The Frontier Army In The Settlement Of The West

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.

The author of "The Fighting Men of the Civil War" now masterfully chronicles the grand history of the territory beyond the Mississippi, with particular attention to exploration, expansion, conflict, and settlement.

The idea of the West conjures exciting images of tenacious men and women, huge expanses of unclaimed territory, and feelings of both adventure and lonesome isolation. Located astride communication lines linking San Antonio, El Paso, Presidio, and Chihuahua City, the United States Army’s post at Fort Davis commanded a strategic position at a military, cultural, and economic crossroads of nineteenth-century Texas. Using extensive research and careful scrutiny of long forgotten records, Robert Wooster brings his readers into the world of Fort Davis, a place of encounter, conquest, and community. The fort here spawned a thriving civilian settlement and served as the economic nexus for regional development Frontier Crossroads schools its readers in the daily lives of soldiers, their dependents, and civilians at the fort and in the surrounding area. The resulting history of the intriguing blend of Hispanic, African American, Anglo, and European immigrants who came to Fort Davis is a benchmark volume that will serve as the standard to which other post histories will be compared. The military garrisons of Fort Davis represented a rich mosaic of nineteenth-century American life. Each of the army’s four black regiments served there following the Civil War, and its garrisons engaged in many of the army’s grueling campaigns against Apache and Comanche Indians. Characters such as artist and officer Arthur T. Lee, William “Pecos Bill” Shafter, and Benjamin Grierson and his family come alive under Wooster’s pen. Frontier Crossroads will enrich its readers with its careful analysis of life on the frontier. This book will appeal to military and social historians, Texas history buffs, and those seeking a record of adventure.

Historians have long assumed that ethnic and racial divisions in post–Civil War America were reflected in the U.S. Army, of whose enlistees 40 percent were foreign-born. Now Kevin Adams shows that the frontier army was characterized by a “Victorian class divide” that overshadowed ethnic prejudices. Class and Race in the Frontier Army marks the first application of recent research on class, race, and ethnicity to the social and cultural history of military life on the western frontier. Adams draws on a wealth of military records and soldiers’ diaries and letters to reconstruct everyday army life—from work and leisure to consumption, intellectual pursuits, and political activity—and shows that an inflexible class barrier stood between officers and enlisted men. As Adams relates, officers lived in relative opulence while enlistees suffered poverty, neglect, and abuse. Although racism was ingrained in official policy and informal behavior, no similar prejudice colored the experience of soldiers who were immigrants. Officers and enlisted men paid much less attention to ethnic differences than to social class—officers flaunting and protecting their status, enlisted men seething with class resentment. Treating the army as a laboratory to better understand American society in the Gilded Age, Adams suggests that military attitudes mirrored civilian life in that era—with enlisted men, especially, illustrating the emerging class-consciousness among the working poor. Class and Race in the Frontier Army offers fresh insight into the interplay of class, race, and ethnicity in late-nineteenth-century America.

William Tecumseh Sherman is known primarily for having cut a swath of destruction through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War. From the fame of these years, however, he moved into an eighteen-year phase of “insuring the tranquility” of the vast region of the American West. As commander of the Division of the Missouri from 1865 to 1869 and General of the Army of the United States under President Grant from 1869 to 1883, Sherman facilitated expansion and settlement in the West while suppressing the raids of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, Comanche, and Crow Indians. Robert G. Athearn explores Sherman’s and his army’s roles in the settling of the West, especially within the broad framework of railroad construction, Indian policy, political infighting, and popular opinion.