Wandering through Keystone an evening not long ago and looking above the trees, I could see Mt. Rushmore in the distance. Apparently the lighting ceremony had just ended, and as I looked at those faces of Washington, Jefferson, T. R., and Lincoln, I felt a tinge of excitement. But why? I had seen them many times before. In fact, I spent a summer working for the concessionaire at the monument, serving food in the old Buffalo Dining Room. Every day I stared at those faces as I asked people if they wanted fried chicken or beef and gravy. In recent years, I have lived in the vicinity of the mountain. By now that carving should be old news. But obviously, those faces say something to me, and until I read these books by John Taliaferro and Jesse Larner, I never considered exactly why Mt. Rushmore moves me or exactly what the monument means, or should mean, to the millions of people who visit it each year.

Like the nearly three million others who gaze at Rushmore annually, Taliaferro and Larner made their own pilgrimages to the mountain, each shaping a personal narrative as part of his story. But looking at the same mountain, they come away with entirely different experiences. In general, Taliaferro liked what he saw, and his book praises not only the quality of the sculpture, but the meaning behind it. His history covers all aspects of Rushmore's past, from inspiration to consternation. On the other hand, Larner virtually ignores the monument itself, dwelling instead on the sins it seemingly hides. To him, Mt. Rushmore represents an American ideology of conquest, and he wants to debunk the myths he sees embodied in it.

Recounting his visit, Taliaferro explains that the carving aroused' in him such basic questions as who were these four men whose faces stare out at the landscape, why were they chosen, and who was the person who carved the mountain? He builds his account around these questions. But this is not just a story about Mt. Rushmore, for Taliaferro realizes that any telling requires examining the life and times of its contentious sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. Indeed, Taliaferro has combined two books in one: a biography of Borglum, and the actual history of the project, in which, of course, Borglum plays a major role. Taliaferro hints at this dual function in his title: "Great White Fathers" naturally refers to the presidents; "The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mt. Rushmore" most clearly points to Borglum. But there is overlap. Since Borglum saw himself as a "great man" and fully believed in the role of great men in history, he too can be seen as a "Great White Father."

Many educated Americans in the first half of the eighteenth century held an opinion that differed greatly from Bates's description of America's plains, considering the vast steppe between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains a Great American Desert that posed a barrier to westward expansion.¹ The Stephen Long Expedition of 1820 did more to promulgate this idea than any other source.² Thomas Say, the mission's zoologist, reported that the group dreaded the journey across "the trackless desert which still separated [them] from the utmost boundary of civilization." Dr. Edwin James, the official chronicler of the expedition, stated that the explorers passed through "a barren and desolate region."³ In his account, James claimed that beyond the ninety-sixth meridian travelers could expect a "wide sandy desert, stretching westward to the base of the Rocky Mountains."⁴The official report was illustrated by a map labeling the Great Plains as the "Great American Desert." After the accounts and report of the expedition were made public, the number of textbook references to the Plains as a desert jumped dramatically.⁵ The debate over who accepted this description and how long it dominated geographical thought has been hotly contested. For this reason the Long Expedition will forever be known for its description of the Plains as a Great American Desert.

While modern scholars have taken an interest in Long's exploration, neither they nor earlier historians investigated the origins of the expedition's conclusions. When we consider the factors that influenced the journalists of this mission to label the Plains a "sandy waste," we get a more complete picture of the military exploration undertaken by Stephen Long and his men. Long's expedition greatly influenced the perception of the Plains in the nineteenth century.⁶ Culture, education, and experience influences how people perceive a region. These factors guided "the Long party's portrayal of the Southern Plains. My investigation explores the role that culture, education, and experience play in influencing how people perceive a region.

The alliance of the AWSA and NWSA during the September 1882 conventions was a notable point in the gradual reunification of the two suffrage organizations. "During the decade of 1880-1890," Eleanor Flexner writes, "it was becoming increasingly evident that the factors which had brought about the existence of two separate suffrage associations were steadily diminishing in importance."⁴ Because suffragists in Thayer County, Nebraska, associated with both organizations and incorporated the ideas of both groups into their suffrage rationale, it is possible that they represented the early stages of the two groups beginning to merge back together. It is also possible that the suffragists' location on the Great Plains provided a context in which both groups realized they could, when they needed to, cooperate despite their larger disagreements.

