What do you think?
Rate this book
The Old West #3
The Soldiers
A pictorial survey of the U.S. Army soldier's daily life in the early West, Indian wars, Custer's last stand, etc.
239 pages, Leather Bound
First published January 1, 1975
5 people are currently reading
104 people want to read
About the author
David Nevin
35 books27 followersDavid Reinhardt Nevin was born in Washington. His father, a veterinarian in the US Army when it had a horse cavalry, was soon assigned to Fort Sam Houston in Texas. Mr. Nevin joined the US Navy as a teenager and served in the Pacific. After the war he did poorly in college, but could write well enough to be hired as a police reporter for The Brownsville (Texas) Herald. That led to work for Time and Life magazines.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 23, 2021
I have always liked the look of this series of books but had never read any and I often thought they might be of the 'pot-boiler' variety but how wrong could I be. This one is excellent and David Nevin has covered the Indian wars from the soldiers' point of view and linked in the history of the battles on the plains superbly. Once started it was difficult to put down and it was something of a disappointment when in ended - on a high I might add with great detail on Custer at the Little Big Horn. An additional point is that the illustrations are also superb with many double-page coloured and black and white illustrations from contemporary photographs.
In 1845 the territory from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast had 300,000 proud, possessive Indians living in it but 50 years later there was not a single truly free Indian left. This followed many series of campaigns by the soldiers, some of whom enjoyed the camaraderie of the Western outposts but more often than not they were out on the Plains, as the soldiers related it, covering '40 miles a day on beans and hay'. And conditions varied massively from scorching desert , where water was in short supply, to frost covered tundra where there was very little comfort and often very little shelter.
The Indians were often on the move but they were always aware, and took, the opportunity to ambush the various regiments that sought them out. Indeed it resulted in a bloody war with mass killings, particularly when the army, under Custer, wiped out a Cheyenne camp near the Wichita River, admirably captured in an atmospheric, and dare I say realistic, painting by Charles Schreyvogel, who, ironically, never saw a battle at first hand in his life!
All the greats of both sides feature in the action, for instance Generals Sheridan and Sherman, and, of course, the enigmatic Custer, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Crazy Horse, all play their parts in a riveting and entertaining history of the period.
While reading it I was reminded of our childhood games of cowboys and Indians but the real thing was nothing like our carefree games; if we had understood the significance of what was going on, I'm not too sure we would have played with such gusto. I must confess that I often wanted to take the part of Geronimo, I think I liked the name!
In 1845 the territory from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast had 300,000 proud, possessive Indians living in it but 50 years later there was not a single truly free Indian left. This followed many series of campaigns by the soldiers, some of whom enjoyed the camaraderie of the Western outposts but more often than not they were out on the Plains, as the soldiers related it, covering '40 miles a day on beans and hay'. And conditions varied massively from scorching desert , where water was in short supply, to frost covered tundra where there was very little comfort and often very little shelter.
The Indians were often on the move but they were always aware, and took, the opportunity to ambush the various regiments that sought them out. Indeed it resulted in a bloody war with mass killings, particularly when the army, under Custer, wiped out a Cheyenne camp near the Wichita River, admirably captured in an atmospheric, and dare I say realistic, painting by Charles Schreyvogel, who, ironically, never saw a battle at first hand in his life!
All the greats of both sides feature in the action, for instance Generals Sheridan and Sherman, and, of course, the enigmatic Custer, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Crazy Horse, all play their parts in a riveting and entertaining history of the period.
While reading it I was reminded of our childhood games of cowboys and Indians but the real thing was nothing like our carefree games; if we had understood the significance of what was going on, I'm not too sure we would have played with such gusto. I must confess that I often wanted to take the part of Geronimo, I think I liked the name!
October 15, 2009
This is a very easy book to get lost in. For one, the picture editing was superb and the format big enough for spreads of old photos. The details and dimensions made it like looking through a stereoscope and being brought unsettlingly close among a skating party of officers wives and children on a frozen pond near a Montana post in 1880, or bivouacked black troops posing jauntily with bottles and six-shooters. The reproduced artifacts (recruiting posters, cavalry guidons, an army surgeon’s field kit, all bone saws and trepans) are also big and textured and scary. In short, Time-Life Books Inc. made great use of archival materials to ensure that this overview of Army life on the frontier, 1865-90 (Sand Creek to Wounded Knee, roughly), was as vivid and striking as possible; and then there’s the prose:
In[Boston newspaperman-turned-army officer John:]Cremony’s day there was a 125-mile stretch between the New Mexican settlements of Dona Ana and Socorro without a single habitation. For 95 of those miles there was neither shade nor water. Worse yet was the imminent danger of attack by Apaches, who lurked in the surrounding hills. Because of this threat, the stretch was known as the Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of Death—and Cremony made the trip alone.
