Montana Books

Full Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School Basketball Champions of the World

Linda Peavy, Ursula Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Coming of Age off the Reservation 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

A find of several arrowheads on our land in western NY sparked my interest in reading Full Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School: Basketball Champions of the World by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith. Once the authors introduced me to the players on the basketball team named world champions at the 1904 World's Fair, I found myself immersed in the players' lives as they transitioned from life on reservations and farms with their families to their coming of age at a boarding school, separated from their own cultures.

Because different tribes had been settled in one location at the Fort Shaw Indian School, there existed the potential for conflict, but instead these girls supported one another while negotiating the illnesses that plagued them from time to time, as well as surviving the deaths of parents, siblings, and friends. Starting with a soccer ball and a basket nailed to the wall, they progressed through and over many obstacles to become the "champions of the St. Louis world's fair." Not only did they play two twenty-minute, full-court basketball halves, several times a week and sometimes twice in a day, they also performed pantomime, played musical instruments, and recited poetry as part of their "demonstration" of how Indian girls could become "civilized." They raced up and down the court and through the Northwest exhibiting their talents, recruiting new students, accepting challenges from whites who could barely score against them, showing grace and modesty each time they won.

Even though they were exploited to gain money for their school budgets, these diligent young women put all their efforts into perfecting their performances and heroically presenting a positive view of Native Americans at a time when the whites who lived on their native lands ridiculed, criticized, and denigrated them.

Through newspaper and magazine articles, BIA reports, letters, and oral history from their descendents, the Fort Shaw Girls' Basketball team emerges from the pages as a group of unique individuals, each with her own distinct personality. Numerous photos of the girls and extensive notes add to the details of their lives.

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, originally intended to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, became the showcase for Native American crafts and lifestyles that were quickly disappearing. The Fort Shaw girls represented the future with their recitations, dance, and exhibition basketball games just as the exhibits represented the past. Their biographers and descendents deserve our praise. Recommended for women's, multicultural, and regional history collections.

by Susan Andrus
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Editorial Review:

Full-Court Quest offers a rare glimpse into American Indian life and into the world of women's basketball before "girls rules" temporarily shackled the sport.

Heart Earth

Ivan Doig

Amazon Price: $10.40 List Price: $13.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvest Books Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $6.19

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Days of their lives . . . 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

As a sometime writer, I am always humbled by Ivan Doig's rapturous rendering of human experience in the written word. His love of language is a perfect match for the sense of wonder he brings to whatever he's writing about, and he can spin what is often a simple idea into a lengthy interweaving of carefully observed details and nuances of feeling and gentle humor.

He does that here with a handful of letters written by his mother from Arizona and Montana to her brother on board a Navy destroyer in the Pacific during the closing months of WWII. They are also her own last months, dying as she does of heart failure in a high altitude sheep camp where she has been spending a summer with her husband and young son, the author. Doig generates pages of meaning and significance from single sentences in her letters, notably recreating one of her last days, herding sheep on horseback and alone, while husband and son travel to nearby Bozeman.

This is a short book compared to his other fiction and nonfiction, really more like an appendix to his memoir of growing up, "This House of Sky." It captures almost worshipfully the day-to-day reality of people living proudly and with determination on the margins of a rural wartime economy only beginning to recover from the Great Depression. Enjoyable also is Doig's gift for replicating the wry humor in the way they deal with and talk about life's vagaries. Highly recommended to readers of his other books, this is also an excellent introduction to Doig for those who haven't read him yet.

Editorial Review:

Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters--and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as Doig would prove to be. In this moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig brings to life his childhood before his mother's death and the family's journey from the Montana mountains to the Arizona desert and back again. He eloquently captures the texture of the American West during and after World War II, the fortune of a family, and one woman's indomitable spirit.

The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

Stewart Lee Allen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

One of my favorite books 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I came across this book by accident and bought it out of my sheer love for coffee. But the book not only has the great tale of how coffee came from Africa and made it's way all over the earth to the daily drink we know today, it also is a first rate travelogue. The author follows coffee's migration from Africa to Europe. Mr. Allen has quite a knack for finding and reporting his adventures and misadventures with a fun easy to read style.

If you like non-fiction travelogues, then do yourself a favor and buy this book.