The Western Woman's Journal, a Nebraska suffrage periodical, wrote encouragingly about the upcoming Nebraska conventions: "Much good is expected to result from the meetings of the American and National Associations, in this state in September."⁵ Prominent Thayer County suffragist Erasmus Correll noted that "Local workers, noble ones, too numerous to mention, are doing much local work to advance the cause. Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, H. B. Blackwell, Helen M. Gougar, Margaret W. Campbell, and many other able and experienced workers, will soon be on Nebraska soil, to aid us in our noble struggle. The writer is also devoting his whole time to the work. The cause is everywhere progressing."⁶ Anthony, the "suffrage war veteran," was scheduled to arrive in mid-September "to aid in carrying the amendment."⁷ Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, according to Leslie Wheeler, "extended their stay [in Nebraska] from ten days, as originally planned, to more than a month, and spoke in twenty-five counties."⁸

In this essay I want to demonstrate that Indians not only negotiated the terms on which they came to Omaha but also played a major role.in determining what activities they would participate in once they arrived.¹ Rather than view the Indian Congress as an example of the imperialist and racist tendencies of the United States at the turn of the century as have some scholars, I have chosen to adopt a less pessimistic view of the encampment.² Certainly exhibit organizers had their own colonialist ideas about how Native peoples should be portrayed to the American public at Omaha. However, Indians who attended the exposition created their own program of events that defied the notion that they were either subservient or assimilated.

The intertribal Grass dances that took place on the grounds throughout the summer, for instance, demonstrated that Indians were willing to compromise on decisions regarding where dances were held and who could participate in them in order to ensure their survival. Such concessions support historian Clyde Ellis's observation that the Grass dance, or Omaha dance, became more secular in form and meaning in the late nineteenth century as warrior societies waned in importance.³ And as Paige Raibmon suggests in her study of Kwakwaka'wakw Indian dances at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, such compromises represented not the "commercialized corruption of traditional practices" but rather cultural resilience in the face of the colonial policies of the federal government.⁴

At the same time, Hedge Coke's insight is luminous: "congenital memory that of belonging by nature to landscapes runs the deepest of all the rivers of the earth." Her book remembers many landscapes-from North Carolina, the Tsalagi (Cherokee) homeland, to Texas, to Oklahoma, to California, to Georgia, and finally to South Dakota.

Hedge Coke barely survived the sixties and seventies as a teenager living on her own without protection or guidance. Again and again, it was the stories her father told her of their Tsalagi traditions and values that helped her survive. The Cherokee, her father told her, are "relatives of deer." He provided a stable source of love and respect for her and always trusted that his wife's mind would heal. Hedge Coke first moved out of her parents' home at the age of nine.

Billed as the background piece, Zhu's lengthy essay is the most substantive of the four, providing a historical overview of Deadwood's Chinese community. As in his earlier work, A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese of the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (1997), Zhu advances the inspiring theme that Chinese workers were creative competitors in the American West rather than simply passive victims resigned to their fate in stereotypical "oriental" fashion. Indeed, they not only survived in a hostile environment but also thrived in what Zhu aptly describes as "ethnic oases." He considers these oases as both Chinese enclaves and American neighborhoods within Euro-American towns and mining camps.

Complementing Zhu is Fosha's essay on the archeological excavations of Deadwood's Chinese community. Fosha's purpose is to present some of her preliminary findings. The rub is their paucity, making her contribution appear more like a research proposal than anything else. Instead of findings, Fosha recycles questionable ideas such as the failure of the Chinese to participate in the Euro-American economy as the cause of their problems in America. Without realizing it, she is implicitly blaming the victims for their victimization. Still, Fosha's site may yield some interesting results, and she would be well advised to be guided by what Hardesty and Gardner have learned at archaeological sites of Chinese communities elsewhere in the American West.

Organized into three parts, the book opens with the Hamiltons' brief biography of Schuyler (illustrator, writer, associate of the Boy Scout movement, and instructor of illustration). Although written for a general audience, more could have been added here since biographical details round out the picture of Schuyler in the context of his era. Schuyler's writings, interspersed with sketches, cover and story illustrations, dust jackets, and an oil painting, comprise the second section, which contains letters from his 1903 sojourn at Rosebud Indian Agency, South Dakota, and radio scripts and magazine articles from the 1920s. Brian Dippie's scholarly afterword, in which he adroitly analyzes Schuyler's art and positions the artist within the American illustrative tradition, complements the authors' enthusiasm.

