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Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: The Long War for the Northern Plains is the fourth volume of a five-volume series that seeks to tell the saga of the military struggle for the American West in the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it.
This is the fourth volume in a planned five-volume series that will tell the saga of the military struggle for the American West in the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it.
Over the course of his military career, George Crook developed empathy and admiration for American Indians both as foes and as allies. As Paul Magid has demonstrated in the previous two volumes of his groundbreaking biography, this experience prepared Crook well for his metamorphosis from Indian fighter to outspoken advocate of Indian rights. An Honest Enemy is the third and final volume of Magid’s account of George Crook’s life and involvement in the Indian wars. Using rarely tapped information, including Crook’s own diaries, the work documents in dramatic detail the general’s arduous and dangerous campaigns against the Chiricahua Apaches and their leader Geronimo, action that forms a backdrop to the transformation in the general’s role vis-à-vis Native Americans. In a story by turns harrowing and tragic, Magid details the plight of Indians who, in the aftermath of their defeat, were consigned to reservations too barren to sustain them, where they were subjected to impoverishment, indifference, and in many cases, outright corruption. With growing anger, Crook watched as many tribes faced death from starvation and disease and, unwilling to passively accept their fate, desperately sought to flee their reservations and return to their homelands. Charged with the grim task of returning the Indians to such conditions, Crook was forced to choose between fulfilling his duties as a soldier and his humanitarian values. Magid describes Crook’s struggle to reconcile these conflicting concerns while promoting policies he regarded as essential to the welfare of the Indians in the face of a hostile public, jealous fellow officers, and an unsympathetic government that regarded his efforts as quixotic and misguided. Here is a tale that readers will not soon forget.
The Great Sioux War of 1876–77 began at daybreak on March 17, 1876, when Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds and six cavalry companies struck a village of Northern Cheyennes—Sioux allies—thereby propelling the Northern Plains tribes into war. The ensuing last stand of the Sioux against Anglo-American settlement of their homeland spanned some eighteen months, playing out across more than twenty battle and skirmish sites and costing hundreds of lives on both sides and many millions of dollars. And it all began at Powder River. Powder River: Disastrous Opening of the Great Sioux War recounts the wintertime Big Horn Expedition and its singular great battle, along with the stories of the Northern Cheyennes and their elusive leader Old Bear. Historian Paul Hedren tracks both sides of the conflict through a rich array of primary source material, including the transcripts of Reynolds’s court-martial and Indian recollections. The disarray and incompetence of the war’s beginnings—officers who failed to take proper positions, disregard of orders to save provisions, failure to cooperate, and abandonment of the dead and a wounded soldier—in many ways anticipated the catastrophe that later occurred at the Little Big Horn. Forty photographs, many previously unpublished, and five new maps detail the action from start to ignominious conclusion. Hedren’s comprehensive account takes Powder River out of the shadow of the Little Big Horn and reveals how much this critical battle tells us about the army’s policy and performance in the West, and about the debacle soon to follow.
A book of surpassing importance that should be required reading for leaders and policymakers throughout the world For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements. Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.
With its charismatic leader George Custer and its memorable encounters with Plains Indians, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Seventh Cavalry serves as the iconic regiment in the post–Civil War U.S Army. Voluminous written documentation as well as archaeological and osteological research suggest that the soldiers of the Seventh represented a cross section of the men who joined the army as a whole at the time. In Health of the Seventh Cavalry, editors P. Willey and Douglas D. Scott and their co-contributors—experts in history, medicine, human biology, epidemiology, and human osteology—examine the Seventh’s medical records to determine the health of the nineteenth-century U.S. Army, and the prevalence and treatment of the numerous conditions that plagued soldiers during the Indian Wars. Building on previous comparisons of archaeological evidence and medical records, Willey and Scott follow multiple lines of inquiry to assess the health of the Seventh, from its organization in 1866 to its 1884 station on the Northern Great Plains. Pairing general overviews of nineteenth- and twentieth-century health care with essays on malaria, injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other specific ailments, Health of the Seventh Cavalry provides fresh insights into the health, disease, and trauma that the regiment experienced over two decades. More than 100 tables, graphs, and maps track the troops’ illnesses and diseases by month, season, year, and location, as well as their stress periods, desertions, and deaths. A glossary of medical terms rounds out the volume. As an ideal exemplar of regiments of its time, the Seventh Cavalry affords scholars and enthusiasts a better understanding of nineteenth-century health and medicine. This volume reveals the struggles that the post–Civil War Seventh, and the entire U.S. Army, faced on the battlefield and elsewhere.
“The drums they roll, upon my soul, for that’s the way we go,” runs the chorus in a Harrigan and Hart song from 1874. “Forty miles a day on beans and hay in the Regular Army O!” The last three words of that lyric aptly title Douglas C. McChristian’s remarkable work capturing the lot of soldiers posted to the West after the Civil War. At once panoramic and intimate, Regular Army O! uses the testimony of enlisted soldiers—drawn from more than 350 diaries, letters, and memoirs—to create a vivid picture of life in an evolving army on the western frontier. After the volunteer troops that had garrisoned western forts and camps during the Civil War were withdrawn in 1865, the regular army replaced them. In actions involving American Indians between 1866 and 1891, 875 of these soldiers were killed, mainly in minor skirmishes, while many more died of disease, accident, or effects of the natural environment. What induced these men to enlist for five years and to embrace the grim prospect of combat is one of the enduring questions this book explores. Going well beyond Don Rickey Jr.’s classic work Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay (1963), McChristian plumbs the regulars’ accounts for frank descriptions of their training to be soldiers; their daily routines, including what they ate, how they kept clean, and what they did for amusement; the reasons a disproportionate number occasionally deserted, while black soldiers did so only rarely; how the men prepared for field service; and how the majority who survived mustered out. In this richly drawn, uniquely authentic view, men black and white, veteran and tenderfoot, fill in the details of the frontier soldier’s experience, giving voice to history in the making.
In War-Path and Bivouac, published in 1890, John Finerty (1846–1908) recalled the summer he spent following George Crook’s infamous campaign against the Sioux in 1876. Historians have long surmised that Finerty’s correspondence covering the campaign for the Chicago Times reappeared in its entirety in Finerty’s celebrated book. But that turns out not to be the case, as readers will discover in this remarkable volume. In print at last, this collection of Finerty’s letters and telegrams to his hometown newspaper, written from the field during Crook’s campaign, conveys the full extent of the reporter’s experience and observations during this time of great excitement and upheaval in the West. An introduction and annotations by Paul L. Hedren, a lifelong historian of the period, provide ample biographical and historical background for Finerty’s account. Four times under fire, giving as well as he got, Finerty reported on the action with the immediacy of an unfolding wartime story. To his riveting dispatches on the Rosebud and Slim Buttes battles, this collection adds accounts of the lesser-known Sibley scout and the tortures of the campaign trail, penned by a keen-eyed newsman who rode at the front through virtually all of the action. Here, too, is an intimate look at the Black Hills gold rush and at principal towns like Deadwood and Custer City, captured in the earliest moments of their colorful history. Hedren’s introduction places Finerty not only on the scene in Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota during the Indian campaign, but also in the context of battlefield journalism at a critical time in its evolution. Publication of this volume confirms John Finerty’s outsize role in that historical moment.