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A Review by Benjamin Schwarz

This book, replete with evocative photographs and informative maps, is a detailed and exceptionally well written guide to the wildlife, topography, and natural and human history of the Great Plains — an area that was once a sea of grass stretching from Ohio to Montana and from Texas to Alberta. The authors have been highly selective; they've chosen only forty-eight preserves in fifteen states and three Canadian provinces, which they consider the best examples of native prairie accessible to the public. "Accessible" is a relative term; many of the places are especially remote in this, the loneliest region of the country. Bring the book along on a car trip out west this summer; get off the freeways and drive, say, Highway 3 across the Oklahoma Panhandle to see the light change abruptly from the soft, hazy glow of the East to the brilliance of the West; or Highway 20, past the Oglala National Grassland (site of the Northern Cheyennes' last battle) and through the Sandhills of western Nebraska as they undulate toward the Rockies; or Highway 12 through isolated Lemmon, South Dakota, to buck the unceasing wind in the Cedar River National Grasslands. Also pack the University of Nebraska Press's The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark; Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail; Mari Sandoz's Crazy Horse; Kathleen Norris's Dakota, her sublime meditation on Lemmon and the northern plains; and The Crow Indians, by Robert H. Lowie (Nebraska). This reissue of a classic ethnographical study is based on the fieldwork and interviews with Crow elders Lowie conducted from 1907 to 1931. A twentieth-century anthropologist summoning a vanished nineteenth-century world of war parties and buffalo hunts, Lowie illuminated religious beliefs, relations between the sexes, and attitudes toward death and violence. And he proved a clear-eyed but generous observer; despite its occasional misinterpretations, this is perhaps the most well-rounded contemporary (or nearly so) account of traditional American Indian life on the Great Plains. It's especially enlightening because so much of our understanding of Plains Indians derives from the experience of the Sioux; this study examines their sworn enemy. It's a worthy addition to its publisher's list, which contains the most important collection of books on western and American Indian history.

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