He had a fine horse and made the trip without difficulty. After spending two days in Socorro he started back toward Dona Ana at 3 o’clock in the morning. By mid-afternoon he had made about 55 miles; for half of them he trotted on foot beside his horse in order to save its strength for any emergency that might arise. The sun ‘glared like a shield of red-hot brass,’ he later said, and he was thinking of stopping for a while when he saw a column of dust moving rapidly toward him from the left. To John Cremony that meant Apaches.
David Nevin spent his youth at ghostly old western forts as the son of a U.S. Cavalry veterinarian (the army used horse solders until the 1930s), and wrote two other books in this series, The Mexican War and The Texans, which I have to read. His pulpy, punchy style is always clean, concise, and absorbing, as in his narrative of John Cremony’s galloping fight with Apache warriors, full of shortcuts and switchbacks and embedded arrows, through 70 miles of New Mexico desert. Some of the feats of arms—-of endurance, rather—-retold in this book are simply incredible.
In January 1867 a young cavalry lieutenant named George A. Armes led 55 men to the relief of a party of woodchoppers who were surrounded in Dakota by Cheyenne warriors 40 miles away. He had been dispatched on patrol to recover some livestock taken by rustlers and was camped in a blizzard when a woodsman who had escaped the Indian siege found him.
Armes broke camp at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in driving snow. At 8 a.m. he stopped for an hour, ate hastily, and then moved on again. The snow was blinding. Men rode with their faces down, their eyes slitted, their hands tucked into their coats. Twenty miles farther on, a concealed mass of Indians burst from the woods with shrieks and rifle fire, the noise of their attack partially muffled by the snow. Armes rallied his men and charged, driving the Indians over the ridge and into a ravine deep with snow. His horsemen floundered three miles up the ravine before he admitted that the Indians had escaped. One of his own men was missing, either killed or captured.
He gave his men time to brew coffee and take a hasty meal, and then marched again for the woodchoppers’ camp. The snow was a foot deep and drifting on level ground, as much as six feet deep in depressions. The soldiers reached the camp and drove the Indians away. The blizzard was increasing, the temperature falling. The soldiers warmed themselves at the woodsmen’s fires, ate another quick meal and mounted again to attack the Indians in their village, 10 miles ahead. At 4 a.m. Wednesday they charged the village—and found it empty. But the Indians’ trail was plain in the heavy snow, and the soldiers followed it for 10 more miles, sometimes struggling through drifts as much as 10 feet deep.
At noon Wednesday Armes gave up the hopeless pursuit. He turned back, and between 11 and 12 o’clock that night the troop reached an isolated ranch. Armes was lifted off his horse. The ice on his face was so thick that he could not speak. Only 10 of his 55 men were still functioning; he brought the remainder back in wagons, and most of these men had lost toes and fingers. In 45 hours they had marched the appalling total of 145 miles, fought two actions, eaten three meals, rested hardly at all, and had never been out of the cold and snow.
So yeah, the frontier really offered American soldiers the worst of everything: insane extremities of climate, a determined enemy defending that which is most worth fighting for—-freedom, family, a “way of life”-—and officers that were kind of crazy, though one could argue that Lt. Armes lacked only Arctic overshoes and buffalo robes, and furthermore had, back in 1867, what everyone realized a decade later to be the “right” idea (right tactically; of course its not right at all, morally): “officers are expected to continue pursuit until capture”--capture meaning destruction--was the winning mantra of General Nelson Miles, a virtuoso Indian fighter who presided over the final massacre of resistance at Wounded Knee, in 1890, and, if we go by the page-filling portrait in this book, a dashingly handsome blade, a mighty specimen of murderous empire-building Victorian male pulchritude. Miles, a dry goods clerk who purchased an officer’s commission when the Civil War started, was chief of the army by the turn of the century, when we entered the Big Imperial Game, when America, having consolidated the continent and built the world’s greatest industrial powerhouse, roughed up feeble Spain—-an easy enough mark, the beginner has to pace himself—-and made off with its Caribbean and Asiatic colonies.
