Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 79, number 3, spring, 1996

              BOOK REVIEWS
Lake Michigan's Railroad Car Ferries is a pictorial history, and its more than 150 well-chosen illustrations, which include postcards, interior views, menus, adver¬ tisements, and photographs add consid¬ erable texture and depth to the author's narrative. Viewed in total, the illustra¬ tions and text blend together and evoke the feeling of a slower and, somehow, more wholesome time in American life.
Lake Michigan's Railroad Car Ferries was produced by and for railroad enthusiasts; this fact explains the book's many strengths and its major weakness, an absence of a marine historical perspective. Throughout the book, the essentially maritime aspects of the car ferry service, including ship op¬ erations and personnel, receive little atten¬ tion. For example, while acknowledging the existence of strong maritime traditions aboard the Chesapeake and Ohio ferries, the author then ignores them in his story. A popular railroad historian, Zimmermann notes ofthe ferries that "their primary func¬ tion had been to tote railway cars . . . and they were run by railroads." IVIaritime omis¬ sions notwithstanding, Zimmermann does a good job of immersing readers in the romance, aesthetics, and ultimate demise of railroading on one of America's inland seas.
As of 1995, only one of the car ferries, the Badger, remains active. Offering sum¬ mer passenger and automobile service, the ship is a nostalgic reminder of a by¬ gone era. Lake Michigan's Railroad Car Ferriesv/ould be a fine purchase for people considering a cross-lake trip on the Bad¬ ger, or for anyone with a popular interest in American railroads.
John Odin Jensen State Historical Society of Wisconsin
Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota. By Renee Sansom Flood. (Scribner, New York, 1995. Pp. 384. Illustrations, notes, bibhography, index. ISBN 0-684-19512-7, $25.00.)
Lost Bird, also known as Zintkala Nuni, was found beneath the frozen body ofher mother four days after the tragic 1890 confrontation at Wounded Knee. Briga¬ dier General Leonard Colby, leader of Nebraska National Guard units assigned to the area, adopted the orphaned infant and took her home to Beatrice, Nebraska, to provide a "Christian civilized" upbring¬ ing. The outcome proved disastrous. The troubled young woman, commonly re¬ ferred to as Zintka, perished at age twenty- nine from a combination of syphilis and Spanish flu.
Renee Sansom Flood, a social worker in South Dakota from 1980 through 1987, became intrigued with Lost Bird's story. With help from the Gage County Histori¬ cal Society in Beatrice, Flood won a re¬ search grant from the Burlington North¬ ern Foundation, allowing her "to travel coast to coast to archival depositories, gathering letters, diaries, and photo¬ graphs." Early in her research Flood mar¬ ried Yankton Dakota historian, Leonard Bruguier, who helped research and edit the book.
Lost Bird of Wounded Knee evolves from an impressive array of primary and sec¬ ondary sources as indicated by seventy- five pages of chapter footnotes and bibli¬ ography. The letters of noted suffragist Clara Bewick Colby, who was the General's wife until he forsook her for Zintka's gov¬ erness, provide the richest lode of pri¬ mary material. The result is that the work is as much a biography of the Colbys as it is of Zintka.
Clara graduated as valedictorian of the first graduating class of women (six) from the Univensity ofWisconsin in 1869. There she met Colby, handsome captain of the cadets, and married him in 1871. They moved to Beatrice where Colby established himself as a successful, if shifty, lawyer and politician, and Clara gained a national repu¬ tation as the publisher of a woman's rights newspaper. Neither had enough time for Zintka, although Clara made a determined effort to raise her properly. From the begin¬ ning Clara's well-intentioned  guidance
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