This is one of those rare books which give me considerable pleasure to put down, as in unfinished.The author has taken a history of the great plains and written short stories in a timeline with all the political correctness of modern society.You have a women becoming aware of her own sexuality in the early 1500's in a place where the daily struggles for mere survival would have to be parimount to daily life. We have our race equality issue taken place in the 1800's.At this point I put the book down.I'm not a bigot.I just didn't need these issues brought up in a book about the history of the plains.In short this is a great(yea right) work of fiction geared to a seventh grade reader. I suggest "Ride The Wind" by St Clair I believe, a much more enjoyable novel about the plains

I have been fortunate enough to read all of Don Coldsmith's novels ever since I was given one of the Spanish Bit Sagas by my wife. Ever since then I have been on a mission to read his books. I was really pleased when "Tallgrass" was released. Since I live in region that the novels take place I can almost put myself into the story. The research that Dr. Coldsmith put into writing so that it would be relatively historically accurate. "Tallgrass" is an easy book to read for anyone. I strongly recommend "Tallgrass" for those looking for an bit of light history to read.

Dust Bowl: Disaster on the Plains focuses on the natural and human causes of the Dust Bowl of the 1930's. I read this book with the eye of a fifth grade teacher who was looking for good non-fiction on the topic of the Dust Bowl. The book is broken into five chapters describing natural causes, human causes, impact on people, government intervention, and the possibilities of history repeating itself. This is a good book to show the impact humans can have on the environment, or how climate affects the way people live. It is most apporpriate for a fourth or fifth grade reader.

I wanted to like the book, but was gravely disappointed. I was originally going to rate it two stars--I raised it to three because the author seems such a nice guy! The book consists of fifty sets of two facing pages, each set devoted to a bird. On the right is a painting, usually showing a side view of the bird and nothing else. On the left is a page of text on the bird, usually an anecdote about the author's experience with the species. Most of the stories are very dated, from the 1940s or 1950s. I find the book mildly amusing to leaf through when I'm bored, but it is no use as a reference, didn't challenge or inspire me, and I wouldn't dream of taking it into the field. There are much better uses for your reading dollar.

This is the first book to touch on the subject of southern prisoners taking an oath to the US Government to fight indians in the west. During the civil war, most military men returned east to seek their glory in the many battles. This left our western borders unprotected. Yet the tide of western migration was not stalled. Civil war prisons in the north became overcrowded. The idea of releasing POWs for service in the west was born; hence the name galvanized. This book is the story of those soldiers, who out of desperation for better living conditions agreed to a term of service to fight indians and protect the western frontier. My only complaint on this book was that it was to thin. I craved for more knowledge.

I can only comment on the Kansas section of this book, but that leaves a little to be desired. It seems that Knapp found the most popular trails but didn't dig too deep. Another problem is his tendency to list utterly boring rides on semi-maintained doubletrack. If someone buys a mountain biking guide book, it means they are looking for the real thing, not some flat access roads. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of alternatives to this book for cyclists in the midwest so I still have to recommend it as part of your collection, if for nothing else but the states you do not live in.

This comprehensive, yet pretty humble edition of Edward S. Curtis work, should be suitable for those who are looking for some textual info and general images of Edward's artwork about the Plains Indian. For those of us who are looking for more, it's slightly a disappointment, mostly because of the lack of balance between the images and the text. Despite of the modest size of this book, it's hard to find an excuse for such small and poor quality prints. After all the main issue here should be the remarkable artwork of Curtis and therefore it's a bit missed.

Don Coldsmith takes an historical fiction perspective in writing about the life of Native Americans. He does an excellent job of bringing the view point of their culture and relationship to nature to the story. Quest for the White Bull tells the story of a man's journey to save his people the summer the bison did not migrate north. It gives the flavor of his life, his love of family and his dedication to his calling. The only reason I gave it three stars is that I found it a little short. I wanted it to be longer, to tell me more about the characters and their everyday life. All in all, I will read more of the series - The Spanish Bit Saga.

Maybe this book was just not my cup of tea. Don't get me wrong, there are some good chapters about some little known historical happenings in the plains, but I guess I lean more towards an actual story with some bite in it rather than bits and pieces of this and that.

The journals, diaries, and other primary accounts of the men and women that settled the American West occasionally describe exciting events, but more commonly these historical records detail the routine life of an isolated settler surviving in a harsh and unforgiving land. I marvel at the courage and perseverance exhibited by so many common men and women.

In "Wild Animals and Settlers on the Great Plains", Professor Fleharty has compiled primary accounts (not reminiscences penned years later) from newspapers and diaries to detail the impact of settlers on the native fauna of Kansas during a short, critical period, 1865 -1879. His reports, while specific to Kansas, can be generalized to the settlement of the extensive Great Plains of western America.

I was pained by some of the detailed accounts of uncontrolled hunting, of unwitting habitat destruction, of seeming obliviousness to the irreversible changes that were occurring. The newspaper accounts seemed so real, because they were.

Professor Fleharty does more than report the decline of the buffalo, bear, deer, antelope bobcat, and other animals during this period of intense settlement. He also shows, again from primary accounts, that a concern for the diminishing wildlife gradually developed, leading to hunting regulations and protective legislation. Our modern understanding and appreciation for protecting wildlife and the environment did not suddenly emerge a few years ago, but evolved steadily from these early concerns.

The strength of this book - its extensive quotations from newspapers and other primary sources - is also its weakness. I commend Professor Fleharty for his extensive research. However, as might be expected, many of these reports are similar, some even repetitious. Some, possibly a sizeable fraction, could have been relegated to an appendix, or possibly footnotes.

Possibly because Dr. Fleharty was trained as a zoologist, and not as an interpretive historian, he seemed reluctant to offer interpretations and extrapolations based on the rather sparse and anecdotal reports. And yet, as a zoologist willing to undertake historical research, his interpretations and insights, even speculations, would have been very interesting indeed.

If Dr Fleharty does revise this interesting book, I would like more discussions on how and why things happened. Tell us more about animal population dynamics in Kansas from 1865 to the present. What other ecological trends were set in motion during this short, catastrophic period? Could more steps have been taken earlier to mitigate the negative impact of the extensive settlement on the Great Plains?

Also, while I recognize that we cannot recreate the Great Plains of the 1860s, I am curious about Professor Fleharty's views on the ongoing movement to create large, natural grasslands preserves in the mid-continent. We cannot change the past, but we may be able to shape the future.

After reading Thomas Mails' Fools Crow and Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power, I was eagerly looking forward to reading this book. Alas, I was quite disappointed. The writing style was plodding, and frankly it was often a boring read.

The information contained in this book is quite good. But Mails jumps around so much between tribes, it is difficult to follow. The book is broken into two chapters; the first is about the training of young boys to become warriors and the second is about the mature warrior.

If you are just looking for information about the life of the Plains Indians(for a term paper or you are just interested), you will probably benefit by purchasing this book. But if you are looking for a bit of excitement, I would recommend against this one.