The men under Armes, like the rest of the rank-and-file grunts Nevin portrays in this book, suffered a lot for that classic American reason: the government half-assed it for a long time. America’s big 19th century conquests (of the far West in the Mexican War of 1846-47; of the rebellious Confederacy; of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898-1902) were done under a halo of good, idealistic propaganda, with an army festively swollen by jingoistic volunteers...but when the conquest wasn’t a glamorous pageant; when the enemy wasn’t another state but bands of free people; when it came down to the obvious dirty work of destroying or displacing the indigenous families, soldiering became appropriately déclassé, and the military budget a grudged pittance. I guess there’s some residue of morality to that, or at least of shame; or maybe it was just denial and cognitive dissonance in the face of so "un-American" a reality. By the late 1860s many of the Plains Indians realized what was coming, and resolved to fight, and this was exactly the time at which the US government, exhausted by the Civil War, began to vacillate, Nevin writes, “between wishing the problem would go away and deciding it was not that serious after all. This was the real reason that soldiers of the time were underequipped, underfed and underpaid.”
And boy did they treat these guys like shit! President Grant’s leech brother Orvil and secretary of War Belknap (the secretary of Defense, in our more euphemistic times) sold lucrative post trader contracts, and the steep kickbacks meant that the traders themselves, in order to clear a profit, had to overcharge the troops for the items the army refused to provide—-yep, the government was actively fleecing its own troops. Shortly before his final battle, Custer testified before Congress about this swindle, incurred the displeasure of President Grant and thereby screwed his career, and was only able to participate in the Little Big Horn expedition by getting down on his knees and tearfully begging his commanding officer for a second chance; this happened at a fort that I live near but have never visited. He didn’t want to die, in fact he hoped a timely victory would make him president, but as one of America’s original media celebrities, the idea of going out in a blaze of glory while still young, beautiful and beloved probably wasn’t repulsive to his instincts.
Soldier’s pay was anyway so low most were never out of debt. They could only afford bargain-basement whores (“soldier’s woman” was cowboy slang for an ugly or handicapped prostitute). Their rations (at worst green, rotten bacon and biscuits so hard they had to be broken open with rifle butts) were inedible and, seemingly, anti-nutritive; scurvy was frequent. Their training was a matter of indifference. There was little to no target practice, or instruction in riding—-cavalry recruits, many of them urban immigrant laborers from the east unable to find work during the long depression of the 1870s, were expected to just hop on and tangle with Indian warriors who’d been on horseback practically since birth. Army law listed 12 death penalty offenses, and tormenting enlisted men with harsh punishments (the ball-and-chain; being strung up by the thumbs; marching up and down the parade ground all day long with a 40-lb log; languishing in a deep pit covered with planks, one Custer's inventions) was an officer pastime surpassed only by prodigious drinking (the ledgers of many post traders have survived, and list, gallon-by-gallon, the weekly whisky intake of these bored, disillusioned martinets). “Tyrannical superiors” contributed, Nevin writes, to the astronomical desertion rate: fully one-third of soldiers recruited during the Indian wars ended up running away. Desertion amounted to a "vernal rite": as soon as weather became hospitable to the wayfarer, men took off.
This spectacle of social unhealth dwarfs any photo shopped montage of fast food ads and broken-up street protests Adbusters cares to put forth as apocalyptic: the US Army had sadistic drunks lording over malnourished chain gangs made up of desperate immigrants, the unemployed, drifters, war-lovers who re-enlisted after the Civil War, ex-cons, fugitives trying to stay a step ahead of their pasts and, finally, the usual allotment of fresh-faced boys naively looking for adventure. They were assigned with exterminating the native tribes of what would become 14 American states, or forcing them onto reservations barren but for the same whisky traders and sutlers who gouged the troops. And they got it done, as Nevin marvels again and again. The component parts and ethos of an effective killing machine don't have to be, can't ever be, socially healthy, "Be All You Can Be" and "Army of One" notwithstanding. For all the incompetence, corruption, neglect and dithering that characterized its administration, the US Army accomplished what the country wanted: to defeat the Indian warriors and open up the tribes’ ancestral hunting grounds to settlement, to agriculture, to capitalism, to “progress...or whatever you want to call it,” as General Sheridan shrugged in his Memoirs.
