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

Unlike previous histories, this book argues that the politics of slavery profoundly influenced the western mission of the regular army - affecting the hearts and minds of officers and enlisted men both as the nation plummented toward civil war."--BOOK JACKET.

In "Frontier Regulars" Robert M. Utley combines scholarship and drama to produce an impressive history of the final, massive drive by the Regular Army to subdue and control the American Indians and open the West during the twenty-five years followingathe Civil War. Here are incisive accounts of the campaign directed by Major General William Tecumseh ShermanOCofrom the first skirmishes with the Sioux over the Bozeman Trail defenses in 1866 to the final defeat and subjugation of the Northern Plains Indians in 1890. Utley's brilliant descriptions of military maneuvers and flaming battles are juxtaposed with a careful analysis of Sherman's army: its mode of operation, equipment, and recruitment; its lifestyle and relations with Congress and civilians. Proud of the United States Army and often sympathetic toward the Indians, Utley presents a balanced overview of the long struggle. He concludes that the frontier army was not the heroic vanguard of civilization as sometimes claimed and still less the barbaric band of butchers depicted in the humanitarian literature of the nineteenth century and the atonement literature of the twentieth. Rather, it was a group of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) men doing the best they could."

Frontiersmen in Blue is a comprehensive history of the achievements and failures of the United States Regular and Volunteer Armies that confronted the Indian tribes of the West in the two decades between the Mexican War and the close of the Civil War. Between 1848 and 1865 the men in blue fought nearly all of the western tribes. Robert Utley describes many of these skirmishes in consummate detail, including descriptions of garrison life that was sometimes agonizingly isolated, sometimes caught in the lightning moments of desperate battle.

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.

In 1898 the American Regular Army was a small frontier constabulary engaged in skirmishes with Indians and protesting workers. Forty-three years later, in 1941, it was a large modern army ready to wage global war against the Germans and the Japanese. In this definitive social history of America's standing army, military historian Edward Coffman tells how that critical transformation was accomplished. Coffman has spent years immersed in the official records, personal papers, memoirs, and biographies of regular army men, including such famous leaders as George Marshall, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur. He weaves their stories, and those of others he has interviewed, into the story of an army which grew from a small community of posts in China and the Philippines to a highly effective mechanized ground and air force. During these years, the U.S. Army conquered and controlled a colonial empire, military staff lived in exotic locales with their families, and soldiers engaged in combat in Cuba and the Pacific. In the twentieth century, the United States entered into alliances to fight the German army in World War I, and then again to meet the challenge of the Axis Powers in World War II. Coffman explains how a managerial revolution in the early 1900s provided the organizational framework and educational foundation for change, and how the combination of inspired leadership, technological advances, and a supportive society made it successful. In a stirring account of all aspects of garrison life, including race relations, we meet the men and women who helped reconfigure America's frontier army into a modern global force.

The first book devoted exclusively to teaching and documenting Userland Frontier, a collection of powerful, pre-written scripts for total web site management, this book teaches readers Frontier from the ground up. The guide is packed with examples, advice, tricks, and tips.

Here is the most detailed and most engagingly narrated history to date of the legendary two-year facedown and shootout in Lincoln. Until now, New Mexico's late nineteenth-century Lincoln County War has served primarily as the backdrop for a succession of mythical renderings of Billy the Kid in American popular culture. "In research, writing, and interpretation, High Noon in Lincoln is a superb book. It is one of the best books (maybe the best) ever written on a violent episode in the West."--Richard Maxwell Brown, author of Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism "A masterful account of the actual facts of the gory Lincoln County War and the role of Billy the Kid. . . . Utley separates the truth from legend without detracting from the gripping suspense and human interest of the story."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year In August 1862, after suffering decades of hardship, broken treaties, and relentless encroachment on their land, the Dakota leader Little Crow reluctantly agreed that his people must go to war. After six weeks of fighting, the uprising was smashed, thousands of Indians were taken prisoner by the US army, and 303 Dakotas were sentenced to death. President Lincoln, embroiled in the most devastating period of the Civil War, personally intervened to save the lives of 265 of the condemned men, but in the end, 38 Dakota men would be hanged in the largest government-sanctioned execution in U.S. history. Writing with uncommon immediacy and insight, Scott W. Berg details these events within the larger context of the Civil War, the history of the Dakota people and the subsequent United States–Indian wars, and brings to life this overlooked but seminal moment in American history.

Cheyennes at Dark Water Creek tells the tragic story of the southern bands of Cheyennes from the period following the Treaty of Medicine Lodge through the battles and skirmishes known as the Red River War. The Battle of Sappa Creek, the last encounter of that conflict, was a fight between a band of Cheyennes and a company of the Sixth Cavalry that took place in Kansas in April 1875. More Cheyennes were killed in that single engagement than in all the previous fighting of the war combined, and later there were controversial charges of massacre-and worse. William Y. Chalfant has used all known contemporaneous sources to recound the tragedy that occurred at the place known to the Cheyennes as Dark Water Creek. In Cheyenne memories, its name remains second only to Sand Creek in the terrible images and the sorrow it evokes. Chalfant tells the story in a sweeping style that recreates Cheyenne life on the southern plains. Beyond examining firsthand and secoundary accounts in detail, the author personally retraced the route of the army detachment from Fort Wallace, Kansas, to the battle site at Sappa Creek, and the route of the Cheyennes from Punished Women’s Fork to the Sappa. His recounting of the lives of the Indian and military participants, both leading up to and following the battle, is sure to appeal both to scholars of the Indian wars and to the general reader.