Missouri Books

Lots of folks know about the Metis people of the North, the people sprung from the mixing of French and Indian peoples in Canada and the Dakotas, but this book fills an important gap....that the same process occurred on the lower Missouri as well. There are a few facts and conclusions I do not agree with, but the book is very important, nonetheless. As one of the descendants of these people, with Ioway, Otoe, Omaha, Sauk, Menominee, and Dakota bloodlines, I recommend this book highly. From the University of Missouri Press:

"The Many Hands of My Relations is a study of kinship networks among French Creoles and Central Siouan tribes and the influence of those networks on social, political, and economic development along the lower Missouri River from the late prehistoric period to the removal era in the 1870s. The book's primary focus is on the economic relations and intermarriages between French fur traders and native people of the Central Siouan tribes and the consequences for intergroup relationships as three imperial powers (France, then Spain, and then the United States) vied for political control and commercial supremacy.

Arguing that cultural and biological hybridization is an underappreciated aspect of the historical development of this region, Tanis Thorne focuses much of her analysis on French-Indian mixed-bloods of the lower Missouri River region. She examines their economic roles as intermediaries in the fur and liquor trade, their attempts to form communities, and their political loyalties and cultural orientations. Of special importance is Thorne's examination of the French-Indian borderlands people, not as isolated individuals, but as members of family networks set in a social and historical context. The study concludes with an assessment of how persons of mixed ancestry influenced tribal politics in the era of white settlement and Indian removal.

This significant work helps dispel stereotypes regarding "half-breeds" and shows how kinship between culturally different groups served as a means of accommodation and coexistence in America's multiethnic panorama. Filling a major gap in the literature on the fur trade, The Many Hands of My Relations also yields important new insights into the history of native peoples of the Midwest and their relations with European newcomers."

Tanis C. Thorne is Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the University of California in Irvine.

"Many Hands of My Relations" is an outstanding academic history of the French, Indians, and mixed bloods on the middle border of the United States. The author opens with a pre-history of the Indian tribes on the Great Plains border from Oklahoma to Iowa: the Osage, Kansa or Kaw, Omaha, Ponca, Missouri, Oto, and Iowa. He describes the coming of the French in the 18th century and the cultural and racial mixing between the Indians and French to create a new people, neither French nor Indian, and believed by Anglos to incorporate the worst of both peoples, the "mixed bloods." (The common term of the day, "half breed," is deemed derogatory by the author.)

The fact that French and French/Indian mixed bloods preceded the Anglos in discovering most of the United States is ignored in most histories. Lewis and Clark found French traders as far west as the Mandan villages of North Dakota; early fur trading brigades in the Rocky Mountains included many French and Indians; and as late as the 1840s travelers such as Francis Parkman and John Charles Fremont relied on French and mixed blood guides and helpers. We just don't hear of the French and Indians as we do of such well-know American heroes as Jim Bridger, "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick, and others.

The mixed bloods began to disappear about 1850, integrating into either White or Indian society -- although neither received them enthusiastically. The membership rolls of Indian tribes are dotted with their names today: Pappan, Roy, Revard, Bellmard, Denoya, and many others. The only Vice President of the United States with Indian blood, Charles Curtis, came out of this culture. His mother's maiden name was Pappan and she was the granddaughter of the Kaw chief, White Plume.

Thorne does an thorough and excellent job in telling the story of the 18th and 19th century French and Indians living on the lower Missouri River. It's a sad story as the Indians and their French relatives were plowed under by the waves of advancing Anglos. The author's research is impeccable; his bibiography runs to 27 pages and includes numerous eye-witness and primary sources dug out of dusty archives. The Indian tribes on the Middle Border and the French/Indian mixed bloods are pretty much forgotten today, and the work of scholars such as Thorne in recovering memories of them is welcome.

Smallchief

I was led to this book via Partickane's list of contemporary Irish literature on .... Partially a memoir, partially a meditation on language and history, and not quite like anything I have ever read before. Carson's prose style is lyrical, melodic and absolutely engaging without being in the least showy.

As unlikely as the link may seem, Cairan Carson is to Belfast and traditional Irish music what Nathanial Mackey is to California and jazz.

Carson's memoire of life as an adolescent in Belfast is ripe ground for etymological meanderings in an out of English and Irish. He dally's with Catholic dogma and sources whose only connective thread is his passing interest in them.

The Star Factory is an internal play of language, image and memory that gives spunk to the genre and good craic to the reader.

This is the best book I have found on this topic. However, the interviews get a little boring. I actually never made it to the end of the book because it was getting redundant. I would like someone to write about this topic in a more narrative form.

