On July 17, 1866, two soldiers and six wagoners were killed by Sioux Indians. In the next two weeks, fourteen more men died in Sioux attacks. The attacks continued through the summer and fall. On December 21, disaster struck. Recklessly pursuing Indians across a wooded ridge, Brevet Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman and his company fell into an ambush. It was the worst military blunder of the Indian Wars before the Battle of the Little Big Horn ten years later. Margaret Irvin Carrington, like many officers’ wives, kept a journal of her stay in the outposts of the West. She recorded her impressions of the scenery and the inhabitants of Absaraka, in present-day Wyoming, Montana, and the western Dakotas. As the wife of the commander of Fort Phil Kearny, Colonel Henry B. Carrington, she experienced the sequence of events and the heightening of tensions that led to that bloody December day. She could not have known that her journal would come to such a shocking climax, with her husband's career at stake.

A reassessment of the military's role in developing the Western territories moves beyond combat stories and stereotypes to focus on more non-martial accomplishments such as exploration, gathering scientific data, and building towns.

Fort William Henry and Fort Phil Kearny were both military outposts of the North American frontier. Both lasted but briefly--about two years from construction until their walls went up in flames. And both saw what were termed "massacres" by Indians outside their walls. This book reexamines the traumatic events at both forts. The Fort William Henry Massacre was condemned by both the British and the French as barbaric. Yet these European powers proved capable of similar crimes. The Fort Phil Kearny defeat, traditionally attributed to Captain William Fetterman's having disobeyed orders, has been scrutinized in recent years. Did the women present at that time write a distorted version of events? It would appear that his second-in-command, the rash Lieutenant George Grummond, led the charge over Lodge Trail Ridge. Or did he?

On the afternoon of June 25, 1867, an overwhelming force of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians quickly mounted a savage onslaught against General George Armstrong Custer’s battalion, driving the doomed troopers of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry to a small hill overlooking the Little Bighorn River, where Custer and his men bravely erected their heroic last stand. So goes the myth of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a myth perpetuated and reinforced for over 100 years. In truth, however, "Custer’s Last Stand" was neither the last of the fighting nor a stand. Using innovative and standard archaeological techniques, combined with historical documents and Indian eyewitness accounts, Richard Allan Fox, Jr. vividly replays this battle in astonishing detail. Through bullets, spent cartridges, and other material data, Fox identifies combat positions and tracks soldiers and Indians across the Battlefield. Guided by the history beneath our feet, and listening to the previously ignored Indian testimonies, Fox reveals scenes of panic and collapse and, ultimately, a story of the Custer battle quite different from the fatalistic versions of history. According to the author, the five companies of the Seventh Cavalry entered the fray in good order, following planned strategies and displaying tactical stability. It was the sudden disintegration of this cohesion that caused the troopers’ defeat. The end came quickly, unexpectedly, and largely amid terror and disarray. Archaeological evidences show that there was no determined fighting and little firearm resistance. The last soldiers to be killed had rushed from Custer Hill.

Cecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the Civil War era. It examines how prominent political figures interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation.