Frontier Regulars; The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1890

New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc, 1973. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. xv, [3], 462 pages. Illustrations. Notes Includes 14 maps, as well as Introduction, Bibliography, and Index. Chapters cover Return to the Frontier; The Postwar Army: Command, Staff, and Line; The Problem of Doctrine; The Army, Congress, and the People; Weapons, Uniforms, and Equipment; Army Life on the Border; Fort Phil Kearny, 1866; Hancock's War, 1867; The Peace Commission of 1867; Operations on the Southern Plains, 1868-69; Beyond the Plains, 1866-70; Grant's Peace Policy, 1869-74; The Red River War, 1874-75; Sitting Bull, 1870-76; The Conquest of the Sioux, 1876-81; Nez Perce Bid for Freedom, 1877; Bannock, Paiute, Sheepeater, and Ute, 1878-79; Mexican Corder Conflicts, 1870-81; Geronimo, 1881-86; and Ghost Dance, 1890-91. At the core of the book stand Robert Utley's incisive accounts of the military campaigns waged against the Indian--from the first skirmishes with the Sioux over the Bozeman Trail defenses in 1866, to the final defeat and subjugation of the Northern Plains Indians in 1890. As battles became more ferocious, debate between peace advocates and military leaders intensified. Treaties were signed which established reservations. Signed and Broken. Concentration, education, "civilization," and agricultural self-support were offered the Indian as a new and better way of life. But across the West, the Indian resisted the reservation. Robert Marshall Utley (born October 31, 1929) is an American author and historian who has written sixteen books on the history of the American West. He is a former chief historian for the National Park Service. Much of his writing deals with the United States Army in the West, especially in its confrontations with the Indian tribes. He writes: "the frontier army was a conventional military force trying to control, by conventional military methods, a people that did not behave like conventional enemies and, indeed, quite often were not enemies at all. This is the most difficult of all military assignments, whether in Africa, Asia, or the American West. ' The Western History Association annually gives out the Robert M. Utley Book Award for the best book published on the military history of the frontier and western North America. He attended Purdue University, receiving a Bachelor of Science in history. He then attended Indiana University for graduate school, receiving a Master of Arts in history in 1952. Following his graduation, Utley served in the U.S. Army, and then joined the National Park Service. In 1997 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. Derived from a Kirkus review: Enthusiasm for Indian fighting underpins this account of Western battles after the Civil War. The extermination of the Indians, or at least of their land rights, was, Utley feels, not genocide but "domination." The book is a chronicle of the fighting, together with sketches of men, officers, weaponry, and politics. Utley rolls through the 1866 Fort Kearney battle, Hancock's War, the early Apache fights, Sheridan's winter campaign against Black Kettle, the conquest of the Sioux, the Nez Perce war, Mexican border skirmishes and so forth. The significance of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre is that it put an end to the Indian search. and-destroy operations and officially dissolved the frontier. An entry in the Wars of the United States series, this will interest students of military logistics and historians of human conflict.