John Mack Faragher. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, January 1987. Pp. 280 with index. $25.

Sugar Creek is a common placename in the Midwest, and John Mack Faragher, who teaches at Mt. Holyoke College, has written a refreshingly uncommon history of successive settlements along one such stream in southern Sangamon County.

His book is just as remarkable for what it is not as for what it is. For one thing, Sugar Creek is a history of white settlement that neither stereotypes nor sentimentalizes the Indian culture thus displaced. The Kickapoo tribe had settled in the area during the 18th century, but by 1814 were outnumbered two-to-one by whites throughout Illinois. Noted for their skill as hunters and horsemen, their permissiveness as parents and their ferocity as warriors, they resisted pioneer encroachment until 1815, when they signed a treaty and began withdrawing westward. Despite such dispossession, Faragher reports that the Kickapoo nation today has the highest proportion of full-bloods of any tribe in the country and retains its culture to an unusual degree.

Equally noteworthy, Sugar Creek portrays mid-19th century pioneer life in and around Sangamon County without focusing on the region's most famous settler of the period, Abraham Lincoln. Instead, the book tries to articulate the experience of Lincoln's less illustrious, more representative neighbors — "common folk who rarely committed their thoughts to paper even if they could write, and rarely saved the paper if they did." consequently, the shape and substance of their lives must be reconstructed not only from their scant personal papers but also from rich lodes of demographic data available in public records.

Yet these settlers emerge in memorable detail. Take, for example, Robert Pulliam, the peg-legged patriarch who tapped a maple grove by Sugar Creek in 1817, moved his family there in 1819, purchased 420 acres of nearby farmland in 1823, lost it to foreclosure a decade later, and died landless while on a return visit to his sons — still farming along Sugar Creek — in 1838. Rescued from obscurity in 1859, Pulliam was named the county's first pioneer by the Old Settlers' Society. It is a lesson in historiography to read how subsequent commentators appropriated portions of his pathbreaking past for their present purpose — and a useful reminder that history is never neutral. Sugar Creek also offers a distinctive view of kinship patterns among the settlers — one less genealogical than geopolitical. Faragher analyzes how family farms along the creek reflected changing modes of agricultural production and sexual reproduction under conditions ranging from subsistence to surplus. On the prairie the household was also a constant workplace, and large families represented an economic advantage on the land, so farmwives of the first generation tended to be as fecund as the soil, averaging over eight children apiece. In contrast, second-generation farmwives tended to marry later, have fewer confinements and cease procreation earlier — in part reflecting their sense of declining local opportunities for their offspring.

Sugar Creek manages to stress the converging interests that helped to bind these families and their communities together without minimizing the profound differences that also threatened to divide them. Faragher shows that over the first four decades of American settlement on Sugar Creek only three of the hundreds of married couples divorced. He also argues that in the typical marriage men were only able to enter public life because their wives and children were being systematically exploited in the private sphere.

Similarly, although the early settlers faced many common hardships — Indian attacks, harsh weather, wild animals, rampant diseases — socioeconomic stratification among them began within 20 years of their arrival on Sugar Creek. By 1838 (a generation after Robert Pulliam's settlement) the richest 10 percent of Sugar Creek landowners held one-fourth of the available land; by 1858 they would own 35 percent. Indeed, the majority who migrated to Sugar Creek farmed there only a time before moving on. A significant minority, however, stayed to buy, improve and bequeath farmland. Gradually, the transients' political interests and preferences began to diverge from those of the established families.

Sugar Creek, unlike Faragher's first book, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979), derives its narrative momentum less from motion through space than from movement through time. As if in a series of time-lapse photographs, we see the same locale as it was initially occupied, then transformed by its inhabitants. Maps dating from 1817 to 1860 show the degree of topographical change as well as continuity. Photos and sketches of pioneer families from the 1850s and 1860s reveal in the stark visages of the settlers how much they too were shaped by the landscape they came to tame.

Maple sugar helped draw Robert Pulliam to Sangamon County and lent Sugar Creek its name when it was first mapped in 1815. At that time it flowed clean and clear, bordered by giant sycamores, Cottonwood, hickories and oak. Today Sugar Creek, ''dammed and backed up nearly to the sugar grove, runs thick with silt and effluents, the timber along its banks reduced in many places to a mere thicket. ..." But in the face of this physical change, there remains cultural continuity. As late as 1981 descendants of 23 of the 44 families settling before 1840 who had persisted in the area continued to farm along Sugar Creek and to own 10 percent of its land. The environment has changed appreciably, but the community persists to a surprising degree, as this handsomely produced and delightfully accessible saga documents.