Schuyler's illustrations for western pulp literature included Adventure, Farm & Fireside, Wild West Weekly, The Frontier, Western Story, Short Stories, Top-Notch, and Popular Magazine. Occasionally, his work appeared on the upscale covers of the Saturday Evening Post, World's Work, Literary Digest, Leslie's Weekly, and Women's Home Companion. There is a marked dichotomy of image and word: while Schuyler's writing bespeaks tedium, hardship, loneliness, and suffering (the life and environment he saw and experienced firsthand as an agency store clerk and a ranch hand in the Great Plains), his images evoke excitement, courage, romance, and self-reliance-the stuff of boyhood dreams and fantasies. Lack of reality was not an anomaly, as Dippie points out. Rather, Schuyler was in the good artistic company of the likes of Charlie Russell, Frederic Remington, Joseph Henry Sharp, E. W. Deming, and many others who preferred the mythic West. Schuyler's job was to sell magazines by enticing readers to pick up the next rip-roaring adventure of the gun-toting hero Billy West. And, indeed, Schuyler was successful.

Dippie asserts that Schuyler was a sound journeyman, not a studio artist with fine art pretensions. Nonetheless, Schuyler had a solid command of formal language; his good use of counterbalance creates the dynamic element of many compositions. With intelligent attention to small details, he dealt with the abstract relationships of line and form to integrate and unify his figures into landscapes, exemplified by the cover of Western Story Magazine (May 15, 1926), where the viewer's eye moves through a series of rounded shapes: the crown of the hat, the vested chest, the curve of the left arm, the bend of the left and right knees, the dome of the coffee pot, and the summit of the butte.

While Christian offers a fairly standard account of the economic and political developments of the period, including the all-important fur trade and the transfer of Louisiana from Spanish and French control to American, her primary interest is in the personalities she explores. Little novel comes from this, but she does provide greater emphasis on some of the spouses, particularly Berenice Menard Chouteau, wife of Franyois Gesseau Chouteau, the eldest son of Pierre Chouteau Sr.'s second marriage, and Emilie Gratiot Chouteau, wife of Pierre Chouteau Jr. She also echoes the interest in Native Americans common to most recent historical work.

While the original Chouteau mercantile empire was built extensively on special relationships, familial and governmental, Americans brought a different and less personal system to St. Louis. The elder Chouteaus, Auguste and Pierre Sr., navigated these waters, but imperfectly; Pierre Jr. was to find his place in the new order, prosper, and guide the family to new achievements in finance, lead mining, real estate speculation, and railroads.

Shirley Christian's account of the Chouteaus and their legacy reflects the Pulitzer Prize winning author's capacity to write well and tell an interesting story despite a confusing and ineffective citation system that may have been more the fault of the publisher than the writer. Lacking the comprehensive insight found in Carl Ekberg's François Vallé and His World: Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark (2002) and omitting much of the detail that lends contrast to earlier histories of the time and place in its attempt to span the generations, The Story of the Chouteaus is a convenient starting point for readers newly interested in the subject.

As with most autobiographies, there is a fair dose of self-serving interpretation and perspective. There is also the brash rhetorical style and techniques that are emblematic of the speeches and writings of many AIM members. It was shocking and original in the 1970s, and still has the power to move, but three decades later it at times seems tired. Nonetheless, the book still has important value.

Banks's take on the familiar narrative of AIM's activities of the 1970s is complemented by his insights into less familiar subjects, including a vivid picture of his early life and much needed discussions of his activities of the 1980s. This book is also, on some level, a retort to Russell Means's 1995 autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread, a book Means teamed with Marvin Wolfe to write. Banks and Means, AIM's two primary leaders during its most influential period, have not always agreed on matters, and those disagreements have sometimes been public. True to form, Means was sometimes openly critical of Banks and his supporters in White Men. Also true to form, Banks is more diplomatic in Ojibwa Warrior, even complimenting of Means. But the discerning reader can readily pick out the issues of contention. The general schism in approaches is perhaps best shown by their conclusions. Means ended his book by lauding the virtues of therapy and the Libertarian Party (he has since disavowed the Libertarians). Banks ends his by celebrating his life with his youngest son and other family members back on the reservation of his birth in Minnesota, where he subsistence hunts and fishes and runs a small business based on wild rice and maple syrup harvesting.

