Focusing on the Indian Wars period of the 1840s through the 1890s, Life of a Soldier on the Western Frontier captures the daily challenges faced by the typical enlisted man and explores the role soldiers played in the conquering of the American frontier.

In this remarkable journal, an observant and opinionated cavalry private offers an inside look at a soldier's life during the Indian Wars of the 1870s. One of the few enlisted men to keep a diary, Private William F. Zimmer participated in the closing campaign of the Great Sioux War. Later, under the command of Colonel Nelson A. Miles, Zimmer fought at the climactic Battle of the Bear's Paw Mountains, the battle that led to Chief Joseph's famous surrender. Frontier Soldier expands our understanding of military dynamics during the Indian Wars and offers an honest view of army life from the perspective of the rank and file.

From the earliest days of the western frontier, women heeded the call to go west along with their husbands, sweethearts, and parents. Many of these women were attached to the army camps and outposts that dotted the prairies. Some were active participants in the skirmishes and battles that took place in the western territories. Each of these women-wives, mothers, daughters, laundresses, soldiers, and shamans-risked their lives in unsettled lands, facing such challenges as bearing children in primitive conditions and defying military orders in an effort to save innocent people. Soldier, Sister, Spy, Scout tells the story of twelve such brave women-Buffalo Soldiers, scouts, interpreters, nurses, and others-who served their country in the early frontier. These heroic women displayed a depth of courage and physical bravery not found in many men of the time. Their remarkable commitment and willingness to throw off the constraints of nineteenth-century conventions helped build the west for generations to come.

"Not many enlisted men recorded their adventures in Indian warfare. Still fewer actually kept a journal to lend immediacy to their observations. Frontier Soldier is such a journal, by a literate private who left his story of plains warfare in a chronicle rich in detail. It is the richer for the annotations of Jerome A. Greene, whose understanding of the campaigns in which Zimmer marched is surpassed by few historians." --Robert M. Utley, author of Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier

"Steven Eames has crafted an insightful and much needed examination of colonial warfare on the northern frontier. His analysis of the effectiveness of the New England militia provides a long overdue corrective to stereotypes of their incompetence."---Emerson W. Baker author of The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England --

Details the U.S. Army's campaign in the years following the Civil War to contain the American Indian and promote Western expansion

This text retells the story of a brotherhood of young men who together laid claim to one of the most notorious frontiers in the world: India's north-west frontier, which in the late 1990s forms the volatile boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Known collectively as Henry Lawrence's Young Men, each had distinguished himself in the East India Company's wars in the Punjab in the 1840s before going out to carve out names for themselves as politicals on the frontier. Drawing extensively on the men's diaries, journals and letters, Charles Allen weaves the individual stories of these Soldier Sahibs together with the tale of how they came together to save British India, ending climatically on Delhi Ridge in 1857.

A study of British colonial history in the northwest region of India, and the role played by Brigadier General John Nicholson and other British army officers.

An unheralded military hero, Charles Young (1864–1922) was the third black graduate of West Point, the first African American national park superintendent, the first black U.S. military attaché, the first African American officer to command a Regular Army regiment, and the highest-ranking black officer in the Regular Army until his death. Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment tells the story of the man who—willingly or not—served as a standard-bearer for his race in the officer corps for nearly thirty years, and who, if not for racial prejudice, would have become the first African American general. Brian G. Shellum describes how, during his remarkable army career, Young was shuffled among the few assignments deemed suitable for a black officer in a white man’s army—the Buffalo Soldier regiments, an African American college, and diplomatic posts in black republics such as Liberia. Nonetheless, he used his experience to establish himself as an exceptional cavalry officer. He was a colonel on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War I, when serious medical problems and racial intolerance denied him command and ended his career. Shellum’s book seeks to restore a hero to the ranks of military history; at the same time, it informs our understanding of the role of race in the history of the American military.

English immigrants who came from Europe to start a new life in colonial North America soon discovered that the methods they used in organizing and training companies of militia for the protection of their farms and homes, based on what they had practiced in Europe, were ill suited for waging war against the native tribes that inhabited the continent. The natives simply would not fight as thought proper by their European counterparts, they fought "spread out and thin," using hit and run tactics that kept the militiamen off balance never knowing from which direction the next attack might come. The natives equipped themselves as lightly as possible when conducting raids on the English settlements, and passed on their skills and tactics to the French partisan troops who sought to keep the English settlements confined to the east coast. In order to combat these threats a new type of soldier was needed that could wage war against the French and Indians by utilizing the same skills and tactics that the enemy used, and with this need the Ranger was born. A Ranger was a soldier selected for his ability as a woodsman, as well as for his courage and stamina. Rangers began to patrol or "range" the frontiers of the English colonies to be a sort of "early warning system" against French and Indian raids into the backcountry settlements. As their skills and abilities increased so did their value as a vital part of any military conflicts that occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book gives a detailed look at the use of rangers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, the Mohawk Valley, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia during the colonial period in North America. This volume also contains a large bibliography of books, pamphlets, and websites used in the research of this book, as well as an index of names, subjects, and historical places contained in the book. Over fifty period maps, paintings, illustrations, and photographs compliment the text.