Editorial Review:

In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee, indeed, the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India’s three Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ U.S.A., where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea-drinkers) do so at their own peril.

A Great Day to Fight Fire: Mann Gulch, 1949

Mark Matthews

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Mann Gulch, Montana, 1949. Sixteen men ventured into hell to fight a raging wildfire; only three came out alive.

Not until 1999--the fiftieth anniversary of the fire--did people begin to talk openly about Mann Gulch. Matthews has garnered those thoughts to reveal how devastating the fire was to the firefighters' family members, coworkers, and friends. In retelling the story of Mann Gulch, he draws on the testimony of the three survivors--including never-before-published insights from the last living member of the team--and interviews with former smoke jumpers of that era. The result is a moment-by-moment, heart-stopping re-creation of events.

The Mann Gulch tragedy provoked the Forest Service to develop safety equipment and training programs, but fighting wildfires is still a perilous job.

Matthews' stirring account renews our respect for one of nature's primal forces. A heartbreakingly human story, it still haunts a firefighting community--and keeps today's firefighters forever on guard.

Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement

Michael Barkun

Amazon Price: $19.75 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: The University of North Carolina Press Amazon Marketplace: 20 new & used starting at $18.29

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Subjects -> History -> Middle East -> Israel

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Tour of one region in America's chaotic religious landscape 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

While I highly enjoyed this book and found it meticulously, yet engagingly, researched, I will try to refrain from repeating what other reviewers have already stated. What I would like to add, is that I was unexpectedly impressed with the tortuous connections Barkun unearthed between the Identity/British-Israel sects/movements and other strains of Protestants and Pentecostals. I felt that I learned not only about Identity, but also gained a wider perspective on America's colorful religious history. Barkun also did an admirable job of maintaining a degree of objectivity and emotional distance from his subject, preventing a preachy or moralistic tone from overwhelming the book.

Editorial Review:

According to Michael Barkun, many white supremacist groups of the radical right are deeply committed to the distinctive but little-recognized religious position known as Christian Identity. In Religion and the Racist Right (1994), Barkun provided the first sustained exploration of the ideological and organizational development of the Christian Identity movement.

In a new chapter written for the revised edition, he traces the role of Christian Identity figures in the dramatic events of the first half of the 1990s, from the Oklahoma City bombing and the rise of the militia movement to the Freemen standoff in Montana. He also explores the government's evolving response to these challenges to the legitimacy of the state.

Michael Barkun is professor of political science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is author of several books, including Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-over District of New York in the 1840s.

Tough Trip Through Paradise, 1878-1879

Andrew Garcia, Bennett H. Stein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

'Tough Trip' has the ring of truth 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

A Spanish-Texan quits his job wrangling for the Army in Montana to set out trapping and trading with the Indians. His stories - full of grandeur, intrigue, death and romance - never cease to have a ring of truth.
In Garcia's accounts he is never the hero, but rather the hapless greenhorn who escapes by the skin of his teeth and a generous apportionment of luck.
Written in true trapper/trader/rancher dialect, this book is a joy to read and a pity to finish. I love his insights and Tom Sawyer wisdom, self deprecation, and observations about life with the Indians (and life with whites).

AS CLOSE AS I'LL GET TO KNOWING HOW THE WEST REALLY WAS 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Stepping Off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice
This book's handwritten manuscript was found in a dynamite box in its author's Montana cabin after his death at age 88. Garcia was an original Western settler, arriving in Montana in 1878, one year after the famous Nez Perce Chief Joseph's surrender. If you want authentic Old West, here it is. Garcia tells it like he saw it, favoring neither Native Americans or Europeans. He marries three Indian women (sequentially) and leaves his past world behind. This book has romance, beauty, humor, deadly adventure. Danger. Thrillers come nowhere near this true story. Most of all, Andrew Garcia's soul shines through his writing. What a dear, good man. I wish I could have met him.

