Voices of the American West. Volume 1, The Indian Interviews of Eli S. Ricker, 1903–1919 and Volume 2, The Settler and Solder Interviews of Eli S. Ricker, 1903–1919 ed. by Richard E. Jensen (review)

In Voices of the American West, editor Richard Jensen has presented a remarkable two-volume set of first-person accounts originally taken by Eli Ricker in the early twentieth century. While the interviews documented in this set are not oral histories as scholars might normally understand them, the methodology behind their creation was in some ways considerably closer to current-day practices than one would anticipate. Additionally, the material contained in these two volumes is incredibly rich and will provide researchers with a range of perspectives on some of the most critical turning points in the relationships between the US government and sovereign tribes living primarily in the northern part of the Great Plains.

This collection of interviews began with Eli Ricker’s impulse to get the complete story on some of the US military-American Indian conflicts that occurred toward the end of the 1800s. A Civil War veteran, a lawyer, and later a newspaperman, Ricker had what appears to have been a longtime interest in history. When he moved to Chadron, Nebraska, in 1885, not far from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, his location gave him an unplanned, front-row seat for the tragedy that unfolded in 1890 at Wounded Knee, less than forty miles distant. It would not be until the early 1900s that Ricker became actively interested in documenting the history of that event, among others, but once he began his work, he continued it almost to obsession.

The book that Ricker planned never transpired, but fortunately for future scholars his children donated his research to the Nebraska Historical Society. Later, Richard Jensen edited and wonderfully annotated Ricker’s research into this publication. These two volumes, topping out at a combined 1,042 pages, are not meant to be read at one sitting and do not have a consistent narrative thread, but that is not their purpose. The material they provide is primarily for researchers, and the book is packed with dense, detailed descriptions that individuals who observed the events and people in question offered.

Sometimes utilizing translators, Ricker conducted interviews with a wide range of narrators between 1903 and 1919, resulting in two volumes: The Indian Interviews and The Settler and Soldier Interviews (with cleverly appropriate covers). While he did not use mechanical recording devices to document his sessions, he did keep a complete accounting on notepads, and based on the notations and corrections in a number of those tablets, he actually does seem to have been completely transcribing the interviews using a combination of shorthand and longhand note taking. The results are partially in first-person and partially in third (perhaps in part because of his use of translators), and copied correspondence, reports, maps, and sections of interviews that others conducted supplement his question sessions. Ricker cast a broad net and captured the recollections of Indian scouts and government agents, schoolteachers, warriors, traders, and, only occasionally, women. (While he gathered the perspectives of a diverse array of men on both sides of the conflicts, his emphasis on diversity of viewpoint seems not to have extended as much to female chroniclers, who represent less than 8 percent of those questioned.)

The combined sources cover a number of historical points that will be of extreme interest to researchers, including many detailed accounts of battles and assessments of well-known leaders on both sides of the various hostilities. The chapter titles in both volumes give a fairly good outline of the topical emphases, with The Indian Interviews (Volume I) containing sections on William Garnett and Philip Wells, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, and “The Old West—Indians and Indian Fights.” The Settler...