Following the Indian uprising known as the Red River War, Fort Reno (in what would become western Oklahoma) was established in 1875 by the United States government. Its original assignment was to serve as an outpost to exercise control over the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. But Fort Reno also served as an embryonic frontier settlement around which the first trappings of Anglo-American society developed a regulatory force between the Indian tribes and the white man, and the primary arm of government responsible for restraining land-hungry whites from invading country promised to Native American tribes by treaty. With the formation of the new Territory of Oklahoma and introduction of civil law, Fort Reno was forced to assume another purpose: it became a cavalry remount center. But when the mechanization of the military brought an end to the horse cavalry, the demise of Fort Reno was imminent. When Ben Clark, the prideful scout who knew and loved Fort Reno, ended his own life in 1914, the military post that had once thrived on America’s frontier was brought to a poignant end. The story of Fort Reno, as detailed here by Stan Hoig, touches on several of the most important topics of nineteenth-century Western history: the great cattle drives, Indian pacification and the Plains Wars, railroads, white settlement, and the Oklahoma land rushes. Hoig deals not only with Fort Reno, but also with Darlington agency, the Chisolm Trail, and the trading activities in Indian Territory from 1874 to approximately 1900. The author includes maps, photographs, and illustrations to enhance the narrative and guide the reader, like a scout, through a time of treacherous but fascinating events in the Old West.

This history and guidebook is composed of two parts: first, narratives of the Plains Indian conflicts and, second, directions to battle sites in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.

Historian Jerome A. Greene is renowned for his memorable chronicles of egregious events involving American Indians and the U.S. military, including Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee. Now, in January Moon, Greene draws from extensive research and fieldwork to explore a signal—and appallingly brutal—event in American history: the desperate flight of Chief Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne Indians from imprisonment at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In the wake of the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, the U.S. government expelled most Northern Cheyennes from their northern plains homeland to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Following mounting hardships, many of those people, under Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, broke away, seeking to return north. While Little Wolf’s band managed initially to elude pursuing U.S. troops, Dull Knife’s people were captured in 1878 and ushered into a makeshift barrack prison at Camp (later Fort) Robinson, where they spent months waiting for government officials to decide their fate. It is here that Greene’s riveting narrative edges toward its climax. On the night of January 9, 1879, in a bloody struggle with troops, Dull Knife’s people staged a massive breakout from their barrack prison in a last-ditch bid for freedom. Greene paints a vivid picture of their frantic escape, which took place under an unusually brilliant moon that doomed many of those fleeing by silhouetting them against the snow. A climactic engagement at Antelope Creek proved especially devastating, and the helpless people were nearly annihilated. In gripping detail, Greene follows the survivors’ dreadful experiences into their aftermath, including creation of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Carrying the story to the present day, he describes Cheyenne tribal events commemorating the breakout—all designed to ensure that the injustices of nineteenth-century U.S. government policy will never be forgotten.

An exhaustive evaluation of literature published on the Indian Wars. Articles by leading historians include how to research the wars, build a good library, the best books on Custer and the Little Bighorn, the best books overall on the subject, suggested reading, and much more. Index.

Journal of the Indian Wars, or JIW was a quarterly publication on the study of the American Indian Wars. Before JIW, no periodical dedicated exclusively to this fascinating topic was available. JIW's focus was on warfare in the United States, Canada, and the Spanish borderlands from 1492 to 1890. Published articles also include personalities, policy, and military technologies. JIW was designed to satisfy both professional and lay readers with original articles of lasting value and a variety of columns of interest, plus book reviews, all enhanced with maps and illustrations. JIW's lengthy essays of substance are presented in a fresh and entertaining manner.

In summer 1883, General William Tecumseh Sherman took Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, his former aide-de-camp, with him on a 10,000-mile inspection tour across the northern tier of territories, on to the Pacific Northwest, south through California, and east through the Southwest to Denver. Dodge had no idea his journals would ever become public, so he wrote openly about his companions and their interactions, terrain and natural wonders, conditions of military posts, life in civilian communities, and what the future seemed to hold for the region and its changing population.

Best known today as the author of The Plains of North American and Their Inhabitants (1877), Dodge recorded his observations and thoughts in volumes of journals, letters, and reports, as well as three popular published books. In this first biography of the soldier-author, Wayne R. Kime describes Dodge's early years, experiences as a writer, and forty-three-year career as an infantry officer in the U.s. Army, and sets his life in a rich historical context.

This symposium was held 16-18 Sept. 2008 at Fort Leavenworth, KS. The theme, ¿The U.S. Army and the Interagency Process: Historical Perspectives,¿ was designed to explore the partnership between the U.S. Army and government agencies in attaining national goals and objectives in peace and war within a historical context. The symposium also examined current issues, dilemmas, problems, trends, and practices associated with U.S. Army operations requiring interagency cooperation. In the midst of two wars and Army engagement in numerous other parts of a troubled world, this topic is of tremendous importance to the U.S. Army and the Nation. Charts and tables.

Harry E. Rieseberg's autobiographical writings include stories like being attacked by a giant octopus while recovering sunken treasure, defending himself from an attack by a 15-foot shark with only a diving knife, and surviving a hurricane and a severely broken leg while at sea--all captivating tales for audiences in the 1940s and 1950s, and all invented by a very successful charlatan. This is a biography of Harry E. Rieseberg, a shameless self-promoter who passed himself off as the world's greatest treasure salvor but who never got wet. His entire public persona was based on stories he retold in dozens of books and thousands of articles in which he made claims of feats that were fantasy but sold as fact. Despite the often-obvious facts of his fabrication, his books influenced a generation of legitimate divers and underwater archaeologists like Sir Robert Marx and Robert Stenuit. Thoroughly researched, this book uses sources including his personal records and letters to his agents to provide deep insight into the nature of his life and the way he created a false persona for popular consumption.

Before the drought of the early twenty-first century, the dry benchmark in the American plains was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But in this eye-opening work, Kevin Z. Sweeney reveals that the Dust Bowl was only one cycle in a series of droughts on the U.S. southern plains. Reinterpreting our nation’s nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates the dramatic and little-known role drought played in settlement, migration, and war on the plains. Stephen H. Long’s famed military expedition coincided with the drought of the 1820s, which prompted Long to label the southern plains a “Great American Desert”—a destination many Anglo-Americans thought ideal for removing Southeastern Indian tribes to in the 1830s. The second dry trend, from 1854 to 1865, drove bison herds northeastward, fomenting tribal warfare, and deprived Civil War armies in Indian Territory of vital commissary. In the late 1880s and mid-1890s, two more periods of drought triggered massive outmigration from the southern plains as well as appeals from farmers and congressmen for federal famine relief, pleas quickly denied by President Grover Cleveland. Sweeney’s interpretation of familiar events through the lens of drought lays the groundwork for understanding why the U.S. government’s reaction to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was such a radical departure from previous federal responses. Prelude to the Dust Bowl provides new insights into pivotal moments in the settlement of the southern plains and stands as a timely reminder that drought, as part of a natural climatic cycle, will continue to figure in the unfolding history of this region.