Judith L. Everson, associate professor of English at Sangamon State University, will join Illinois Issues as associate editor for book reviews/humanities, effective in August. She earned her Ph.D. in American studies at Indiana University and joined the faculty at Sangamon State in 1970. Her teaching and research interests include modem American fiction, women and literature, and popular culture.

Ernest J. Finney, Birds Landing. Pp. 137. $11.95.

Paul Friedman, Serious Trouble. Pp. 155. $11.95.

Rebecca Kavaler, Tigers in the Wood. Pp. 108. $11.95.

Phillip Parotti, The Greek Generals Talk. Pp. 164. $11.95.

All published by University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1986.

Since its first appearance in 1975, the Short Fiction Series has become one of the mainstays of the University of Illinois Press, helping the Press to maintain its preeminent position among academic publishers. The Short Fiction Series also performs an invaluable cultural service, publishing distinguished but relatively unknown writers and helping to preserve the short story as a genre at a time when even longer forms of fiction must struggle for survival. In a media society where "serious" journalists reduce the news to "happy talk," it becomes ever more important to guarantee the citizenry access to high-quality fiction, the only news that stays news. The four books for 1986, like their predecessors in the series, offer us readable and well-crafted tales, all focusing on human beings who work their way from agonizing ignorance to hard-won certainties. In the best sense of the term, these stories represent humanistic writing at its finest.

Each book is different, but a convenient division may be made between one pair that is more belletristic and self-consciously "arty" (Kavaler and Parotti) and the other two (Finney and Friedman), which deal realistically with the recognizable characters of Mid-America. The limited space of this forum cannot do justice to all four books, but, before offering some extended comments on Finney and Friedman, let me say that there are genuine pleasures in the elegant and very cerebral fictions of Rebecca Kavaler. Each of her stories is hard-edged and delicately executed like the piece of hand-cut crystal at the center of her story entitled "Depression Glass.'' And there is an extraordinary psychological and sociological wisdom on every page of the title piece, "Tigers in the Wood," which anatomizes a rich New York divorcee and her perilous outing in Central Park. Phillip Parotti also provides some special delights, especially for any reader with an interest in governmental planning or military strategy. Without debasing or cheapening Homer's originals, Parotti follows up on the Iliad and Odyssey by offering lively discussions of the Trojan War by the actual participants. Anyone who has even a glancing acquaintance with the Greek classics will come away with a renewed admiration for the Classical past and its ironic relevance to our present. There are, for example, fascinating parallels between the Trojan Horse and that strange beast called the Strategic Defense Initiative (or "Star Wars").

Ernest Finney, by contrast, offers us no epic tales of gods and heroes but poignant revelations about Americans living on the edge of American culture in the Great Decline of the 1980s. In Birds Landing, his characters — con men, waitresses, smalltime hoods — are all survivors in a world of lay-offs, muggings and murders. In "Birds Landing," the title story, Finney writes eloquently about a rough, nose-picking adolescent named Gerald who earns his keep by guiding rich city-slickers through the green world of the duck ponds. He survives by sheer toughness coupled with a native lyricism, admiring the decoy-maker who "put the white ring around a mallard's neck and the green in a teal's wing."

Paul Friedman is an existentialist writer at a time when that word is no longer fashionable, but in Serious Trouble Friedman is a master story-teller with a supreme curiosity about all the mechanisms by which human beings try to avoid the recognition of their own deaths, like Raleigh Bauer in "An Unexpected Death." He continues this theme in "A period of Grace," an autobiographical story based on the death (by cancer) of the narrator's father — one of the most powerful stories I have ever read. There is no way to read this story (with all its painfully realistic details about hospitals, doctors and the merciless progress of cancer) without becoming involved in the reality of one's own death, and the inevitable death of one's own parents. Every small victory and small setback is clearly presented because Friedman is also writing about the difficulties of writing such a story. He is a participant, an observer and a documentarian. His story is, to some extent, the story of every human being who has struggled with the tragedy of death and the even larger obstacle of telling the tale honestly.

Friedman has a lighter side and loves to include descriptions of central Illinois in his stories (he teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, after all), and he specializes in wry name-changes: Urbana, for example, becomes the town of Level. Like all good works of art Serious Trouble and the other three books in this Short Fiction Series just keep on giving pleasure. They are good on first reading — but even better on re-reading.

