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A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West
From 1860 to 1890 the United States military engaged in war after war with the indigenous peoples of the West. Although numerous treaties recognized the rights of individual tribes, the U.S. government often did nothing to stop settlers from expanding into Indian territory. Some Indians fled, and others attempted to coexist with the newcomers, but many fought against the loss of homelands and traditional ways of life. Superior numbers, organization, and technology benefited the United States, yet Indian resistance was often skillful, heroic, and tenacious. This informative work serves as a guide to the battlefields and fits the episodes into the larger historical drama. John D. McDermott, who has spent a lifetime researching the events, discusses the equipment, organization, and lifeways of the combatants. He explains circumstances underlying the encounters and analyzes the significance of events. This detailed guide also leads students, tourists, and history buffs to monuments, parks, museums, and other sources of information about the wars.
211 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1998
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April 9, 2023
This small volume from 1998 is peculiar.
As a Westerner, born and bred, I tend to be most interested in American history which occurred west of the Mississippi, and at least west of that little range of well-weathered hillocks designated the Appalachians, especially that history beginning more or less about the time of the Civil War. The clashes between natives and whites has long been a blind spot of mine and I've been working on addressing that shortcoming. Many of these stories and incidents appear as mere footnotes in other, broader histories of the West and so remain obscure; at least, this has been my experience. I obtained McDermott's book as part of my goal of filling in the blanks a little better.
Many factors contribute to the intellectual challenge of trying to combine the Western Indian Wars into a single integrated drama. The many native tribes were ununified and isolated from one another by great distances, resulting in innumerable small, unrelated and uncoordinated clashes with whites. Furthermore, the US Army was severely reduced in manpower in the aftermath of the Civil War, and most enlisted soldiers were posted throughout the old South during Reconstruction. US troops stationed farther West were often less professional and their forts were usually severely undermanned. It's also true that the narrative of the Civil War is, for example, much more readable than are these disorderly and fragmentary events of the Indian Wars because so many of the Civil War's commanders have been elevated into legendary status. Even when some of these recently christened righteous heroes later ventured into the West, their larger-than-life statuses were rapidly tarnished on account of public disinterest and inadequate resources at their disposal. It seems to me, therefore, that one way to begin to understand these sad and sorry hodgepodge events as a single mythic structure is to first grapple with the more historically consequential battles, assembling them in chronological order regardless of geography, and to later append the less evocative stories and reconcile them with the more all-encompassing themes. And does McDermott help me achieve that goal? Yes, and no.
McDermott's book is chockfull of much of the information I sought. I was often impressed when he provided answers to questions that were most on my mind. This does not always happen when reading a book like this one. McDermott is a historian of the Indian Wars and a retired National Park Service administrator and I imagine he learned well how to answer the questions most on peoples' minds. The book is in two parts: 1. The Context and 2. Places to Visit. The second part is probably of more worth to me, being divided by regions and states, and then further subdivided with descriptions of historic sites, battlefields, museums and Indian heritage sites. Concise descriptions of events that took place at these sites are included in this section of the book. Of course by breaking things down geographically, we lose the chronological significance and sequence.
The first part of the book is more strange. Here we find a list of chapters which describe numerous and diverse aspects of life in the West, each chapter divided into the experiences of both US soldiers and natives. While interesting enough, little here is of immediate concern when trying to grasp the overarching story of the Indian Wars in the West. I felt as if over the years McDermott may have accumulated a great deal of information about these matters of "local color" which might have appeared in small, individual brochures, and that perhaps these notes were all compiled into the present series of chapters. I don't mean to suggest the writing is not good. McDermott is an excellent writer. But reading this material was like reading a collection of somewhat obscure facts and information trundled together perhaps as an aid for would-be writers of Western novels or movie makers as a guide to creating an authentic atmosphere for their works. This material was all very interesting, but it probably would make for a better series of brochures than to be joined together in a single book.
Yes: having read A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West, I do have a better grasp on the scale of the subject and how to begin to understand it as a whole. But no: while the second part in particular is valuable, this is not really the book I'd hoped it might be.
As a Westerner, born and bred, I tend to be most interested in American history which occurred west of the Mississippi, and at least west of that little range of well-weathered hillocks designated the Appalachians, especially that history beginning more or less about the time of the Civil War. The clashes between natives and whites has long been a blind spot of mine and I've been working on addressing that shortcoming. Many of these stories and incidents appear as mere footnotes in other, broader histories of the West and so remain obscure; at least, this has been my experience. I obtained McDermott's book as part of my goal of filling in the blanks a little better.
Many factors contribute to the intellectual challenge of trying to combine the Western Indian Wars into a single integrated drama. The many native tribes were ununified and isolated from one another by great distances, resulting in innumerable small, unrelated and uncoordinated clashes with whites. Furthermore, the US Army was severely reduced in manpower in the aftermath of the Civil War, and most enlisted soldiers were posted throughout the old South during Reconstruction. US troops stationed farther West were often less professional and their forts were usually severely undermanned. It's also true that the narrative of the Civil War is, for example, much more readable than are these disorderly and fragmentary events of the Indian Wars because so many of the Civil War's commanders have been elevated into legendary status. Even when some of these recently christened righteous heroes later ventured into the West, their larger-than-life statuses were rapidly tarnished on account of public disinterest and inadequate resources at their disposal. It seems to me, therefore, that one way to begin to understand these sad and sorry hodgepodge events as a single mythic structure is to first grapple with the more historically consequential battles, assembling them in chronological order regardless of geography, and to later append the less evocative stories and reconcile them with the more all-encompassing themes. And does McDermott help me achieve that goal? Yes, and no.
McDermott's book is chockfull of much of the information I sought. I was often impressed when he provided answers to questions that were most on my mind. This does not always happen when reading a book like this one. McDermott is a historian of the Indian Wars and a retired National Park Service administrator and I imagine he learned well how to answer the questions most on peoples' minds. The book is in two parts: 1. The Context and 2. Places to Visit. The second part is probably of more worth to me, being divided by regions and states, and then further subdivided with descriptions of historic sites, battlefields, museums and Indian heritage sites. Concise descriptions of events that took place at these sites are included in this section of the book. Of course by breaking things down geographically, we lose the chronological significance and sequence.
The first part of the book is more strange. Here we find a list of chapters which describe numerous and diverse aspects of life in the West, each chapter divided into the experiences of both US soldiers and natives. While interesting enough, little here is of immediate concern when trying to grasp the overarching story of the Indian Wars in the West. I felt as if over the years McDermott may have accumulated a great deal of information about these matters of "local color" which might have appeared in small, individual brochures, and that perhaps these notes were all compiled into the present series of chapters. I don't mean to suggest the writing is not good. McDermott is an excellent writer. But reading this material was like reading a collection of somewhat obscure facts and information trundled together perhaps as an aid for would-be writers of Western novels or movie makers as a guide to creating an authentic atmosphere for their works. This material was all very interesting, but it probably would make for a better series of brochures than to be joined together in a single book.
Yes: having read A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West, I do have a better grasp on the scale of the subject and how to begin to understand it as a whole. But no: while the second part in particular is valuable, this is not really the book I'd hoped it might be.
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