The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Montana, 1800-2000

David Miller, Dennis J Smith, Joseph R. McGeshick, James Shanley, Caleb Shields

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> Native American -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

The first comprehensive history of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, commissioned by the tribes themselves, The History of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, 1800–2000 is an authoritative scholarly exploration of the struggles and triumphs of the Native Americans who were relegated by the federal government to a small portion of northeast Montana in the late 1880s. Written by five scholars of Native American studies, many of whom are native themselves, the narrative tracks the tribes from pre-contact with whites through the brutal early reservation period, two world wars, the turbulent 1960s, and into the twenty-first century. Drawn mostly from primary sources, including federal archives and private materials, The History of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, 1800–2000 is a benchmark in the publication of tribal histories with a native point of view.

Co-published with the Fort Peck Tribes.

Pretty-shield (Second Edition): Medicine Woman of the Crows (Second Edition)

Frank B. Linderman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Pretty-shield, the legendary medicine woman of the Crows, remembered what life was like on the Plains when the buffalo were still plentiful. A powerful healer who was forceful, astute, and compassionate, Pretty-shield experienced many changes as her formerly mobile people were forced to come to terms with reservation life in the late nineteenth century.

Pretty-shield told her story to Frank Linderman through an interpreter and using sign language. The lives, responsibilities, and aspirations of Crow women are vividly brought to life in these pages as Pretty-shield recounts her life on the Plains of long ago. She speaks of the simple games and dolls of an Indian childhood and the work of the girls and women—setting up the lodges, dressing the skins, picking berries, digging roots, and cooking. Through her eyes we come to understand courtship, marriage, childbirth and the care of babies, medicine-dreams, the care of the sick, and other facets of Crow womanhood. Alma Snell and Becky Matthews provide a new preface to this edition.

A Bride Goes West (Women of the West)

Nannie T. Alderson, Helena Huntington Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I loved this book! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book was an amazing true account of life in Montana when it was still being settled. The author(s) paint a vivid picture of the "new" West at the time and how men and women lived. I was surprised to learn that it was not all hardship and toil, to the contrary, there was much fun and merriment had. There's an amazing cast of colorful characters that Nannie met as a new young bride on a ranch. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves American history, the Old West, or authobiographies.

Captivating Account of early Pioneer Women 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book traces a short period in the life of a woman who came to Montana from a fairly well-to-do life in Virginia. She was young and probably not prepared for what she encountered. But it is amazing how well she did in the middle of nowhere. I was impressed with her open mindedness and interest in all things. I thought it was very well written. It leaves a lasting impression.

Editorial Review:

A Bride Goes West is new and fresh because it is impregnated with a just sense of values about life. When Nannie Tiffany of West Virginia married Walt Alderson, who'd already been on the cattle trail for years, in 1882, they went to Montana to start a little ranch. There's plenty about ranching in this book but what is most valuable is about life, about people in this ranch country.

As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart

Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Adventurers & Explorers

Editorial Review:

Granville Stuart (1834-1918) is a quintessential Western figure, a man whose adventures rival those of Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, or Sitting Bull, and who embodied many of the contradictions of America's westward expansion. Stuart collected guns, herded cattle, mined for gold, and killed men he thought outlaws. But he also taught himself Shoshone, French, and Spanish, denounced formal religion, married a Shoshone woman, and eventually became a United States diplomat.
In this fascinating biography, Clyde A. Milner II and Carol A. O'Connor, co-editors of the acclaimed Oxford History of the American West, trace Stuart's remarkable trajectory from his birth in Virginia, through his formative years in the agricultural settlements of Iowa and the mining camps of Gold Rush California, to his rough-and-tumble life in Montana and his rise to prominence as a public figure. Along the way, we see Granville and his brother James battling bandits and horsethieves and becoming leaders of the new Montana territory. The authors explore Granville's life as a cattleman, including his role as the leader of a vigilante force, known as "Stuart's Stranglers," responsible for several hangings in 1884, his abandonment of his half-Shoshone children after his second marriage, his government service in offices ranging from the head of the Butte Public Library to U.S. Minister to Paraguay and Uruguay, and his final years, during which he composed a memoir, Forty Years on the Frontier, still widely read for its dramatic account of the era.
Written with narrative flair and a lively awareness of current issues in Western history, As Big as the West fully illuminates the conflicting realities of the frontier, where a man could speak of wiping out "half-breeds" while fathering 11 mixed-race children, and go from vigilante to diplomat in the space of a few years.