Daniel L. Guillory is a professor of English, Millikin University, Decatur.

Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Ellen Skerrett, Michael F. Funchion, and Charles Fanning. The Irish in Chicago. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 171. $27.50.

Chicago has never been an Irish city, although it sometimes has seemed to be one. Nevertheless, it is probably true that Chicago can't be understood without understanding its Irish citizens, any more than the Irish can't be understood without knowing Chicago. Reading The Irish in Chicago — a collection of stimulating essays chronicling what one of its authors calls this ''urban ethnic success story" — will help do both. Today the Irish are among the most Americanized of Chicago's disparate ethnic groups. They arrived early. (Irish natives dug the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the 1830s.) They spoke English. Their women provided powerful prods toward education and middle-class respectability. Perhaps most important, their Irishness tended to be defined in terms of religion rather than in language or a cause. Irish parochial schools were not dedicated to preserving the culture of the homeland, as were others, but to inculcating the faith; as recent generations quickly learned, one can be an American Catholic as easily as an Irish one.

Indeed, the Irish have done well enough in Chicago that they don't have to live in Chicago anymore. (Today there are three times the number of Irish-Americans living in Chicago suburbs as in the city itself.) In her essay, Ellen Skerrett (who co-authored the recent Chicago: City of Neighborhoods) suggests that the Irish weren't pushed out by ethnic antagonisms in their old city neighborhoods but pulled out by the lure of nicer housing. The grandsons and granddaughters of cops and firemen are now doctors and lawyers, and live like it.

One can debate the wisdom of using material prosperity as a measurement of ethnic success. Lawrence McCaffrey, the Loyola University history professor, argues here that respectability may have been purchased at the price of creativity; where, he wants to know, are the worthy successors to literary artists like Finley Peter Dunne or James T. Farrell?

The extent of the Irish's rise impresses, even if its direction doesn't. The bigotry that the Irish encountered in 19th century Chicago was real enough, but their cultural isolation was even more profound. The early Irish came from a world that was communal, rural, Catholic and economically dependent, one that left them ill-prepared to cope with a booming Chicago which was individualistic, urban, Protestant and competitive.

To many outsiders, the Chicago Irish are symbols of rootedness — their bungalows and parish churches bulwarks against a changing world. It is all the more surprising to see the Irish experience depicted here as one of repeated, fretful movement along Chicago's often troubled ethnic frontiers. Charles Fanning here describes Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy as (among other things) a "study of forced displacement." The ironies of the Irish flight from the expansion of the black population, which began in the World War I era, for example, are vivid and sad. The Irish had comprised the first urban underclass in the United States, and had themselves confronted the kinds of racial stereotyping that they have turned so often against blacks.

(Illinoisans visiting Ireland are startled to be asked by locals about "the neegers" back home.) The uneasy peace between Irish and black Americans in Chicago broke down most recently during this year's mayoral campaign, where ethnic legitimacy was as much at stake as the more traditional spoils of politics.

It is of course as politicians that the rest of the world knows Chicago's Irish. They found there a political environment peculiarly suited to their experience and temperament. (Deviousness, we learn, was a bequest of Britain to its subject peoples.) If the Irish did not invent the Chicago style of politics, they perfected it. They kept their hold on City Hall by a succession of savvy coalitions with other ethnic arrivers — first the Wasps, later Slavs, Mediterraneans and blacks. The fastidious regard Chicago-style machines with distaste, perhaps unjustly; McCaffrey advances the provocative claim that the modern U.S. welfare state owes more to Irish machine politics than to liberal ideology.

Michael Funchion, who teaches history at South Dakota State University, reminds us that for all their success in Chicago the Irish have seen but one of their own elected governor in Illinois (Edward F. Dunne, 1913-1917) and none go to the U.S. Senate from this state. Funchion blames this failure on a mostly Protestant native downstate whose resistance to Catholic leadership dissuaded the Irish from venturing out of their ward strongholds. Like most assertions about Illinois politics, this one is easier to argue about than to prove. It seems doubtful that many downstaters differentiate very clearly among the varieties of Chicago Democrats. Was Mike Howlett really defeated in the 1976 race for governor because he was Irish? Because he was Catholic? Because he was a Daley man? Because he was a Chicagoan? Or just because he was Mike Howlett?