Nevin’s mixture of breathless adventure story prose and grim inventory of social suffering reminded me of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, and a lot of the military fiction I devoured as a kid. (“Childish imperialism,” Mandelstam’s phrase for his boyish entrancement by the martial spectacle of St. Petersburg's parade grounds.) Sharpe moves in the same universe of deprived, terrorized enlisted men, second-rate junior officers and an ungrateful, eye-averting, slightly ashamed government and nation. Britain defeated Napoleon and secured its empire using an armed mob largely made up of social cast offs—-“the scum of the earth,” as the Duke of Wellington once referred to his victorious army. Without ever forgetting that they were employed as instruments of terror, I’m very touched by the ramshackle pride America’s frontier soldiers could salvage, the grimy esprit de corps they managed to rig up. Nevin quotes an old barracks ballad:
Oh the drums would roll, upon my soul,
This is the style we’d go,
Forty miles a day on beans and hay
In the Regular Army O
In[Boston newspaperman-turned-army officer John:]Cremony’s day there was a 125-mile stretch between the New Mexican settlements of Dona Ana and Socorro without a single habitation. For 95 of those miles there was neither shade nor water. Worse yet was the imminent danger of attack by Apaches, who lurked in the surrounding hills. Because of this threat, the stretch was known as the Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of Death—and Cremony made the trip alone.
He had a fine horse and made the trip without difficulty. After spending two days in Socorro he started back toward Dona Ana at 3 o’clock in the morning. By mid-afternoon he had made about 55 miles; for half of them he trotted on foot beside his horse in order to save its strength for any emergency that might arise. The sun ‘glared like a shield of red-hot brass,’ he later said, and he was thinking of stopping for a while when he saw a column of dust moving rapidly toward him from the left. To John Cremony that meant Apaches.
David Nevin spent his youth at ghostly old western forts as the son of a U.S. Cavalry veterinarian (the army used horse solders until the 1930s), and wrote two other books in this series, The Mexican War and The Texans, which I have to read. His pulpy, punchy style is always clean, concise, and absorbing, as in his narrative of John Cremony’s galloping fight with Apache warriors, full of shortcuts and switchbacks and embedded arrows, through 70 miles of New Mexico desert. Some of the feats of arms—-of endurance, rather—-retold in this book are simply incredible.
In January 1867 a young cavalry lieutenant named George A. Armes led 55 men to the relief of a party of woodchoppers who were surrounded in Dakota by Cheyenne warriors 40 miles away. He had been dispatched on patrol to recover some livestock taken by rustlers and was camped in a blizzard when a woodsman who had escaped the Indian siege found him.
Armes broke camp at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in driving snow. At 8 a.m. he stopped for an hour, ate hastily, and then moved on again. The snow was blinding. Men rode with their faces down, their eyes slitted, their hands tucked into their coats. Twenty miles farther on, a concealed mass of Indians burst from the woods with shrieks and rifle fire, the noise of their attack partially muffled by the snow. Armes rallied his men and charged, driving the Indians over the ridge and into a ravine deep with snow. His horsemen floundered three miles up the ravine before he admitted that the Indians had escaped. One of his own men was missing, either killed or captured.
He gave his men time to brew coffee and take a hasty meal, and then marched again for the woodchoppers’ camp. The snow was a foot deep and drifting on level ground, as much as six feet deep in depressions. The soldiers reached the camp and drove the Indians away. The blizzard was increasing, the temperature falling. The soldiers warmed themselves at the woodsmen’s fires, ate another quick meal and mounted again to attack the Indians in their village, 10 miles ahead. At 4 a.m. Wednesday they charged the village—and found it empty. But the Indians’ trail was plain in the heavy snow, and the soldiers followed it for 10 more miles, sometimes struggling through drifts as much as 10 feet deep.
At noon Wednesday Armes gave up the hopeless pursuit. He turned back, and between 11 and 12 o’clock that night the troop reached an isolated ranch. Armes was lifted off his horse. The ice on his face was so thick that he could not speak. Only 10 of his 55 men were still functioning; he brought the remainder back in wagons, and most of these men had lost toes and fingers. In 45 hours they had marched the appalling total of 145 miles, fought two actions, eaten three meals, rested hardly at all, and had never been out of the cold and snow.