If you are interested in Mexico, deeply interested, this is an important book by Elena Poniatowska, one of the country's most distinguished writers. Four decades later, in the midst of a bloody drug war rife with accusations of military human rights abuses, torture and assassinations, the questions surrounding the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco persist.

This one has been out for a number of years and has been out of print for several of those years. This is a pitty. This is a wonderful collections of sketches by the author of various characters and travels through this interesting state. The author is a natural story teller and his descriptions of both the country and of the people he writes of are first rate. This is another of those "lost gems" that you can find in used book stores on on the bottom shelves of libraries. You need not live or have lived in the state of Missouri to enjoy this one. People are people and people are interesting. The author's take on these individuals and these places are most interesting. Recommend this one highly.

This is a hauntingly beautiful collection of real life vignettes recounting Kantor's memories, both good and bad, of times he spent over a period of several years in various parts of Missouri. From St. Joseph to Poplar Bluff, from St. Louis to Springfield, he paints a poignant word picture of this beautiful midwestern state--of scenery he's seen, of people he's met, of meals he's eaten, etc., all with a comfortable and "downhome" style that makes reading it a real pleasure. And though it's no doubt more memorable and meaningful to a past or present citizen of Missouri, I feel it would appeal to any reader who appreciates character studies and who doesn't mind laughing and/or shedding a tear(s), sometimes in the same chapter. As you progress through the book, you'll get to know "Mack" and his companion, wife "Irene," better and better until they seem like close friends, like you're sitting in front of a cozy, cheery fireplace, listening to him regale you with his/their real life adventures.

I have quite a collection of regional geologies. This volume is, by far, the best organized and complete one I've seen. If you have any interest in the geology of Missouri or the mid-continent area, I'd strongly recommend it.

I've always been interested in geology but never educated in it. I hung with geology types in the caving club at the University of Missouri-Rolla but was never able to understand the significance when they'd remark on the Roubidoux sandstone or Gasconade Dolomite. I have an old copy of Vinyard's "Geologic Wonders and Curiosities of Missouri" and was always teased by his mention of those and many other formations throughout that book.

He and Unklesbay makes up for it in this book! All the rocks in Missouri, from bottom to top, are given their due -- what they are and how they got here, and what they're good for. And without having to try too hard, I even managed to memorize all the basic geologic ages, eras, and epochs that had always muddled me.

This book shows its age in some ways, though I'm not qualified to judge how badly. I have read about interesting research into the Weaubleau and Crooked Creek structures identifying them as potential meteor strikes, e.g., whereas this book identifies them as explosive in orgin. In fairness, some of that research is very new, if I recall correctly.

The section about economically important geologic resources is all about numbers and recoverability without any thought given to the ecologic and cultural damage widespread mining can cause. But in fairness, that's not the aim or purpose of this book, and neither are those concerns overtly slighted. Keep in mind the age of this book, too, when reading about Missouri mining industries. The lead belt still produces, but the Pea Ridge iron mine has been shuttered, or so says my Internet research.

Okay, now that I've shown balance by pointing out some shortcomings, I can now highly recommend that you read this book if you're curious but uninformed about the mid-continent region geology. It is exactly the book I was looking for.

Phillips obviously researched his topic thoroughly and has great insight into Jackson and the reasons Missouri found its identity with the southern states.
Phillips weaves his story masterfully. Well done.

Driving in Jefferson City, Missouri a few years ago, I saw a man selling Confederate flags by the side of the road. In the St. Louis area, where I live, this man would probably have been beaten to within an inch of his life, but to most Missourians, St. Louis might as well be New York City. In out-state Missouri, publicly displaying a Confederate flag does not seem to be an unofficial felony.

Why? Why did a state which began life and perceived itself as Western become the most Confederate state in America(as some of us like to point out, WE didn't surrender until 1882, when Frank James turned himself in after Jesse's murder)? In this biography of Claiborne Jackson, the Missouri governor who tried to take his state out of the Union, Christopher Phillips argues that Missouri's transformation from Western to Southern basically boiled down to the protection of slavery. Central Missourians, the people around whom this book mostly revolves, did not see owning slaves as contrary to democracy but central to it. Their families had owned slaves since emigrating to the West from Kentucky or Virginia. Threats, or perceived threats, to slavery finally drove segments of Missouri's leadership to a full-fledged Southern identity and led to Missouri's exceptionally violent civil war, which in turn fueled Missouri's fierce postwar attachment to the Confederate States.

This is both a good biography of Jackson and a good study of antebellum Missouri. But I do have a few problems with it. Phillips spends the bulk of his time in the Boon's Lick(now called Little Dixie another result of the war)among the slaveholding aristocracy there. Natural, one assumes, because that's where Jackson was from, but the rest of the state is neglected. St. Louis is paid attention to, but other areas of the state, like the fiercely Unionist regions of the Ozarks, are barely mentioned. And once the war starts, Phillips seems in a hurry to wrap things up; I wish he'd spent more time on the war itself.