Harris offers her definition of "ghost town" as a place founded for a purpose, later to decline. By adding "accessible and visually interesting," Harris narrows her selection to sixty-eight diverse towns and two forts. Some, like Madrid just south of Santa Fe, are rebounding with such vigor they should forfeit their right to be included. Others, like Casa Salazar northwest of Albuquerque, are so forlorn that they belie the book's title. Harris has organized the towns into eleven chapters based on location and, by extension, shared history. Of interest to eastern Plains g-towners will be chapters two and three, covering those places kept alive by the Santa Fe Trail and, later, the symbiotic economies of mining and railroading, as well as chapter six, a hodge-podge of sites between Interstate 40 and U.S. 380.

Concise but compelling essays impart the history of each town, while anecdotes illuminate the human histories that exist (ed.) there. In Johnson's Mesa, a town in far northeastern New Mexico, for example, Harris tells of the special ring system that residents used on their telephones to alert other townspeople whether a call was public or private. Harris's gift for description is evident throughout; she summarily depicts the big nothing of south-central New Mexico by stating, "In a place where a curve in the road counts as a landmark, the sky bears the responsibility for the scenery." Though such evocations occasionally trespass, there is warmth behind the words. Regrettably, some of the first-person accounts of Harris's visits to these sites overwhelm the narrative, leaving the reader with more to remember about the weather on the day of her visit than the town itself.

Johnston argues that her book is not about women's struggle for freedom, but rather their fight to maintain their time-honored freedoms. Traditionally, Cherokee society held women in awe: the matrilineal and clan- and land based matriarchal society had provided Cherokee females with opportunities to exercise control over their families, economy, political arenas, ecological systems, and spirituality. While their pervasive influence faced compromises during tragic displacement and the Civil War and Reconstruction, the death knell to the traditional matriarchy and female ties to land occurred in the Dawes Commission meeting in 1897, the sequel to the 1887 Dawes Act. Though land and its resources no longer belonged to the female, Johnston argues that women continued to sustain a strong sense of self and power. Johnston sees the twentieth-century lives of past female chiefs of the Cherokee Nation-Wilma Mankiller of Oklahoma and Joyce Duggan of the Eastern Band (North Carolina}- as emblematic of Cherokees' unbelievable tenacity and respect for female leadership.

Johnston identifies globally with other ethnic groups that have remained extraordinarily cohesive in times of severe persecution and displacement by resonating with the world of Elie Wiesel, who attributes his sense of identity to the importance of stories. Storytelling is an art, and Johnston makes her case clear that this venue offers the historian a valuable resource. By combining the historic record and extensive research, she reinforces her premise that the Cherokee Nation still reveres the role of women and does so naturally. Well written and refreshingly honest, I recommend the book both to general and scholarly audiences.

With Writing Her Own Life, Blew, a recent winner of the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award, focuses on Imogene's diary entries for 1940-1945, years when she transitioned between teaching in rural Montana and her eventual life in Washington. Perhaps because it is a constant backdrop, the dramatic historical events of World War II receive little attention in Imogene's diary, while we learn much about the trivia of daily life: the difficulty of getting and keeping a school, the frustrations of living with roommates, and the slow growing pleasures of an independent life, of sugar rationing and a doomed struggle to lose weight, of illnesses and accidents. As Blew points out, the details give us a different view of time, one "that not only connects the dots of local history but transcends history."

Where the memoir sometimes jars is in the tension Blew stages between the fiction writer and the writer of creative nonfiction, as both personas struggle to understand what to include, what to invent, what to bolster, what to explain. The memoir's two endings remind us that to be unsettled in our reading is productive and even poignant; by refusing a single, too-pat conclusion, Blew insists that this life-and whatever lessons it holds for her, for us-be read complexly, with attention to the ways we all collaborate in its creation and meaning.

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Great Plains Symposium 2005

Northern Great Plains History And The Society For Military History 2005 Conference

International Cather Seminar 2005

Call For Papers: Western History Association 2006 Conference

Western History Association 2005 Conference

In South Dakota, he reads Dan O'Brien's Equinox (1997) and Rites of Autumn (1988) and Linda Hasselstrom's Windbreak (1987) and Land Circle (I991) and interviews each writer-O'Brien about his life on his ranch with his falcons and Hasselstrom about her lifetime on her ranch and her eventually having to give it up. For Price and these writers the question is commitment: what does it mean, what are the gains and losses? For O'Brien and Hasselstrom their place and their self are one; Price hopes to find that union for himself in his own part of the prairie.