The authors do not speak with perfect unanimity on such points, and indeed acknowledge that many aspects of the Irish Chicagoan's experience — poverty for one — still need to be rescued by scholars from the nostalgists. The prediction that the Irish will look more to statewide office as their traditional power base in Chicago shrinks seems safe enough. It is just one more uprooting, after all. The more things change for Chicago's Irish, it appears, the more they stay the same.

Robert C. Williams. Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin' Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and Its Impact on America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, April 1987. Pp. 232 with index. Illustrated. $24.95.

If the automobile transformed life in the cities and towns of provincial America since 1900, the farm tractor transformed everything else in between.

Williams, a Ph.D. in history who describes himself as a Texas farmer, makes clear that the impact of the new machines over the half-century following their introduction in the 1880s was both unpredictable and profound. Crude as the early models were, they did relieve farmers of much of the physical strain for workers who (in the testimony of one woman) gave their bodies to the making of a big farm.

The price was high. The tractor spurred the trend toward larger and fewer farms, raised the capital requirements of farm enterprise, caused accidents, sucked wealth from the countryside into the cities (via interest payments to banks or payments to equipment manufacturers), added materially to chronic overproduction, displaced millions of rural workers, sped the conversion of diversified farming into cash-crop monocultures — the list is both long and doleful.

Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin' Johnny is a comprehensive general survey and thus is part technological history, part business history and part social history drawn from voluminous secondary sources. From its business history, it is pointed out that U.S. manufacturers, somewhat surprisingly, were laggard innovators. In recent years they have been laggard marketers as well, losing much of the small-tractor market to Japanese competitors. As the author puts it, the oligarchy comprised of such familiar firms as Deere, Case, International Harvester and Massey-Ferguson has been characterized as much by apathy as conspiracy.

It is hard to agree with its sunnier apologists that the world is a better place for having the tractor in it. The adoption of mechanization of some sort on the farm was inevitable nevertheless. Besides, as Williams states vividly in a concluding, hortatory chapter, the machine did not exploit economic circumstance so much as economics exploited the machine. In the end, the failure is not technology's but that of ''a society that has never been able to address the unconscious centralization of economic power . . . ."

James Krohe Jr. is a free-lance writer in Springfield.

Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, January 1987. Pp. 240. $75.

This 9 by 12, handsomely printed and appointed hardbound volume gives a comprehensive account of Indian life in the Great Lakes region from the early 1600s until the 1870s. Its editor, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, is a research associate with the Newberry Library in Chicago. She has provided a text that gathers in detail the history of this region's native peoples, much of which was known formerly only in piecemeal and patchwork accounts. Her chapters are complemented by 33 maps, many of which are double paged in the text, by Miklos Pinther, now chief cartographer to the United Nations. In addition the volume is graced with some 80 carefully chosen illustrations, including work from such master artist/chroniclers as Francis de Castlenau, Seth Eastman, Henry Lewis and George Winter.

The Atlas offers a glimpse of the Indian past at the moment of the first European contact and proceeds to sum up the history of that period when Indian, French, English and American interests were at variance for the control of the Great Lakes and the lands surrounding them. It is a grim chronicle of native adaptation, resistance, defeat, land cessions, and somehow, for the fortunate, survival.

The book's unusual format calls for a description of at least one chapter to indicate the general construction of the Atlas. The War of 1812 convulsed the entire region and engaged the native peoples from east of Montreal to Boones Lick, Mo., and from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., to Hills Ferry, Ill., near Carlyle. The chapter on Indian involvement in the war opens with an explanation of the map symbols, and then presents the two-page map itself. This is followed by a chronology of 150 entries lining out the action. The dates given on the map correspond to the dates in the chronology. The earliest entry — 1811 — for Hills Ferry indicates that an action here was one of several that prompted General William Henry Harrison's attack at Tippecanoe. The last entry is Black Hawk's 1814 victory near Saukenuk. The chapter concludes with a five-part essay on the war, giving an account of the action in the eastern and western theatres and in the Mississippi valley.

In general, the essay-map format is employed throughout, providing handy visuals for accounts of tribal territories at various times, of land cessions, of epidemics and so on, during the centuries covered in the Atlas. The book includes an important bibliographical essay and a selected bibliography. The editor and cartographer are to be commended for the labor of love that went into the making of this volume, a worthy contribution to the understanding of the painful history of the Great Lakes region.

John Knoepfle is a poet and professor of literature at Sangamon State University. He was named Illinois Author of the Year in 1986 and his most recent book of poetry is Poems from the Sangamon.

Ben Joravsky and Eduardo Camacho Race and Politics in Chicago. Community Renewal Society, 18 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603, 1987 Pp. 71. Illustrated. $7.95.

