The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 42, July 1938 - April, 1939 Page: 418
446 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Except for the failure to set off quotations in accordance with the
best usage, the volume is well printed.
OTTIs CLARK SKIPPER.
The Citadel.
Southern Plainsmen. By Carl Coke Rister. (Norman: Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 1934. Pp. xviii, 289.)
During recent years a number of capable historians have turned
their attention to the Great Plains. The chronicles of its ex-
plorers have been edited, and historians and novelists alike have
written about its Indian warfare, its border strife, and the open
range cattle industry inseparably linked with it. Also its effect on
frontier institutions, its settlement, and its agrarian movements
have been the subjects of various books and monographs. Now
comes Dr. Rister with a book dealing with the way of life in
the Great Plains during its heroic period. The region selected
for study is that part which lies south of the Platte River. It is
small enough to permit intensive study and large enough to
illustrate the various phases of Great Plains history.
After a brief account of its natural resources and its Indian
inhabitants the author enters into an account of its conquest by
the hunter. He arrives at his subject at once. There is little
time for preliminaries and there is no room for abstractions. This
is a book of action. It deals with a people who were struggling
with a strange environment that called for tireless energy and
constant resourcefulness.
The same land that invited the hunter beckoned also to the
settler. The Spaniards tried, without success, to occupy the
extreme southern reaches of the Great Plains nearly two centuries
ago. German immigrants and a few Anglo-Americans began to
enter the same region during the period of the Republic of Texas.
Their experiences are dealt with in the chapter entitled "Spaniards
and Teutons." North of Texas, settlement was delayed until
after the Civil War. Indeed it was not until the eighties and
nineties that homeseekers came in by tens of thousands and
erased from the map the last American frontier. In his chapter
entitled "An Eventful Horse Race," the author gives a vivid
account of the occupation of the Indian lands of Oklahoma in
1889, when the settlers literally ran into the country.418
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 42, July 1938 - April, 1939, periodical, 1939; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101107/m1/447/?rotate=90: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.