With Heat-Moon and Swander, the locations are different, as are the reasons for attaching themselves to the land. Heat-Moon's PrairyErth (1991) is a very long exploration of Chase County, Kansas-a "deep map" as HeatMoon terms it. Heat-Moon does not live in Chase County, has no personal connection to it, but for Price he represents the ways in which one can learn a place-any place-through its history, geography, ecology. Heat-Moon's book is the story of generations in a landscape. Reading and talking with Heat-Moon leads John Price into exploring his own family history in places, giving him another dimension to his developing sense of commitment. Mary Swander's life on her farm in an Amish community in Iowa, described in Out of This World (1995), is the consequence of a serious illness and a conscious selection of a place for recovery, for healing. The effects of this choice for Swander enhance Price's sense of the potential value of commitment and place.

The text for Karl Bodmer's North American Prints features lucid essays by Ron Tyler, history professor at the University of Texas and director of the Texas State History Association, and by Brandon Ruud, a former curator with the Durham Center in Omaha and now a researcher at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tyler's "Karl Bodmer and the American West" provides an immediate context for the artist's travels, while "A Faithful and Vivid Picture: Karl Bodmer's North American Prints" by Ruud examines the publishing history of the atlas in considerable detail. Ruud served both as editor of the book and annotator of the plates along with Joslyn curator Marsha V. Gallagher.

The development of each image in the series is accounted for in the 242 pages of the "Catalogue of Tableaux and Vignettes" which occupies roughly two-thirds of the volume. All known issues, states, and variant impressions of the prints are identified and described. The book features fifty-seven pages of appendices, including a "Location Census" listing sixty-four institutional collections of Bodmer material, a catalogue of original Bodmer works relating to the individual prints, and biographies of twenty-nine print-makers who were involved in the production of the atlas in Paris over a period of nearly eight years.

The book should not be viewed as a synthesis of Texas Indian cultures in the manner of W. W. Newcomb's Indians of Texas (1961), even granting some of the outdated facets of the latter. La Vere's book is a casual overview often written in a somewhat exaggerated style and focusing more on "who did what to whom," resulting in a narrative of skirmishes, battles, and wars in the historic era. While it will be consulted by historians and other specialists interested in various Texas Indian tribes, I suspect its greatest appeal will be to a general reading public-an important role for this book.

The portions that deal with Indian groups related to the Southern Plains, such as the Wichita, Comanche, Kiowas, Tonkawa, and Lipan Apaches, all have their stories told in better venues than this one. Great Plains scholars might want to read these related sections in La Vere's book, although they do not appear, to me at least, to provide any solid new research or interpretations.

Richard T. Hughes's Myths America Lives By suggests that the United States has both created and been created by six national, and in some cases pre-national, myths. These include the myth of the Chosen Nation, of Nature's Nation, of the Christian Nation, of the Millennial Nation, of the Capitalist Nation, and of the Innocent Nation. Each of these is a doomed proposition, should readers wonder. Hughes has selected them for their done for character.

The riposte to each myth is furnished by a representative African American or Native American, whose superficially-presented discontent at white male ideas about America is meant to "critique" national failings. (Frederick Douglass never sounded so dull in his career as he does when he's obliged to "critique" the "absolutized" myth of the Christian Nation.) And despite centuries of censorious comment by the marginalized, it was only recently that America awoke from its myth-nap: "these myths stood virtually unchallenged from the Revolution to the 1960s." Evidently the prevailing myth since 1968 is Multicultural Guilt-Ridden Enfranchising -the-Marginalized Nation.

Never mind that the term "myth" is wildly misapplied throughout this text and that the average Athenian in the ancient world could better explain the difference between myth and lie. (Hughes does not mean myth; he means what even Northrup Frye, father of North American myth criticism and absent from the index to this book, would have called modestly a mode. Frye reserved mythoi for primal plots, not fugue states of those plots.) Hughes's six myths fold neatly into the jeremiad's pressure to narrate history in one way, toward one finale of 1960s "challenges." Historical context, or even textual sources, for where each myth came from are uneven; in most cases, Hughes's analysis is superseded by the past, namely by old-fashioned Americanist scholarship such as Perry Miller's or Vernon Parrington's, or even D. H. Lawrence's.

