thesis for the book as a 
whole or for the individual chapters. Some themes do recur throughout 
the book, including the expectations of late nineteenth-century women; 
Laura’s love for nature and the western landscape; and her disappoint-
ment that she could not pursue an education. Within each chapter, how-
ever, it is completely unclear why particular topics are pursued or why 
particular details are given. At several points, the author gives excellent 
descriptions of extant photographs of Laura and her family; the pub-
lisher should have published those photographs in the book or on the 
website. 
 Laura Ingalls Wilder: American Writer on the Prairie may be profitably 
read as an introduction to and an appreciation of the life and works of 
Wilder. It might be suitable for college courses on the American West 
or rural history. Those looking for clearer biographies would be better 
served by William Anderson’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (1992) 
for younger readers; John Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder (1998), 
the most complete and scholarly biography to date; or Pamela Smith 
Hill’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life (2007), a briefer, argumentative 
work. 


Not a member yet