So yeah, the frontier really offered American soldiers the worst of everything: insane extremities of climate, a determined enemy defending that which is most worth fighting for—-freedom, family, a “way of life”-—and officers that were kind of crazy, though one could argue that Lt. Armes lacked only Arctic overshoes and buffalo robes, and furthermore had, back in 1867, what everyone realized a decade later to be the “right” idea (right tactically; of course its not right at all, morally): “officers are expected to continue pursuit until capture”--capture meaning destruction--was the winning mantra of General Nelson Miles, a virtuoso Indian fighter who presided over the final massacre of resistance at Wounded Knee, in 1890, and, if we go by the page-filling portrait in this book, a dashingly handsome blade, a mighty specimen of murderous empire-building Victorian male pulchritude. Miles, a dry goods clerk who purchased an officer’s commission when the Civil War started, was chief of the army by the turn of the century, when we entered the Big Imperial Game, when America, having consolidated the continent and built the world’s greatest industrial powerhouse, roughed up feeble Spain—-an easy enough mark, the beginner has to pace himself—-and made off with its Caribbean and Asiatic colonies.
The men under Armes, like the rest of the rank-and-file grunts Nevin portrays in this book, suffered a lot for that classic American reason: the government half-assed it for a long time. America’s big 19th century conquests (of the far West in the Mexican War of 1846-47; of the rebellious Confederacy; of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898-1902) were done under a halo of good, idealistic propaganda, with an army festively swollen by jingoistic volunteers...but when the conquest wasn’t a glamorous pageant; when the enemy wasn’t another state but bands of free people; when it came down to the obvious dirty work of destroying or displacing the indigenous families, soldiering became appropriately déclassé, and the military budget a grudged pittance. I guess there’s some residue of morality to that, or at least of shame; or maybe it was just denial and cognitive dissonance in the face of so "un-American" a reality. By the late 1860s many of the Plains Indians realized what was coming, and resolved to fight, and this was exactly the time at which the US government, exhausted by the Civil War, began to vacillate, Nevin writes, “between wishing the problem would go away and deciding it was not that serious after all. This was the real reason that soldiers of the time were underequipped, underfed and underpaid.”
And boy did they treat these guys like shit! President Grant’s leech brother Orvil and secretary of War Belknap (the secretary of Defense, in our more euphemistic times) sold lucrative post trader contracts, and the steep kickbacks meant that the traders themselves, in order to clear a profit, had to overcharge the troops for the items the army refused to provide—-yep, the government was actively fleecing its own troops. Shortly before his final battle, Custer testified before Congress about this swindle, incurred the displeasure of President Grant and thereby screwed his career, and was only able to participate in the Little Big Horn expedition by getting down on his knees and tearfully begging his commanding officer for a second chance; this happened at a fort that I live near but have never visited. He didn’t want to die, in fact he hoped a timely victory would make him president, but as one of America’s original media celebrities, the idea of going out in a blaze of glory while still young, beautiful and beloved probably wasn’t repulsive to his instincts.
Soldier’s pay was anyway so low most were never out of debt. They could only afford bargain-basement whores (“soldier’s woman” was cowboy slang for an ugly or handicapped prostitute). Their rations (at worst green, rotten bacon and biscuits so hard they had to be broken open with rifle butts) were inedible and, seemingly, anti-nutritive; scurvy was frequent. Their training was a matter of indifference. There was little to no target practice, or instruction in riding—-cavalry recruits, many of them urban immigrant laborers from the east unable to find work during the long depression of the 1870s, were expected to just hop on and tangle with Indian warriors who’d been on horseback practically since birth. Army law listed 12 death penalty offenses, and tormenting enlisted men with harsh punishments (the ball-and-chain; being strung up by the thumbs; marching up and down the parade ground all day long with a 40-lb log; languishing in a deep pit covered with planks, one Custer's inventions) was an officer pastime surpassed only by prodigious drinking (the ledgers of many post traders have survived, and list, gallon-by-gallon, the weekly whisky intake of these bored, disillusioned martinets). “Tyrannical superiors” contributed, Nevin writes, to the astronomical desertion rate: fully one-third of soldiers recruited during the Indian wars ended up running away. Desertion amounted to a "vernal rite": as soon as weather became hospitable to the wayfarer, men took off.
