Book Review: The Southwest Indians: Daily Life in the 1500s

  The Southwest Indians: Daily Life in the 1500s by Mary Englar, Bridgestone Books, Capstone Press, 2006.

Agter reading this short book I was not sure why it had the subtitle, daily life in th 1500s.  The book did not touch the topic at all.  The book does give a pretty good list of tribes living in the Southwest.  It extends into Mexico.  It does include Navajo, Apache, Zuni, Hopi, Hualapai, Yavapai, Mohave, Pima and a few more.  The social structure is similar to that of other Native American groups; groups of families called a clan or a band and a leader called a chief.  Unique in this area is Native American homes made of brick.  You use what you have.  Much of the Southwest is desert and tribes had to make adaptations.  The Navajo raised wool and cotton for fibers for clothing.  The Pueblo traded with others across a wide area.  Popular games were Patol (a game with sticks) and the moccasin game (a hiding game).  Also racing was popular.  Ceremonies were held to honor nature.  The Hopi danced with the kachina dolls to pray for rain and long life.  They passed along oral traditions from one generation to the next.

The Negro Motorist Green Book from Durham History Museum Exhibit

 The Green Book was founded by Victor Hugo Green, a New York City postal worker.  It was published annually from 1936 to 1966.  Jim Crow laws during this period made it difficult for a Black motoris to be safe while traveling.  Discrimination was accepted and legal at the time.  The Green Book was to help provide information to counteract this effect.  It provided information on where to stay in several diffent home, especially New York and Los Angeles.  The exhibit also documents discrimination as well as the civil rights movement, and safe places for the Black traveler.

The result of racial discrimination

beach trip

racism

Muhammed Ali and Malcolm X

Martin Luther King

struggle for Civil Rights

Omaha

Lower End of Mormon Hollow

 In 1846 Mormon Hollow is the area which Big Elk provided for the Mormons to stay and shelter from the extreme Nebraska heat.  This was likely a smaller group of the immigrating Saints.  They only stayed there a short time before Brigham Young asked them to move north, to Cold Springs and then to CUtlers Park and Winter Quarters.  He said there was not room there for a large group of Saints.  I have hiked to the upper Mormon Hollow which is very narrow and would have been difficult for wagons to stay.  There is more room at the bottom, which would have been just off of the Missouri River which I understand at the time flowed through where the marsh is now.  Even though there is more room, and the trees provide shelter, there was not room for the entire body of emigrants.  Since the path of the river has gone father east and left the Gifford peninsula.  There is also clearly water in this area.  Mormon Hollow is now part of Fontenelle Forest,