Sunlight and Storm: The Great American Plains by Alexander B. Adams (review)

330 Western American Literature telling the thought-style of the man Rousseau, if not such himself, believed we most need. A few lines from “Some Good Luck in Lightfoot,” part three, will give an idea of the relationship of thought and craft. Mostly she was locked up good and he would talk as we wandered up the tiny stairs and walked through the gallery of girls she sketched on sheets and tacked to the eaves. He shook his head for the purity of what she made, although she dreamed plain: each girl wore green as she did, the rent streak of the crayon blurring into the hubs of spinning wheels always there, and legs skewed out like bad-cut boards and faces facing to a window hardly more than a butter smear. Two weeks I heard him whisper through the hole in his throat The neighbors must not know or else they’d think being crazy’s just the joke the artist plays. As serious as if he’d laid a knife on a hog’s throat he swore that art was the only thing that mattered in this moony world. You saw it? Didn’t you see it! Upstairs she thumped her boards and drooled When I left he warned me to keep away from the James and I have done the best I can in a hundred towns where no one took me home to keep me living. You would be wrong to think I do not love the way that woman soared in shades of green. VENETA NIELSEN, Utah State University Sunlight and Storm: The Great American Plains. By Alexander B. Adams. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977, 479 pages, appendices, selected bibliography, index, $22.50.) Despite its size, its range, and the amount of research it draws upon, Sunlight and Storm suffers from several defects which prevent it from being a major contribution to the literature of and about the Great Plains. Though the author is not a professional historian (if that makes a differ­ ence), and the book does not formally set out to “shed new light” on any dark scholarly corners, still the lack of a clearly stated thesis is troublesome in a work of over four hundred pages of double column text. True, the introduction asserts that the Great Plains are more “typically American” than other regions because the extremes of life on the Plains (sunlight and Reviews 331 storm) served to forge “the American spirit.” If this is the author’s thesis, however, little is done to bolster the assertion in later chapters. Lacking a strong central argument, Adams relies on chronology to pull his mass of information together. In fact, one of the highlights of the book is a seventeen page “Chronology of Events Relating to the Great Plains 1528-1898,” which precedes the text itself. Chronology, as the book’s major structural principle, has its drawbacks, however. As an example, consider Chapter 32, “Indians and Cattletowns” which illustrates the author’s basic technique of narrating various episodes of Plains history as they happened in time. This one ten-page chapter covers these events: 1) later exploration of the Yellowstone country and its establishment as a national park; 2) further problems with hostiles — Blackfeet, Comanche, Sioux; 3) Custer in the Black Hills; 4) buffalo hunting and the Adobe Walls fight; 5) Mackenzie in the Palo Duro; and 6) Dodge, Ellsworth, and Abilene as cowtowns. What we get is a once-over-lightly narrative approach to the many and various stories of Plains exploration and settlement. The result of Adams’ use of this chronological strategy to tell his larger story is a blurring of our sense of history rather than a sharpening of it. Other problems also exist. The Great Plains are not defined until Appendix A (p. 413). Then there is the total lack of maps. Their absence causes the reader, in a visual sense, to wander as did Coronado’s men on the Llano Estacado where there was “nothing to go by.” There are many photographs, however, some the author’s, some from the National Archives. Some of these photographs are placed in relevant positions in the text...