"A collection of letters that Private Edward L. Matthews wrote from 1869 to 1874 to his family back home in Massachusetts, detailing his life at Fort Bascom and Fort Union, New Mexico Territory. Matthews's letters provide detailed insight into the daily life of the enlisted man and how he felt about the job he was doing"--Provided by publisher.

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During his five years in the army, Private Edward L. Matthews wrote a series of exceptionally detailed and engaging letters to his family back home in Maryland describing his life in the Arizona and New Mexico Territories. Eddie Matthews’s letters, published here for the first time, provide an unparalleled chronicle of one soldier’s experiences in garrison and in the field in the post–Civil War Southwest. Eddie’s letters record a vivid chronicle of day-to-day life in the frontier regulars. Included are operational details in his company, candid observations of people and places, intimate views of frontier society, and personal opinions that probably would have been forgotten or moderated had he recorded his experiences later in life. More subtle are his valuable references to the state of transportation and communication in the Southwest during the early 1870s. Matthews probably did not realize until later years that he was not only a witness to the nation’s rapid westward expansion, but was himself a tiny cog in the machinery that made it possible.

The enlisted men in the United States Army during the Indian Wars (1866-91) need no longer be mere shadows behind their historically well-documented commanding officers. As member of the regular army, these men formed an important segment of our usually slighted national military continuum and, through their labors, combats, and endurance, created the framework of law and order within which settlement and development become possible. We should know more about the common soldier in our military past, and here he is. The rank and file regular, then as now, was psychologically as well as physically isolated from most of his fellow Americans. The people were tired of the military and its connotations after four years of civil war. They arrayed their army between themselves and the Indians, paid its soldiers their pittance, and went about the business of mushrooming the nation’s economy. Because few enlisted men were literarily inclined, many barely able to scribble their names, most previous writings about them have been what officers and others had to say. To find out what the average soldier of the post-Civil War frontier thought, Don Rickey, Jr., asked over three hundred living veterans to supply information about their army experiences by answering questionnaires and writing personal accounts. Many of them who had survived to the mid-1950’s contributed much more through additional correspondence and personal interviews. Whether the soldier is speaking for himself or through the author in his role as commentator-historian, this is the first documented account of the mass personality of the rank and file during the Indian Wars, and is only incidentally a history of those campaigns.

"Realizing that he had more experience dealing with Native peoples than other lieutenants serving on the frontier, Gatewood decided to record his experiences. Although he died before he completed his project, the work he left behind remains an important firsthand account of his life as a commander of Apache scouts and as a military commandant of the White Mountain Indian Reservation. Louis Kraft presents Gatewood's previously unpublished account, punctuating it with an introduction, additional text that fills in the gaps in Gatewood's narrative, detailed notes, and an epilogue."--BOOK JACKET.

This occasional paper is a concise overview of the history of the US Army's involvement along the Mexican border and offers a fundamental understanding of problems associated with such a mission. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the historic themes addressed disapproving public reaction, Mexican governmental instability, and insufficient US military personnel to effectively secure the expansive boundary are still prevalent today.

Mary Lee Stubbs (Chief of the Organizational History Branch of the O.S. Office of the Chief of Military History) and Stanley Russell Connor (Deputy Chief of the U.S. Organizational History Branch, OCMH) wrote the 1968 Armor-Cavalry Part I: Regular Army and Army Reserve, part of the Army Lineage Series, which was "designed to foster the esprit de corps of United States Army units."

In the aftermath of the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, U.S. Army troops braced for retaliation from Lakota Sioux Indians, who had just suffered the devastating loss of at least two hundred men, women, and children. Among the soldiers sent to guard the area around Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, was twenty-two-year-old Private Hartford Geddings Clark (1869–1920) of the Sixth U.S. Cavalry. Within three days of the massacre, he began keeping a diary that he continued through 1891. Clark’s account—published here for the first time—offers a rare and intimate view of a soldier’s daily life set against the backdrop of a rapidly vanishing American frontier. According to editor Jerome A. Greene, Private Clark was a perceptive young man with wide-ranging interests. Although his diary begins in South Dakota, most of its entries reflect Clark’s service at Fort Niobrara, located amid the sand hills of north-central Nebraska. There, beginning in February 1891, five troops of the Sixth Cavalry sought to protect area citizens from potential Indian disturbances. Among his hard-drinking fellow soldiers, “Harry,” as Clark was called, stood out as a teetotaler. He was also an avid horse racer, huntsman, and the leading pitcher on Fort Niobrara’s baseball team. Beyond its descriptions of a grueling training regimen and off-duty entertainment, the diary reveals Clark’s evolving perception of Native peoples. Although he initially viewed them as savage enemies, Private Clark’s attitude softened when the army began enlisting Indian men and he befriended a Lakota soldier named Yellow Hand, who shared Clark's love of sports. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century military history, Greene offers a richly annotated version of Private Clark’s remarkable original text, replete with information on the U.S. Army’s final occupation of the American West.

The inclusion of the Ninth Cavalry and three other African American regiments in the post-Civil War army was one of the nation's most problematic social experiments. The first fifteen years following its organization in 1866 were stained by mutinies, slanderous verbal assaults, and sadistic abuses by their officers. Eventually, however, a number of considerate and dedicated officers, including Major Guy Henry, Captain Charles Parker, and Lieutenant Matthais Day, in cooperation with capable noncommissioned officers such as George Mason, Madison Ingoman, and Moses Williams, created an elite and well-disciplined fighting unit that won the respect of all but the most racist whites.