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General George Crook spent his entire military career, with the exception of the Civil War years, on the frontier. Fighting the Indians, he earned the distinction of being the lowest-ranking West Point cadet ever to rise to the rank of major-general. Crook’s autobiography covers the period from his graduation from West Point in 1852 to June 18, 1876, the day after the famous Battle of the Rosebud. Editor Martin F. Schmitt has supplemented Crook’s life story with other material from the general’s diaries and letters and from contemporary newspapers. “When Red Cloud, the Sioux chief, heard of the death of his old antagonist, the Army officer they called Three Stars, he told a missionary, ‘He, at least, never lied to us.’ General Sherman called Crook the greatest Indian fighter and manager the Army ever had. Yet this man who was the most effective campaigner against the Indians had won their respect and trust. To understand why, you ought to read General George Crook: His Autobiography, edited and annotated by Martin F. Schmitt.”—Los Angeles Times “A story straightforward, accurate, and interesting, packed with detail and saturated with a strong western flavor....The importance of this book lies not merely in its considerable contribution to our knowledge of military history and to the intimate and sometimes trenchant remarks made by Crook about his colleagues, but more particularly in the revelation of the character and aims of the general himself.”—Chicago Tribune
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.
George Crook was one of the most prominent military figures of the late-nineteenth-century Indian Wars. As Paul Magid portrays Crook in this highly readable second volume of a projected three-volume biography, the general was an innovative and eccentric soldier, with a complex and often contradictory personality, whose activities often generated intense controversy.
A firsthand account of General George Crook's campaigns against the Indians, by a member of his staff.
Renowned for his prominent role in the Apache and Sioux wars, General George Crook (1828–90) was considered by William Tecumseh Sherman to be his greatest Indian-fighting general. Although Crook was feared by Indian opponents on the battlefield, in defeat the tribes found him a true friend and advocate who earned their trust and friendship when he spoke out in their defense against political corruption and greed. Paul Magid’s detailed and engaging narrative focuses on Crook’s early years through the end of the Civil War. Magid begins with Crook’s boyhood on the Ohio frontier and his education at West Point, then recounts his nine years’ military service in California during the height of the Gold Rush. It was in the Far West that Crook acquired the experience and skills essential to his success as an Indian fighter. This is primarily an account of Crook’s dramatic and sometimes controversial role in the Civil War, in which he was involved on three fronts, in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia. Crook saw action during the battle of Antietam and played important roles in two major offensives in the Shenandoah Valley and in the Chattanooga and Appomattox campaigns. His courage, leadership, and tactical skills won him the respect and admiration of his commanding officers, including Generals Grant and Sheridan. He soon rose to the rank of major general and received four brevet promotions for bravery and meritorious service. Along the way, he led both infantry and cavalry, pioneered innovations in guerrilla warfare, conducted raids deep into enemy territory, and endured a kidnapping by Confederate partisans. George Crook offers insight into the influences that later would make this general both a nemesis of the Indian tribes and their ardent advocate, and it illuminates the personality of this most enigmatic and eccentric of army officers.
Geronimo and General George Crook were born to destroy each other. And they did--the perfect enemies, perfectly embodying the tragic strenghts and weaknesses of their respective cultures. No confrontation more powerfully captures the relentless, irreconcilable struggle between Native Americans and whites than the Apache Wars--the final and longest running of the North American Indian Wars. At the heart of that bitter and violent conflict lies the intriguing story of two of history's most brilliant strategists--united by their fierce loyalty to their peoples, yet divided by their warring bloods.
General George Crook was one of the most prominent soldiers in the frontier West. General William T. Sherman called him the greatest Indian fighter and manager the army ever had. General Crook and the Western Frontier, the first full-scale biography of Crook, uses contemporary manuscripts and primary sources to illuminate the general's personal life and military career.
“Crook always maintained that, since his command occupied the field after the battle, he was not defeated at the Rosebud, and that if the battle had gone according to his orders, it would have resulted in a real triumph for his men. This view was also held by his superiors, although they called it a ‘barren victory.’ His part in the campaign was to form a junction with the other advancing columns, combining with them in returning the infractious Sioux to their reservations. His immediate purpose was to find and destroy the village of Crazy Horse. He accomplished none of these objectives. Instead he retired from the scene, permitting the forces of Crazy Horse to concentrate their strength against the troops to the north.” From With Crook at the Rosebud The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie gave the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian tribes control over a wide region, covering Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and part of the Dakotas. But in the 1870s gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and white settlers invaded Indian territory in desperate search for the precious mineral. Clashes between miners and Indians erupted. After trying other means of settling the disputes, the U.S. government decreed that all Indians in the northwest should be living on reservations by January 1876. The Sioux and the Cheyenne refused to obey, so the Bureau of Indian Affairs called in the military to enforce the order. Brigadier General George Crook led the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expeditionary forces into southern Montana against rebellious Sioux. But Crazy Horse, leading a party of Sioux and Cheyenne, defeated a portion of Crooks command at Powder River in March 1876. In his chagrin and determination for revenge, Crook led his troops to the Rosebud canyon to destroy Crazy Horse’s village. The two powerful forces, each numbering more than one thousand men, met at the Rosebud River on June 17. At the end of the fierce, day-long battle, Crook returned to his base nearly forty miles away, convinced that he had won. Time would prove, however, that the battle resulted in a stalemate. Crook’s force was removed from the larger campaign and he was unable to come to Custer’s aid at the Little Big Horn eight days later. Though the Battle of the Rosebud had a significant impact on the rest of the campaign against the Sioux, it has often been eclipsed by publicity surrounding the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It was not until 1956, when With Crook at the Rosebud was first published by Stackpole, that the first clear history of the battle emerged.
General George Crook was one Civil War general who didn't win his reputation east of the Mississippi River. To him, the Civil War was just an interlude. Before and after this great conflict, Crook was an Indian fighter. Crook fought the greatest of the Indian chieftains; served at frontier posts from the Columbia River to the Rio Grande, from Illinois to the Pacific. Yet he was as good at defending Indians as he was at fighting them. Crook understood and sympathized with them. He spoke plainly and often against injustices in the treatment of the Indian. And when he died, Red Cloud, chief of the Sioux, gave him his epitaph: “He, at least, had never lied to us.” General George Crook: His Autobiography first came into print when Martin F. Schmitt, working in the archives of the Army War College in Washington, made the startling rediscovery of the Crook papers, which had been presented to the library of the War College by the widow of Walter S. Schuyler, one-time aid to General Crook. The existence of the autobiography had apparently not been previously suspected by any writer on the West, not even by the General's friend, Captain John G. Bourke, who wrote the only existing sketch of his life. A West Point graduate of 1852, General Crook spent his entire military career, with the exception of the four Civil War years, 1861 to 1865, on the frontier. His life paralleled western expansion during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1890, at the time of this death, he was commanding general of the Department of the Missouri, the largest and most active of all frontier commands. The Rogue River and Yakima wars in the eighteen fifties, Paiute pacification in the late sixties, the Apache campaigns of the seventies and eighties—all found Crook actively involved, fighting, counseling and making peace with the Indians. His Civil War experiences, while not uniformly successful or profitable, brought him into close contact with the great military figures of the day. He was a favorite of Grant's and a close associate of Sheridan, who had been in his class at West Point. His blunt, sometimes caustic opinions of his associates and the conduct of campaigns are new and often refreshing. General Crook's autobiography covers the period from Crook's graduation from West Point in 1852 to June 18, 1876, the day after the famous Battle of the Rosebud. The editor has supplemented it with other material, some from the Crook diaries and letters and contemporary clippings, on the other years of the General's life.