Review of \u3ci\u3eMontana Legacy: Essays on History, People, and Place\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Harry W. Fritz, Mary Murphy, and Robert R. Swartout Jr.

Montana Legacy is a sequel to the well-received 1992 anthology, The Montana Heritage. Like its predecessor, this new collection offers sixteen republished essays arranged in roughly chronological order. And much like the articles in Montana Heritage, these new pieces either explore a little-studied aspect of Montana\u27s past or offer a revised slant on a more familiar topic. The two best revisionist essays are Colin G. Calloway\u27s Army Allies or Tribal Survival? and David Emmons\u27s The Orange and Green in Montana. Calloway\u27s reinterpretation of the 1876 military campaign leading to the Battle of the Little Big Horn examines the complex pattern of shifting alliances and enmities among the Plains tribes. Seen in this light, the alliance that the Crows, Shoshones, Arikaras, and a half-dozen other tribes made with the white invaders was more a union of convenience for people engaged in a struggle for survival. In reexamining Montana\u27s infamous battle between copper kings Marcus Daly and William Andrews Clark, Emmons introduces the heretofore ignored elements of religion and ethnicity as key causes of the ongoing feud. Essays by Robert Swartout Jr. and Laurie Mercier explore the experiences of two of Montana\u27s less-studied minorities-Chinese and Mexicans. It is instructive to compare the experiences of the two groups. As Swartout points out, the Chinese, who arrived in Montana during the 1860s gold rush, were overwhelmingly male. Although most labored either as miners or with railroad construction crews, they played central roles as businessmen in many Montana communities throughout the late nineteenth century. In contrast, the Mexicans, brought onto the Plains of eastern Montana by the Great Western Company to harvest sugar beets, arrived as family groups. In common, both groups performed the sort of backbreaking labor that whites shunned, and both had to cope with the often virulent racism of the European-American majority. Other essays explore the plight of women, ranging from female bootleggers in Butte to women in rural Montana struggling to give birth to children without benefit of physicians or hospitals