American Windmills: An Album of Historic Photographs by T. Lindsay Baker, $34.95
Nothing is more symbolic of America’s rural past than the windmill. These agrarian icons once stood beside virtually every farm and ranch house in the country. Windmills still exist, of course. Many farmers use them to supply water for livestock tanks. And there is a sophisticated new generation of them providing wind power. But the windmill’s heyday is long over, which means windmills now are a part of America’s nostalgia.
“American Windmills,” with its superb array of old photographs, revisits that past. Windmill factories were big business. Plymouth Iron Wind Mill Co. made not only windmills but also Daisy air rifles, which it gave away as premiums to windmill purchasers. The windmills had special names. One was the “Terrible Swede.” Sears customized its windmills by putting the buyer’s name on them.
Companies sent crews to remote locations to set up the windmills, which were either constructed on site or assembled on the ground then pulled upright. Occasionally, the wooden structures in towns or near elegant homes were disguised with stucco cones or Victorian embellishments.
Not all windmills were factory-made. Enterprising farmers built them from wood or barrels or whatever they had on hand.
In addition to factory and construction photographs, author John Carter includes pictures of windmills in all kinds of settings.
The Day the World Ended at the Little Bighorn by Joseph M. Marshall III, $24.95 | The most common question asked at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, writes Joseph M. Marshall III, is how did this happen? Meaning, how could Custer and his men have been wiped out? Whites don’t understand; Indians do. The battle-hardened Indians were “better trained and more highly skilled as fighters” than the soldiers, Marshall maintains.
“The Day the World Ended at the Little Bighorn” is not just the Indian side of the story of the “Custer massacre,” as it was called for years, but a comprehensive study of Indian culture that tells why the Indians were a superior fighting force.
Fighting was not the work of enlisted men who served for a few years but a life-long responsibility of all Indian men.
They kept their war horses and weapons close to their tepees. Their primary concern was not fighting but protecting their people, and that was why the Sioux decamped instead of finishing off the Reno-Benteen contingent of soldiers.
Marshall’s book goes a long way toward explaining why the Indians weren’t just lucky at the Little Bighorn.
Outside the Fence: Stories of an Army Officer’s Kids and WWII POW Camp by Marilyn Snethen Clark, Barbara Snethen Leonard and Carol Snethen Reed, $27.89 hardback; $17.84 paper | The four Snethen children had an unusual view of World War II. Their father, who was in the Army, was stationed near a camp for Italian prisoners of war at Lordsburg, N.M. The prisoners cooked and waited tables at the military base and sometimes prepared Italian specialties. Not knowing spaghetti was only an appetizer, the Snethens stuffed themselves at one such meal, only to be presented with the main course — chicken. When the family couldn’t eat any more, the Italians thought they didn’t like the food.
To their surprise, the prisoners were treated well at the base, but some of the farmers who hired them abused them. A prisoner remarked that Mussolini had told them if they were captured, they’d be marched across the U.S. “But he didn’t tell us we’d be dragging a cotton sack,” the POW remarked.
One farmer forced POW workers to drink water from a hog wallow, while another housed the men in a chicken coop and took away their shoes at night so they wouldn’t run away.
“Inside the Fence” is the recollections of the three sisters and their brother about life as children during World War II.
Marilyn Snethen Clark relates that before the war, she was friends with a Japanese girl, who was sent to an internment camp after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese girl wrote to Clark, but Clark’s father, concerned with the impropriety of her corresponding with an evacuee, threw away the letter and didn’t tell his daughter until years later.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes a regular column on new regional nonfiction.
