Fort Union And The Frontier Army In The Southwest

Forts and Forays is a rare account of frontier soldiering in the pre-Civil War Southwest by an enlisted man. James A. Bennett joined the regular army in 1849 and was stationed in New Mexico for six years before he deserted to Mexico. Assigned to the First Dragoons, he visited most major New Mexico posts such as Forts Union, Craig, and Fillmore. His company was stationed at or passed through Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Socorro, and other New Mexico settlements. In six years, his rank climbed from private to sergeant before an unknown infraction reduced him to the ranks. Bennett served under future Civil War generals Edwin V. Sumner, Richard S. Ewell, and John W. Davidson. During his service, Bennett waged war on the Kicarilla, Mogollon, Mescalero, and Mimbres Apaches, the Navajos, and the Utes, suffering serious wounds at the Battle of Cienguilla Forts and Forays is a unique glimpse into the routine duties and terrifying ordeals of soldiering in the antebellum Southwest.

For fifteen years prior to the Civil War, the American army was the major force in the Southwest's economic development. The military opened new roads into the West and built forts in the midst of Indian country, which encouraged homesteaders and farmers as well as ranchers and miners to follow and settle.There quickly emerged between soldier and citizen a system of trade and barter that revolved around the army's demand for local products. Robert Frazer offers here the first book-length study of the economic impact of the military in the Southwest during the early years of U.S. occupation. Utilizing a wealth of largely unpublished materials, Frazer provides a detailed account of the emergence and growth of the military-supported economy in the area from Taos to El Paso and Arizona to the Texas border. He reconstructs the daily life of commercial transaction between the forts and those anglos and Hispanos who profited from the trade. The need to supply the army resulted in a reorientation of the agricultural and commercial patterns inherited from the colonial period, and it brought on such effects as inflation, changes in diet, and wrangling over bid procedures. In addition, they army's need for goods and services invariably conflicted with the government's drive to economize: commanding officers repeatedly tried to reorganize the supplying of their troops, including one attempt to make the forts self-sufficient through raising cattle and putting in farms and gardens. The economic role of forts in the West is a fascinating part of military history that brings a new dimension of understanding to conventional accounts of the frontier army.

"The Southwest developed a mixed economy in an era when laissez-faire capitalism dominated. The army's demand for bread and beef, for instance, created the flour-milling and cattle industries of the Southwest. Moreover, the frontier army was the single largest employer of civilians and relied on them for much of the skilled labor needed in everything from building forts to shoeing horses"--Introd.

Fort Union history coincided with the burgeoning of nineteenth-century photography. Fort Union: A Photo History collects many of these photographs, some never before published, in a visual documentary of a bustling Old West fort. Close-ups of officers and enlisted men, as well as the buildings and activities of the fort, take the reader back in to a different era of American history.

From a headless burial to cocaine toothache drops, the true stories hidden in the Wild West's medical records are a match for its tallest tales. In the 19th century, when dying young was a fact of life, a routine bout of diarrhea could be fatal. No one had heard of viruses or bacteria, but they killed more soldiers on the frontier than hostile raiding parties. Physicians dispensed whiskey for TB, mercury for VD and arsenic for indigestion. Baseball injuries were considered to be in the line of duty and twice resulted in amputations at Fort Davis. Donna Gerstle Smith explains how an industrious laundress could earn more than a private, how a female army surgeon won the Medal of Honor and how a garrison illegally hung the local bartender.