Review of From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West that Was by Charles W. Allen

Authors

John Husmann, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Date of this Version

October 1997

Comments

Published in Great Plains Research 7:2 (Fall 1997). Copyright © 1997 The Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Used by permission. http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/GPR/gpr.shtml

Abstract

Charles Wesley Allen witnessed episodes of late nineteenth-century western American history through the eyes of a "soldier, freighter, rancher, clerk, blacksmith, contractor, editor, war correspondent, Pine Ridge postmaster, philosopher, and poet" (p. viii). Allen's good friend, Addison E. Sheldon, wrote this description of Allen's career in his foreword to the unpublished 1938 manuscript of Allen's reminiscences located at Nebraska State Historical Society. Richard E. Jensen, the Senior Research Anthropologist at the Society has produced an edited version of the manuscript, making it available to a wider audience for the first time. The book, as an edited volume, presents the reader with two layers of material to consider Allen's narrative and Jensen's annotations.