While modest in size, Race and Politics in Chicago has noble ambitions. According to its introduction, the intent of this monograph is "to help civic, political and religious leaders ease hostilities by understanding their underlying causes." The authors assert that ''What the city needs most is a forum free of hysteria to defuse the tension this conflict creates. What we have had, for the last four years, is just the opposite." The sadder truth is, of course, that hysteria, tension and conflict over race have been central to the city's civic and political life for the better part of a century now. Joravsky and Camacho's analysis of race relations in Chicago begins with an account of the 1919 riot which took the lives of 38 people — 23 blacks and 15 whites — and injured more than 500 others after a white man had killed a black swimmer in Lake Michigan. The book ends with an account of the 1983 Harold Washington-Bernard Epton mayoral campaign and its aftermath, which makes one realize that, except for demographics, race relations haven't changed much in Chicago since World War I.

The middle chapters of Race and Politics reveal this sorry history primarily through sketches of various principals, black and white, who have shaped the city's racial record, and through accounts of incidents and situations brought on various political strategies and maneuvers. Joravsky and Camacho examine the records of the Cermak, Kelly, Kennelly and Daley administrations with some care, and they put the work of black politicians like William L. Dawson, Oscar De Priest, Earl Dickerson and others into historical and political perspective.

Incidents like the violent white protests against black families who moved into the airport Homes in the 1940s and the Trumbull Park project in the 1950s are recounted in all their ugliness, providing reminders of the strength and depth of the currents of racism in Chicago. The idealistic efforts of people like Elizabeth Wood, the first director of the Chicago Housing Authority, and of Martin Luther King to bring about change in the city's policies are also recounted briefly but vividly.

The brevity of Race and Politics in Chicago is at once its weakness and its strength. The concentrated summaries of events and lives are, inevitably, somewhat superficial. But the bare, brief facts, strung together in clear, accessible language, have an impact that would be blunted by longer, more scholarly analysis. Race and Politics is like a scorecard from a baseball game. You can't reconstruct everything that happened from it — the subtle strategies, the bonehead plays that can't be recorded on a score sheet — but you can tell who made the hits and, above all, the errors. For that we owe thanks to Joravsky and Camacho.

John E. Hallwas, ed. Ilinois Literature: The Nineteenth Century. P.O. Box 25, Macomb: Illinois Heritage Press, 1986. Pp. 286. $15.95.

Any serious student of Illinois literature will want to own a copy of Illinois Literature: The Nineteenth Century. Everyone knows the giants of our state's literary history, most of whom have worked in the 20th century. Novelists and poets like Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg and Saul Bellow have affected the course of American literature, and Illinois has also launched notable figures like Vachel Lindsay, Floyd Dell and James T. Farrell into the national literary scene.

But these giants had forebears, men and women who toiled in relative obscurity, giving voice to the values and concerns of Illinoisans before the turn of the century. Hallwas's volume includes selections from works that are not distinctly "literary" in a belletristic sense. He opens with selections from Morris Birkbeck's Notes on a Journey in America and his Letters from Illinois, in which Birkbeck, a transplanted Englishman, sang the glories of Illinois and America in the early decades of the century. Hallwas includes selections from Abraham Lincoln's letters and speeches, excerpts from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and samples of various works inspired by the Haymarket tragedy. While sometimes clumsy and inelegant, these nonliterary pieces provide a view of Illinois from a variety of interesting perspectives, giving us a richer sense of the state's history and culture.

Hallwas also includes more classically creative works to suggest literary trends and tastes in the 19th century. He gives us excerpts from novels like Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers and With the Procession, Hamlin Garland's Rose of Dutcher's Coolly and Francis Grierson's The Valley of Shadows, along with samples of some of Chicago's classic early columnists, like Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade, who established much of the city's image in the late 19th century.

These selections, along with Hallwas's detailed introduction, give us a valuable perspective. They remind us of where we've been and of how far we've come, literarily. It would be difficult to defend most of the works in Illinois Literature as great or even intrinsically memorable, but they were necessary to build the foundation for the literary monuments that followed. John Hallwas deserves our thanks for helping us remember our sometimes crude but earnest literary pioneers.

Richard J. Shereikis, professor of English at Sangamon State University, has been Illinois Issues associate editor for book reviews/humanities for three years. On the editorial staff since June 1978, this is his last magazine as associate editor although he will contribute occasional articles.

July 1987'/Illinois Issues/31