This spectacle of social unhealth dwarfs any photo shopped montage of fast food ads and broken-up street protests Adbusters cares to put forth as apocalyptic: the US Army had sadistic drunks lording over malnourished chain gangs made up of desperate immigrants, the unemployed, drifters, war-lovers who re-enlisted after the Civil War, ex-cons, fugitives trying to stay a step ahead of their pasts and, finally, the usual allotment of fresh-faced boys naively looking for adventure. They were assigned with exterminating the native tribes of what would become 14 American states, or forcing them onto reservations barren but for the same whisky traders and sutlers who gouged the troops. And they got it done, as Nevin marvels again and again. The component parts and ethos of an effective killing machine don't have to be, can't ever be, socially healthy, "Be All You Can Be" and "Army of One" notwithstanding. For all the incompetence, corruption, neglect and dithering that characterized its administration, the US Army accomplished what the country wanted: to defeat the Indian warriors and open up the tribes’ ancestral hunting grounds to settlement, to agriculture, to capitalism, to “progress...or whatever you want to call it,” as General Sheridan shrugged in his Memoirs.
Nevin’s mixture of breathless adventure story prose and grim inventory of social suffering reminded me of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, and a lot of the military fiction I devoured as a kid. (“Childish imperialism,” Mandelstam’s phrase for his boyish entrancement by the martial spectacle of St. Petersburg's parade grounds.) Sharpe moves in the same universe of deprived, terrorized enlisted men, second-rate junior officers and an ungrateful, eye-averting, slightly ashamed government and nation. Britain defeated Napoleon and secured its empire using an armed mob largely made up of social cast offs—-“the scum of the earth,” as the Duke of Wellington once referred to his victorious army. Without ever forgetting that they were employed as instruments of terror, I’m very touched by the ramshackle pride America’s frontier soldiers could salvage, the grimy esprit de corps they managed to rig up. Nevin quotes an old barracks ballad:
Oh the drums would roll, upon my soul,
This is the style we’d go,
Forty miles a day on beans and hay
In the Regular Army O
July 29, 2024
The Soldiers was a book from The Old West Series by Time-Life. There were black & white photos of the soldiers & the camps, letters, and maps. The cover was made from tooled leather. The book was made to look and feel like a horse’s saddle. This book made me wonder if they made it out alive or not. If so, how did their lives turn out?
March 18, 2025
I really like these books. They are fair and describe the events with a critical eye. “The Soldiers” is no exception. This book describes the role of the US Army, after the civil war, in fighting the indigenous peoples of the west. It explains the living conditions, the tactics, the patrols, the harsh conditions, and some of the battles, including the biggest army defeat, The Battle of the Little Big Horn, where the egocentric, insubordinate, and vainglorious George Custer, led his men, against orders, to their death at the hands of indigenous warriors. This is a book from the soldiers side, explaining both their cruelty and the attempt to placate the indigenous peoples. There are a number of good exposes of the generals and there attempts to battle their enemy. Of course, in the end the US Army won the war for the west and the once proud indigenous peoples began their confinement to the reservations set aside for them by the US government.
October 2, 2023
Pretty good, one of the best in the "Old West ", series!
November 10, 2024
Early on there's an editor's note that says "In the latter half of the 19th Century the U.S. Army and the Western Indian tribes battled over the land. Each side had its motives, its heroes, its victories and defeats. Recent books have described their confrontations...from the standpoint of the Indians. This volume tells the story from the soldiers' point of view."
Of course, that's the whole point of the volume, I understand. But...it really amounts to saying this:
"Both sides of this genocide had their own point of view. It's time now to tell you the story of the brave enforcers of genocide."
The result is as you might expect it to be. Though at least there's a good amount of time spent debunking the cult of Custer so there's that. The history work here is solid, it's just more than a little frustrating when the end conclusion on a lot of it is "that was a tragic chapter but think about how hard it was for those poor soldiers who were just in it for money and duty and occasionally adventure." This is a good volume to read along with Civil War material to remind you that while Sherman and Sheridan were great for fighting against slavery that didn't mean they weren't also awful on this issue.
Of course, that's the whole point of the volume, I understand. But...it really amounts to saying this:
"Both sides of this genocide had their own point of view. It's time now to tell you the story of the brave enforcers of genocide."
The result is as you might expect it to be. Though at least there's a good amount of time spent debunking the cult of Custer so there's that. The history work here is solid, it's just more than a little frustrating when the end conclusion on a lot of it is "that was a tragic chapter but think about how hard it was for those poor soldiers who were just in it for money and duty and occasionally adventure." This is a good volume to read along with Civil War material to remind you that while Sherman and Sheridan were great for fighting against slavery that didn't mean they weren't also awful on this issue.
February 14, 2012
When Johnny comes marching home again, Hurrah! Hurrah! But a lot of johnnies didn't make it home, old old west was a tuff horse to ride.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews