Animal lovers will enjoy these true accounts portraying ten of Montana's most famous animals. Great Falls author Gayle C. Shirley carefully researched the facts surrounding the legends, while Billings artist John Potter created simple, yet captivating sketches of each animal. Theses tales, averaging 5-7 pages, could easily be included in the classroom as interest stimulators or attention-getting hooks. Grade school and middle school students, as well as adults, will enjoy simply sitting down to read the stories for fun. Pick up a copy of this paperback and witness the loneliness of Shep, a faithful dog awaiting his master at the Fort Benton railroad stations, or the majesty of Earl, the elk that traveled 1,800 miles to find a home in Independence, Missouri. Perhaps you will prefer the audacious nerve displayed by the three wolves and two bears that terrorized ranchers and farmers before being killed or captured. There is something for everyone in this animal collection.
Janet Nickoloff
Riverside Middle School Library, Billings
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This paperback consists of 34 short chapters from Montana history, each about two-and-a-half pages long, interspersed with black and white illustrations by Lisa Harvey.
In selecting subjects for each chapter, Crutchfield emphasizes the dramatic; Montana becomes a stage on which many players have appeared. The historical theater opens with the year 1743, when the first Europeans may have entered Montana and sighted the Bighorn Mountains. Subsequent chapters include "Crazy Woman Morgan and the Massacre," "Mike Fink: A Rowdy at Henry's Fort," and many other fascinating tales. The author makes an effort to include a variety of characters, including mountain men, tribal chiefs, women, artists, and others. It concludes with an essay on A.B. Guthrie, who died in 1991.
The format works well for the chapters about individuals and for short-term incidents such as the winter of 1886-87. It is, however, too confining for bigger subjects such as the Nez Perce War or the history of mining in Butte.
Because of its variety, drama, and brevity, the book should appeal to a wide range of ages, including adults. It could be used to hook children and young adults on Montana history, tempting students to do further research on favorite subjects. For this reason, the lack of a bibliography is disappointing.
In the preface, Crutchfield writes, "I hope that It Happened in Montana will provide a few hours of pleasure to those who read it and that it will, perhaps, find its way into the classrooms of the state, thereby giving younger generations a better appreciation of their vast heritage." I think he has written a book that can do just that.
Ginny Waples
MSU-Billings
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Pepper Tree Rider is a traditional Western novel, set in Texas, with familiar elements--an attractive widow trying to hold on to a beleaguered ranch, a banker demanding payment on the mortgage, a faithful Mexican ranch hand, cattle rustlers, a smooth- talking, cat-eyed villain, and a masked man as hero. Yes, there is also the requisite barroom brawl, intermittent gunshots, and a climactic confrontation between hero and villain.
The title alludes to the pivotal role of the ranch widow's nine-year-old son, who had kept watch from the pepper tree in vain for his father's return from the Civil War. Ultimately, the boy must decide which would-be father figure to trust--a decision with critical consequences. The author is overly-reliant on the conventions of the Western genre to tell his story, while skimping on character development. According to the book jacket, Curtis has written scripts for "The Big Valley," "Rawhide," and "Gunsmoke." Recommended for fans of these Westerns and for collections where demand for the genre exceeds supply.
Ginny Waples
MSU-Billings
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With the promise of spring around the corner, children and adults will be ready get outdoors and see what nature is cooking up. This guide will help them identify common native flowering plants in different areas of Montana.
The book has a nice introduction, then divides Montana into different habitat regions, (subalpine regions, mountain forests, mountain meadows, prairies and grasslands, etc.). It also has a special division on berries, which is wonderful. The only thing that is missing in each division, is a map of Montana with the habitat clearly outlined. Included in the book are a nice glossary that defines botanical terms, the parts of a plant and its flower. It is well-indexed, and plants can be searched by their common or scientific name.
Each plant mentioned has a beautiful large colorful illustration of it in bloom. The author has also included anecdotal information on each plant, including helpful tips on identifying them correctly. Embedded in the anecdotal text is the information about those that are harmful or poisonous. I think this information should be more obvious for young readers and others using it. I could see how a child would have their hands on the false hellebore (it is described as looking like stalks of corn) before getting to the information that it is poisonous.
According to the book, Montana has 2,500 different flowering plants. Sixty-four are covered in this book. It is a great starting place for nature enthusiasts who are exploring Montana. This is geared toward people aged 8 and older, and would be an asset in any library in Montana.
Lyn M. McKinney
MSU-Billings Library
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The battle of the Little Big Horn carries a lot of intrigue for me. Through the years, it provoked enough interest to make me seek out resources, so when the book, The Mystery of E Troop: Custer's Gray Horse Company at the Little Big Horn, needed to be reviewed, I eagerly looked forward to doing it. This book didn't disappoint me; it was interesting and I believe it accomplished its primary purpose. This was to indisputably document with empirical evidence the actual soldier location during the battle and where the soldiers had died which, according to the author, has been a matter of controversy ever since the battle occurred.
Gregory Michno began with a history of the growth of the U.S. Army with emphasis on the 7th Cavalry development, and then progressed to an exciting account of the battle itself. He added backgrounds of the soldiers into his narrative as to where they came from and thoughts and conversations they may have had which created a good picture of each one of them in my mind. But throughout it all, he emphasized that his writing was primarily concerned with uncovering why initial accounts said twenty-eight bodies were found in a deep ravine, thought by all to be a ravine called Deep Ravine, while subsequent investigations failed to uncover any artifacts in this particular ravine. By conducting and reporting thorough investigative diggings meant to uncover any such artifacts, and judiciously compiling Indian and white people's accounts, some from survivors of the battle itself, he finally came to the conclusion that none of the soldiers had actually died in this ravine. His assumption was that all through the years, this ravine was mistakenly identified.
I thought the book very well written but did find the Indian and white accounts of the battle perhaps a bit repetitive and long. This is probably because I am not a true historian at heart particularly seeking out this kind of documentation. For this reason, I believe a serious historian would especially find this book an excellent reference source. I believe it also makes for just good reading for anyone else who has interest in the battle of the Little Big Horn.
Alice Hallstrom
Hot Springs Public Library, ahall@wln.com
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This book is an indeed welcome addition to the available books written pertaining to Native American crafts. It is small, containing only seventy-one pages in all, but it has explicit directions for making twenty-eight different patterns and designs of authentic Indian moccasins. It is written in a format of easily understood, step-by-step instructions and hand-drawn illustrations.
One of the first things I noted that made this manual exceptionally easy to follow was that the author's index wasn't an ordinary index. Instead he indicated his pagination with numbers and pictures of the kind of moccasins a person would find on that particular page making the locating of a certain type very easy.
This was followed by an interesting introduction which summarizes the history of moccasins beginning with the name origination: "just happened because the Algonquin people along the New England Coast told the first white settlers the name of their footwear." White then summarizes the methods used to "tan" the leather and provides historical data detailing the moccasin distribution beginning with the Ice Age. He also included his own drawings of the migration maps of the North American Indian tribes.
The actual moccasin making began with general instructions for constructing moccasins as a whole, followed by specific instructions for each type some of which were named "Oneida- Iroquoian," "Yukon Boot Top," "Giljak Sakhalin," "Kiowa Apache." The directions were meticulous. I could easily follow the pattern making, cutting, fitting together, and sewing.
I found this book informational and a delight. For the small space it takes on a library shelf, it has a ton of information between its covers and will make an excellent resource for anyone looking for information on how to make moccasins. I would recommend it for every library.
Alice Hallstrom
Hot Springs Public Library
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This title is the typical boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, boy falls in love with girl story with a twist. The girl is Edith Harkness. Edith is a retired home economic teacher, widow, mother, and grandmother. Edith is honored as a hero over a bizarre incident at Rocky Bluff High School. Edith is struggling with her son over the family owned business. The boy is Roy Dutton. Roy is also retired and a widower who is very busy with the crisis hotline. Edith and Roy struggle through many life problems such as health problems, the death of one of the sons, as well as the activities from the crisis hotline. Eventually they do find a new beginning for their lives. They both have a commitment to a religious structure in their lives. The story is a nice exception to the typical romance novel. Senior citizens in your library may like this exception. A good title for public libraries.
The story is set in central Montana. Many familiar names and geographic descriptions can be found throughout the story.
Ann Bell has worked as a teacher and librarian in schools in Iowa, Oregon, Guam, and Montana. Previously she has written numerous articles for Christian magazines and a study on the book of James.
Darlene Staffeldt
Montana State Library
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Leslie Leek is an Idaho native. She grew up in McCammon and Dubois. Leslie lives in Pocatello, where she is a Lecturer in Speech and Theater at ISU.
Darlene Staffeldt
Montana State Library
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Although winter visitation to the world's first national park and its immediate neighbor has recently increased dramatically (and dismayingly), by far the majority of visitors still arrive between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Natural events in Yellowstone-Grand Teton, of course, continue apace, with or without visitors. This book looks at a year in the life of two of our best-loved parks.
Much of Frank Craighead's long career has been spent in the Yellowstone-Grand Teton region. Despite his differences with the National Park Service over grizzly bear policy, no one doubts his knowledge of and love for both parks. The words and photographs in this book demonstrate this over and again. Craighead, more than many, is able to appreciate the idea of Yellowstone-Grand Teton as an ecosystem, in which every part is equally valuable and important. Thus, while one can find grizzly bears and geysers here, one also finds gray jays and green gentian.
