Forts And Supplies

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 Utilizing a wealth of largely unpublished materials, Frazer provides a detailed account of the emergence and growth of the military-supported economy in the area from Taos to El Paso and Arizona to the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.

From Montreal to New York City, the rivers and lakes of the Hudson and Champlain Valleys carved a path through the primeval forests of the Northeast. The rival French and English colonies on either end built strategic strongholds there throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The establishment of Fort St. Frederic at Crown Point gave the French command over the vital Lake Champlain. The French and Indian War saw the construction of frontier forts such as the English Fort William Henry at the headwaters of Lake George. Fortifications sometimes changed hands and names, such as when French-built Fort Carillon became the famed Fort Ticonderoga after a successful English siege. Author Michael G. Laramie charts the attempts to secure the most important chain of waterways in early North America.

Three army outposts built before and during the Civil War protected critical routes along the western trails at the North Platte River near what later became Casper. All had been abandoned by 1867, and their dramatic stories are mostly forgotten. The Post at Platte Bridge was a vital outpost on Albert Sidney Johnston's Utah War supply route. Camp Dodge and Platte Bridge Station, also called Fort Caspar, guarded telegraph lines from Native American sabotage. Violent winds, horrendous blizzards and scorching summers made life miserable. Tension reached a fever pitch at the Battle of Platte Bridge when Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho attacked a cavalry detachment led by Caspar Collins. Today, a reconstructed Fort Caspar stands as a vigilant reminder of the struggles at those lonely frontier stations. Local historian Johanna Wickman chronicles military efforts to keep the peace, wage war and merely survive.

John Adams is best remembered as one of the four Confederate generals who lay on the porch of the Carnton House, dead, when the Battle of Franklin ended on December 1, 1864. Unfortunately he did not leave much in the way of personal papers, and this biography has been pieced together from Army records and other sources, including accounts of his contemporaries. Adams's career in the U.S. Army gives us a good look at the military, the concept of Manifest Destiny, and the relations with those conquered by the Army, the Indians. This book also considers one of the more debated topics in Civil War history: why did a man who served the United States for most of his life resign his commission and side with the Confederacy?

In this expanded guidebook Jeff Barnes presents information about the historic forts and military posts of the Indian Wars in the late nineteenth century, including new entries, color photographs, and updated information on the forts.

Life in early New Mexico was often perilous. Geographic isolation attracted outlaws and ruffians, and skirmishes often arose between the indigenous tribes and settlers. In response, the U.S. government set up military forts and outposts to protect its new citizens. These strongholds include Fort Craig, where logs were made to look like cannons to fool Confederate troops. Kit Carson, John Pershing and Billy the Kid all called Fort Stanton home, before it became the first federal tuberculosis sanatorium and later a detention center for German prisoners of war. Author Donna Blake Birchell relates little-known yet highly important Civil War battles, the tragedies of the Navajo and Mescalero Apache internments and other dramatic frontier stories.

Fort Niagara is located at the northern mouth of the Niagara River about twelve miles from Niagara Falls. This scenic river and world-famous tourist area, which is now shared by the United States and Canada, was Iroquois territory in the 18th century being fought over by France and England. Fort Niagara: The British Occupation 1759–1796 dramatically portrays how the British Army took Fort Niagara from the French and Indians in 1759 and held it for thirty-seven years while Indian, French, British, and American warriors and diplomates vied for control of the Niagara River and its portage route into the Great Lake. If the men who garrisoned Fort Niagara joined up to “see the world,” they probably didn’t anticipate being stationed at this isolated frontier post. It is doubtful that few, if any, of the thousands who served at Fort Niagara recalled their time there as the best part of their military life, even as one British officer wrote home that it wasn’t as bad as he had expected. Some died at the fort, in raids out of the fort, or by accidents in the icy cold and volatile waters of the Great Lakes. Others, thinking they were on their way home for a welcomed leave, were unexpectedly rerouted to Boston in 1775 and fought in the battles of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and other famous battles of the Revolution. This second book about Fort Niagara by Patricia Kay Scott and William E. Utley carries on the history presented in Fort Niagara, the Key to the Indian Oceans and the French Movement to Dominate North America, published in 2019.