The Times initially declares the potential of High River in term of progress, says Voisey; the local weekly newspaper becomes a publicity agent for speculators, governments, and railways. But economic and geographical limitations eventually alter the story, he adds. The High River Time's editorial slant thus adjusts from metropolitan progress to small town virtue.

Voisey thoroughly explores how the Times helps High River to rediscover its past, creating an identity through its cowboy heroes and rodeo legends. He gleans from the weekly's pages what sets the southern Alberta foothills community apart from most Plains settlements, scattered over rolling grassland to the east and south: the Stampede. The history of High River becomes inseparable from the story of cowboys, ranches, and rodeos. High River loses to Calgary for metropolitan status, he notes, but wins a legitimate share in the fame surrounding the Calgary Stampede. While many communities of the Plains struggle for identity, manufacturing links to celebrities of popular culture or building contrived tourist attractions like commercial theme parks, Voisey argues High River reinvents its authentic ranching history into the legend of the cowboy.

Yet Voisey's rigorous attention to details occasionally distracts rather than informs the reader; a more critical scholar might want the Times's struggle with the Social Credit government more developed. The tension between commercial imperatives and freedom of expression becomes particularly salient to the Clarks, the weekly's owners. Because local private advertisers are few and government sources like paid notices and printing contracts represent an opportunity to fill the void, Charles Clark, the founder, faces the prospect of publishing a government gazette rather than legitimate news. In particular, the weekly's struggle with the Social Credit government over the Alberta Press Act seems compelling; the Times plays a central role in successfully resisting formally codified government censorship.

Repeatedly, Mead asserts that support from Populists and Progressives, and from the "farm labor alliance," was critical for suffrage successes. And she does deliver persuasive qualitative evidence for her claim. But her conclusion may be challenged on at least three grounds. First, she provides no justification of her definition of "the West." The U.S. Census category, for example, would also include North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. State suffrage movements failed in North Dakota and Nebraska, but won in Kansas (1912), South Dakota, and Oklahoma (both in 1918). What was the role of the "progressive-farmer-labor" alliance in these additional states?

Second, as Mead points out, New Mexico was the only western (by her definition) state in which suffragists were never successful. And yet Mead has virtually nothing to say about suffrage efforts there. Were suffragists in New Mexico unable to garner the critical support of third parties? Was the farm-labor alliance uncooperative? Beyond discussion of failed campaigns in states where women eventually won the vote, Mead might have strengthened her argument with greater attention to the sole holdout.

Foley, an experienced historian of Missouri and fur trade history and editor of the Missouri Biography Series, provides a comprehensive account of Clark's multifaceted life. He stresses Clark's capabilities in mapping the route, transporting men and equipment, erecting winter posts, and negotiating with the tribes that met the Corps along the way. Moreover, Foley succeeds in demonstrating that the expedition was but one episode in Clark's "wilderness journey" that included soldiering in the Ohio campaigns before the expedition as well as an illustrious career in government administration in St. Louis after. In addition to his tenure as Missouri's only territorial governor, Clark served the government as an Indian agent and superintendent of Indian affairs for more than thirty years. Usually a kind and generous man committed to assisting friends and family in need, he was also, paradoxically, a severe master who exhibited cruel treatment toward his slaves.

Jones, former managing editor of People magazine, provides a newsy, journalistic rendition of the "shaping of the West" with Clark cast in the lead role. He, like Foley, faced the daunting task of understanding the complexities of the world wherein Clark operated and the complications exhibited in his character and behavior. Although Clark is the protagonist, more than bit parts are filled by others, like Clark's elder brother George Rogers Clark-simultaneously Revolutionary War hero and villainous Indian fighter. The elder Clark was unusually brutal in his dealings with Indians, exemplifying behavior common to many frontiersmen living in antebellum America. Jones provides vignettes of numerous individuals who helped shape William Clark's life: Anthony Wayne, James Wilkinson, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, John Jacob Astor, Robert Dickson, Nicholas Biddle, Henry Atkinson, Daniel Boone, and others. An Indian presence is achieved by Jones's incorporating words and actions of Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, Tecumseh, Keokuk, Kenekuk, Black Hawk, and other Indian leaders Clark knew.