Review of Montana Legacy: Essays on History, People, and Place Edited by Harry W. Fritz, Mary Murphy, and Robert R. Swartout Jr.

Authors

Don Spritzer, Missoula Public LibraryFollow

Date of this Version

Fall 2003

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall 2003, pp. 265-66.

Comments

Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Montana Legacy is a sequel to the well-received 1992 anthology, The Montana Heritage. Like its predecessor, this new collection offers sixteen republished essays arranged in roughly chronological order. And much like the articles in Montana Heritage, these new pieces either explore a little-studied aspect of Montana's past or offer a revised slant on a more familiar topic.

The two best revisionist essays are Colin G. Calloway's "Army Allies or Tribal Survival?" and David Emmons's "The Orange and Green in Montana." Calloway's reinterpretation of the 1876 military campaign leading to the Battle of the Little Big Horn examines the complex pattern of shifting alliances and enmities among the Plains tribes. Seen in this light, the alliance that the Crows, Shoshones, Arikaras, and a half-dozen other tribes made with the white invaders was more a "union of convenience" for people engaged in a struggle for survival. In reexamining Montana's infamous battle between copper kings Marcus Daly and William Andrews Clark, Emmons introduces the heretofore ignored elements of religion and ethnicity as key causes of the ongoing feud.

Essays by Robert Swartout Jr. and Laurie Mercier explore the experiences of two of Montana's less-studied minorities-Chinese and Mexicans. It is instructive to compare the experiences of the two groups. As Swartout points out, the Chinese, who arrived in Montana during the 1860s gold rush, were overwhelmingly male. Although most labored either as miners or with railroad construction crews, they played central roles as businessmen in many Montana communities throughout the late nineteenth century. In contrast, the Mexicans, brought onto the Plains of eastern Montana by the Great Western Company to harvest sugar beets, arrived as family groups. In common, both groups performed the sort of backbreaking labor that whites shunned, and both had to cope with the often virulent racism of the European-American majority.

Other essays explore the plight of women, ranging from female bootleggers in Butte to women in rural Montana struggling to give birth to children without benefit of physicians or hospitals.