In these journals, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, a well-known chronicler of western history and an authority on Plains Indians, provides an important account of conditions in Indian Territory from 1878 to 1880, a period of rapid transition. The Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation in present-day western Oklahoma was the center of Dodge’s activity. His writings offer a firsthand record of the 1878 retreat of the Northern Cheyenne, the conditions endured by Indians who remained on the reservation, and the jurisdictional conflicts between Army personnel and representatives of the Office of Indian Affairs. These journals also provide insight into Dodge’s character, with reports of his official duties as a military man and of several landmark events in his family life. Extensive commentaries and notes by Wayne R. Kime provide further detail, including a history of Cantonment North Fork Canadian River, a six-company post Dodge established and commanded in the region.

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.

Lt. Col. Richard Irving Dodge’s journals, written with utter candor for his eyes only, are the fullest firsthand account we possess of Gen. George Crook’s Powder River Expedition against the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians, which culminated in Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie’s resounding destruction of Dull Knife’s forces on November 25, 1876. Editor Wayne R. Kime, with his customary flair, has transcribed the journals from Dodge’s pocket-size notebooks and has provided a pertinent introduction and well-crafted, thoroughly illuminating annotations. Dodge’s journals will clearly prove useful to specialists in U.S. -Indian relations and the Great Sioux War, but they will also appeal to a variety of readers because of Dodge’s lively style and his range of subject matter. With vigorous intelligence, he describes such topics as General Crook as a military leader and strategist, the merits of infantry versus cavalry against the Plains Indians, the effects of subzero weather in Wyoming on a large army far from its sources of supply, and of course, the elusiveness of military glory.

In later decades he played a continuing role in the cultural life of the young nation, numbering among his friends and associates a great many other writers, editors, and publishers.".

Advance man, press agent, and publicist extraordinaire, John M. Burke (1842–1917) was instrumental in turning William F. Cody into the iconic persona of Buffalo Bill. And with this biography, published in 1893, Burke put the finishing touches on the legend that persists to this day. This new, definitive edition includes the full text and all the photographs and line drawings of Burke’s original, while providing critical background details on the literary sources, historical characters, and events that figure in the work. With “a few plain truths, unadorned,” Burke purported to give a frank account of Buffalo Bill’s life. Hostile Indians, gunfights, cattle stampedes: Cody’s Wild West was fraught with peril at every turn. This “Chevalier Bayard of American Bordermen” exemplified courage and daring while often narrowly escaping certain death and he earned the respect and admiration of not only his fellow frontiersmen but also European royalty. Burke recounts Cody’s duel with Chief Yellow Hand; his role as army scout, buffalo hunter, Pony Express rider, and international celebrity; and his associations with well-known figures like Kit Carson, Sitting Bull, General Phil Sheridan, and Queen Victoria. A brilliant instance of mythmaking by a true believer, Burke’s portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody as frontiersman and hero is a tribute to the romance of the Wild West and a canonical volume in the American story.

Daily journals recount a scientific expedition's five-month trek into the Black Hills of the Dakotas to determine if rumors of gold were true, which the author describes as the most delightful summer of my life. He describes the natural landscape and its wildlife, eccentric characters, and politic

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.

The exodus of the Northern Cheyennes in 1878 and 1879, an attempt to flee from Indian Territory to their Montana homeland, is an important event in American Indian history. It is equally important in the history of towns like Oberlin, Kansas, where Cheyenne warriors killed more than forty settlers. The Cheyennes, in turn, suffered losses through violent encounters with the U.S. Army. More than a century later, the story remains familiar because it has been told by historians and novelists, and on film. In The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers explore how the event has been remembered, told, and retold. They examine the recollections of Indians and settlers and their descendants, and they consider local history, mass-media treatments, and literature to draw thought-provoking conclusions about how this story has changed over time. The Cheyennes’ journey has always been recounted in melodramatic stereotypes, and for the last fifty years most versions have featured “noble savages” trying to reclaim their birthright. Here, Leiker and Powers deconstruct those stereotypes and transcend them, pointing out that history is never so simple. “The Cheyennes’ flight,” they write, “had left white and Indian bones alike scattered along its route from Oklahoma to Montana.” In this view, the descendants of the Cheyennes and the settlers they encountered are all westerners who need history as a “way of explaining the bones and arrowheads” that littered the plains. Leiker and Powers depict a rural West whose diverse peoples—Euro-American and Native American alike—seek to preserve their heritage through memory and history. Anyone who lives in the contemporary Great Plains or who wants to understand the West as a whole will find this book compelling.

Between 1893 and 1903, Jesse H. Bratley worked in Indian schools across five reservations in the American West. As a teacher Bratley was charged with forcibly assimilating Native Americans through education. Although tasked with eradicating their culture, Bratley became entranced by it—collecting artifacts and taking glass plate photographs to document the Native America he encountered. Today, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s Jesse H. Bratley Collection consists of nearly 500 photographs and 1,000 pottery and basketry pieces, beadwork, weapons, toys, musical instruments, and other objects traced to the S’Klallam, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples. This visual and material archive serves as a lens through which to view a key moment in US history—when Native Americans were sequestered onto reservation lands, forced into unfamiliar labor economies, and attacked for their religious practices. Education, the government hoped, would be the final tool to permanently transform Indigenous bodies through moral instruction in Western dress, foodways, and living habits. Yet Lindsay Montgomery and Chip Colwell posit that Bratley’s collection constitutes “objects of survivance”—things and images that testify not to destruction and loss but to resistance and survival. Interwoven with documents and interviews, Objects of Survivance illuminates how the US government sought to control Native Americans and how Indigenous peoples endured in the face of such oppression. Rejecting the narrative that such objects preserve dying Native cultures, Objects of Survivance reframes the Bratley Collection, showing how tribal members have reconnected to these items, embracing them as part of their past and reclaiming them as part of their contemporary identities. This unique visual and material record of the early American Indian school experience and story of tribal perseverance will be of value to anyone interested in US history, Native American studies, and social justice. Co-published with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science