Nonetheless, if you're interested in antebellum American history, this book is well worth your time.

Epiphanies come hard. In Ruth Hamel's new book of 14 short stories, the reader meets a gaggle of neurotic thirty-and-forty-somethings who live in tight little mental cages, yet who are all yearning to break free. Few, however, are willing to give up the security of not knowing. In other words, they are ordinary people.
In the hands of a concept sculptor like Hamel, the stories engender pleasure through pain. "Kinded," for example, features two fortyish brothers who despise each other, competing even about their mutual inadequacies, negative memories, and social incompetencies. They reach an impasse on kvetching ghrough a stranger's act of kindess which results in the possibility, the mere possibility, of hope for a better future.
The narrator in the book's title story tells lies, ostensibly to soothe the hurts truth would bring. She is a furnitue refinisher who uses creative destruction to improve damaged goods. But her congenital "tact" is only a way of avoiding pain and, in the end, seems self-delusional. "Seems" is the operative verb for this author's work. Ambiguity is all.
Her stories are set in faceless high-rises, bedraggled factory towns, mildewed basements. They are filled with loathsome lovers, ex-drum majorettes, cast-off wives, nerds and George Costanzas. Hamel's world may even contain the sad truth, as one of the characters says, that life is content to let us pass unnoticed.
The epiphanies may be ambiguous. The pleasure of "My Favorite Lies" is not.

Sy Barasch

Ann Beattie, watch out: you've got some serious competition. With razor-sharp wit and not a word wasted, Ruth Hamel deftly captures the quirks of ordinary people and in so doing makes them extraordinary--and fascinating. The prose in "My Favorite Lies" is so deliciously, audaciously precise that it makes you want to shout, leap up, and find someone to read these stories to. A friend who admires Hamel's talent as much as I do said that after reading "My Favorite Lies," he found himself viewing the world through her lens. Succeeding in getting us to see in a new and different way: isn't that the definition of art? I'm eagerly awaiting more from this seriously gifted writer, and am shocked that a major publishing house hasn't yet grabbed her. Maybe they have by now--I hope so.

This book is a long read but I found it fascinating. It is pretty much the entire history of all horse breeds from prehistoric mans' relationship with horses to the present day, with an emphasis on the eventual development of the Foxtrotter breed.The author's research and knowledge of this subject are really impressive. In addition to the exhaustive historical information there is detailed information of personality, traits, and life history of all the founding horses of the Foxtrotter breed. If you are lucky enough to own a Foxtrotter you can not only find out who your horse is related to multiple generations back, but discover if they have inherited any of the traits of their forefathers, where their ancestors originated, who raised them, etc. I found out my ancient relatives in Scotland raised the ancestors of my horse! This book is expensive for a paperback, but if it is a subject dear to your heart it is worth every penny.

Wonderful book. Very little has been written about the MFT, so was excited to purchase a copy. Glad I did. Author has really researched and studied this breed of horse. I have not located another book quite as detailed or one that offers such good information regarding a fairly new breed. Well worth purchasing. It was amazing to see the history of all equines covered with such detail. Enjoyed seeing equines depicted in ancient artwork. A must for anyone who loves horses. By no means am I a history fan, and at times found the detailed work a little confusing, but enjoyed the depth of passion and conviction the author has in explaining the present breed.

This book is wonderful fun. The stories use the letter form in as astonishing variety of ways. Usually I read anthologies by dipping into them from time to time, but this one I read straight through for the incremental pleasure of discovering yet another ingenious manipulation of the form. Pool's brief introductory notes to each story are perfect, giving just enough to whet the appetite without giving anything away. A GREAT Christmas gift for any reader.

A delightful collection of short stories in letter form; an anthology that makes sense, not an anthology that recycles old material. Gail Goodwin's letter story is particularly good.

This is a great guide book for Arkansas and S. Missouri rivers. If you need information about a river in AR./Mo. then this is the book to start your research.

The venerable "blue book" of Ozark whitewater streams and paddling is as good a read as ever, and the information is still some of the best you'll find anywhere on the topic. This is *the* book that I always have in my shuttle vehicle. I have a nearly unrecognizable copy that has gone on a few too many adventures, and I bought a new second edition copy a while back and am in the process of wearing it out too. With the number of new paddlers in the area growing in leaps and bounds, this text provides an essential starting point for those wanting to explore the exciting whitewater of Arkansas and Missouri. Highly recommended!