The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, July 1980 - April, 1981 Page: 475

Book Reviews

-mining operations, prices, foods, and customs-but the author also
relates in lively style his encounters with bandits, guerrillas, and hostile
Yaqui Indians. He tells a good story that rings with authenticity. James
M. Day has added to the account with his editing and extensive notes.
University of Nebraska, Lincoln WILLIAM L. SHERMAN
Rural Oklahoma. Edited by Donald E. Green; "The Oklahoma
Series," Volume V. (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society,
1977. Pp. vii+ 158. Index. Paperback, $7; hardback, $9.50.)
This fine collection of essays on rural Oklahoma gives excellent in-
sight into what rural Oklahoma has been and is. As editor Donald E.
Green states, "To understand Oklahoma one must know something
about its agrarian past" (p. 5), and the essays in this fifth volume of
"The Oklahoma Series" gives most of the agrarian background that
one needs to understand Oklahoma today.
The first four essays and the final one provide insight into the prob-
lems of farming and how science and technology helped overcome
some of the farmer's problems. Bobby H. Johnson tells of the hardships
of the isolated existence of farm families, in "Pilgrims on the Prairie:
Rural Life in Oklahoma Territory." N. James Wilson discusses the
concern of farmers over industrialization as well as technology, in
"Oklahoma and Midwestern Farmers in Transition, 1880-1910." The
application of technology to "King Cotton in Oklahoma, 1825-1939,"
and the heyday of the fiber crop is covered succinctly by Garry L. Nall.
The expansion of wheat across Oklahoma from the early years around
Guthrie to the opening of the Oklahoma panhandle is effectively han-
dled by Donald E. Green in the "Beginning of Wheat Culture in Okla-
homa." Carl N. Tyson investigated how "The Oklahoma Agricultural
Experiment Station" helped Oklahoma farmers increase productivity
and the quality of crops.
The remaining essays are about the rural people of Oklahoma, and
only incidentally or partially touch upon farming. Howard L. Meredith,
in "Native Response: Rural Indian People in Oklahoma, 1900-1939,"
traces the attempt to acculturate the Indians of Oklahoma. The In-
dian people held to the standards of their own civilization and, though
harmed, survived the acculturation process. A different aspect of rural
life is considered by Charles Townsend in "Bob Wills and Western
Swing: The Oklahoma Years, 1934-1942," as he writes of the pioneer-

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