Craighead emphasizes the flow and continuity of life. The book is broken into short chapters corresponding in most instances to one week of the year. He then treats of the events likely to occur around that time. He hopes that readers will learn that natural events are cyclical and predictable, and learn to look for recurring events based on their natural order rather than on artificial calendars.
Although the Yellowstone literature is already voluminous, this is a worthy addition. Besides being a beautiful volume to browse through, For Everything There Is A Season helps the reader to realize that parks are more than tourist destinations.
George Suttle
Montana State University-Bozeman
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According to the editor of this anthology, all official explorers of the Great Northwest came from somewhere else--their encounters were truly with a distant land. Those readers whose historical background is elsewhere, like this reviewer, will find a rewarding intellectual encounter with a distant land in the fourteen essays that make up this volume. The contributors are mostly academic historians who participated in a University of Idaho symposium to celebrate its 1988 centennial.
Schwantes' opening essay provides an overview of Euro-American discovery and exploration of the region, which engaged Spain, Russia, Britain, France, and the United States in a high-stakes contest for national and economic power.
The essays in Part I present a variety of perspectives, uniformly thought-provoking. William Goetzmann investigates positive and negative impacts of exploration, from proofs for Darwin's theory of evolution to the role of disease in forcible conquest of natives. Stephen Haycox fills in the historiographical gap for Russian exploration of the Northwest. Two chapters offer interpretations and reproductions of drawings of flora, fauna, natives, and landscapes. In the days before faraway places became familiar through photographic images, artists frequently accompanied official expeditions. One of the best chapters deals with Connecticut Yankee Peter Pond's vision and search for the Northwest Passage, which would have put the China market within reach of Pittsburgh. Pond explored the present-day Mackenzie River area and tutored the man for whom it was named and who followed it to its disappointing end. Although Pond's belief about the Mackenzie River was wrong, it had a "profound effect" on Jefferson's planning of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Even faulty dreams have value. Richard Maxwell Brown shows how the Chinook jargon solved the "interpreter chain" problem, which for Lewis and Clark had involved translation from Salish to Shoshoni to Hidatsa to French to English. Gary Moulton, editor of a definitive new edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, provides a chapter on their expedition. The men who accompanied the Fremont expeditions are profiled in another. Douglas Cole surveys the work of Northwest anthropologists, who were "urgently salvaging" the material culture of a "primitive people pushed to the wall" by the end of the nineteenth century. The three chapters in Part II deal with publishing and field work in exploration history.
A map would have been a helpful addition. I found myself consulting an atlas in nearly every chapter. Recommended for academic libraries and U.S. West collections.
Janet Owens , MSU-Bozeman
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The Lupine Walker: A Journey / Tony Rasch -- Bozeman: White Pine Pub. (Box 6457, 59771), distributed by Falcon Press, 1992. ISBN 1-56044-144-5, $11.95.
Traveling Through / Don Holmstead -- Charlotte, NC: Herb Eaton Historical Publishers (available from Library Ink, 5142 Hatcher Hill Road, Wallace, SC 29596), 1993. $12.00.
These three books have much in common. Their authors share a sense of place. Wyndham writesof Idaho, Rasch walks through Montana, and Holmstead spent his young years in Helena. Their poetry, too, shares similar themes of spiritual growth through personal journeys. Consider just words from the titles--heavenly, walker, journey, traveling. The largest undertaking is that of Wyndham in Heavenly R & B , his 17th book of poetry self-published by his own press. These poems, written over a period of ten years, present a wide array of style and matter. The personal journey includes family, friends, war, death, Christmas, writing, and place. His poetry is soul-centered which is both a strength and weakness. As a strength, we find images like "white tongue-and-groove two-stories on Main Street" or perhaps my favorite "The Full Moon Over the Apple Trees / throws a gentle light over the garden, / making the onions glimmer in their rows." Many of the poems, however, are weakened by too much telling. Rather than allowing the image of the full moon over his garden to give assurance, we are told at the end, "It gives me assurance in spite of all wordly strife. / This is my house and garden, my moon, my trees, my life." Many of these poems could be strengthened by allowing the images to carry their own message.
The Lupine Walker is a travel journal that records the author's 1200-mile summer trek from Utah across Wyoming and Montana to Canada. Rasch's journal includes prose, haiku, and photography. Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry composed of three lines and a fixed number of syllables, usually incorporating allusions to nature. This is a pleasant journey, and one many of us would envy taken as it was in the midst of family, home, job, and youth. The writing is at its best in the haiku with such concrete imagery as "ponderosa music" and " wild raspberry day." The prose gives a good sense of the personal awe of the traveler alone on the mountain, next to the river, beneath the moon, in the path of the lupine. The calligraphy, though lovely, is distracting and sometimes difficult to read. The photographs, crisp and well crafted, are woven neatly with the text.
Holmstead's Traveling Through includes eighteen poems with titles like "Love," "Autumn," "Truth," and "Happy Island." The majority of these poems are written in couplets, all utilize a rhyming scheme, and their theme is one of telling of life experiences without the use of imagery or allusion. One example is from "Communicate:" "The words and thoughts spoken are completely free, / When uttered by a boy of three." Frequently the rhyming overrides the content as do the awkward line endings. These poems represent a happy traveler but lack poetic strength. These three books are not recommended for poetry collections. Lupine Traveler might be added to public libraries with large Montana travel collections.
Sue Samson , UM-Missoula
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Robert Frost was once asked whether poetry was a form of escapism. His reply still remains with me: "No, poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." Mike Logan in his latest foray in cowboy poetry does precisely this. Men of the Open Range and Other Poems is a collection of Mike Logan's poetry dealing with Montana and the life of the range. Within the poems he certainly takes life by the throat dealing with topics ranging from wolves in Yellowstone to death to the imminent loss of the cowboys' way of life.
The title comes from a C. M. Russell painting, and the poetry from Mike's pen matches that boundlessness that so characterizes much of our state. In his own words, "to ride the far sung places and to hear the west wind sing was to know the horseman's Holy Grail." This is from the title poem of the collection. He paints a picture of open range land without fences "bounded only by horizons" and describes very well a dwindling of such places even here. The poem begins with an ethereal "I can see the ghosts of riders Movin' out across the dawn" and ends with a startling, unexpected "now they're gone." The meter of this poem, and of many in this collection, is what I call "long." The sentences are almost the drawl spoken by some ranchers I know. They take their time. No words are wasted, but they also lack bustle.
Mike Logan also takes on the issues which separate rural people from urbanites. In a poem titled "Letter to Town" he deals with Animal Rights activists. The point he makes is rather interesting. "I wonder how your tunes'd change If gophers chewed your lawns Or ol' griz ate your poodle dogs?" "Hollywood and Vine" is another with a similar theme. He takes to task all the celebrities who have come into Montana and have, in his view, imported the problems as well as the "civilized things" of L. A. His conclusion is typical of many in Montana: "Now if they like conveniences Of city life so fine, Why don't the sonsabitches stay At Hollywood and Vine?"
At the same time that Mr. Logan may be controversial in what he says, he is also capable of stirring deep recesses of emotion. "Drinkers of the Wind" is powerfully descriptive of Pronghorn Antelope "racers to the sky" evoking a visual scene of antelope galloping over the top of a rise. The poem "Celebration" is written in honor of Ruth Korell on the occasion of her passing. The poem begins with the wildwind whispering to the flowers and trails she loved and ends with Ruth leading the angels on a trail ride.
Taken all together Mike Logan causes you to think, emote, or just enjoy the gentle rhythm of the words which are like a Chinook on a cold winter's day.
Larry Swain
Parmly-Billings
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Both the front and back covers of this paperback inform the reader that Wojciechowska is a Newbery Award-winning author. These blurbs are necessary because there is little craftsmanship in Dreams of the Super Bowl to remind one of Shadow of a Bull for which she won the Newbery medal thirty years ago.
The two books do have something in common -- characters searching for resolution to the conflict between desire to please others and need to find their own goals in life. In Shadow of a Bull , Manolo faced pressure by the villagers to follow in his father's footsteps and become a great bullfighter. Wojciechowska updates and Americanizes the dilemma in Dreams of the Super Bowl . Nick's future, his father has decided, lies in being a pro-football quarterback.
Super Bowl's Nick never satisfactorily resolves his problems. Instead, the author provides a second character, John, who is similarly raised since childhood with family expectations that he play pro football--specifically that he become a Pittsburgh Steeler. John embraces his fate, secretly becomes a priest on the side, and discontinues his friendship with Nick when it becomes too controlling. The two former friends play against one another in the culminating Super Bowl game of the book.
Assuming the average American kid would rather read about football than bullfighting, one might expect this to be a worthwhile re-working of the original theme. Trouble is, there is curiously little football and not much storytelling in this book. Dreams of the Super Bowl reads like an outline for a novel that the author never got around to writing. Even what should be the climactic Super Bowl game is hurried through in a mere two paragraphs.
One abrupt detour occurs when John becomes a priest. Wojciechowska takes this opportunity to introduce a short and not very comprehensible polemic on religion and the public schools, "where the knowledge of God, who he loved more and more each day, was prohibited" (p.77).
I had hopes for this book as a high-interest read for young adults, but concluded that when an author leaves out the storytelling, 80 pages can seem mighty long.
Ginny Waples , MSU-Billings Library
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