Soldiers at Play: Baseball on the American Frontier

In the post-Civil War era, the United States Army performed several tasks, but foremost among them was its role in the final conquest of Native Americans. As a tidal wave of population migrated to the Great Plains in the years immediately following the conclusion of the Civil War, the conflict between the Great Plains tribes and the United States intensified. It was a dynamic, turbulent, and violent era in which transcontinental railroads were completed, the great bison herds were annihilated, millions of acres of virgin soil were put to cultivation, and the military struggle with Native Americans finally ended. It was a time of high adventure, glory, shame, and waste. It was also a time during which the foundations for modern America's greatness were built, and it remains a luminous era in the national imagination.

American military forces reached unprecedented size during the Civil War. Once the conflict ended, however, demobilization quickly reduced the army and the navy to near pre-wartime numbers. In 1866, the Army Reorganization Act set the army's authorized strength at 54,302 officers and men, and over the next decade, Congress regularly whittled away at the army's manpower.¹ By 1878, the nation's land forces numbered 23,254 enlisted men and 2,153 officers. The small force of twenty-five regiments of infantry, ten regiments of cavalry, and five of artillery faced a variety of tasks, but pacifying the frontier occupied most of its efforts in the two decades following the Civil War.² Roughly two-thirds of the army's manpower was stationed on remote posts in the West as the army struggled to protect railroad construction workers, farmers, emigrants, and travelers on the transcontinental trails.

From Canada to Mexico, soldiers on the Great Plains contended with the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches who did not acquiesce when their homelands were critically threatened after the Civil War. A massive flood of Americans and recently arrived immigrants claimed lands on the Great Plains and mortally challenged the Native Americans' hopes to preserve their nomadic, horse-oriented, buffalo-dependent civilizations. For twenty-five years, the army and the Native Americans battled each other, and eventually, the lopsided war ended the Plains Indians' independence. Native Americans offered heroic resistance as white settlers infringed upon their homelands on the Great Plains. Politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals debated the wisdom and equity of government policies regarding the "Indian problem" throughout the era. Many Americans concluded that the treatment of the Indians was, at best, shameful. Nevertheless, as the debate unfolded and intensified, the government was confronted by the fact that citizens along the frontier were threatened and had to be protected. No one was surprised in the mid-1860s when the army was delegated to protect the construction of the new railroads across the western plains and to guard the many settlements mushrooming amidst the militant Native Americans. Old military posts were renovated or closed depending on need, new forts were established, and regiments were deployed to carry out the task of subjugating the Indians. Young men seeking adventure, Civil War veterans extending their military careers, and soldiers of fortune from abroad joined the postwar army, and soon many of them found themselves stationed in such lonely places as Fort Wallace, Kansas; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Fort McPherson, Nebraska; and other equally isolated and sometimes dangerous locations. Wherever they were, frontier soldiers found their lives to be combinations of hardships, drudgery, boredom, and fear. Occasional contact with their nomadic opponents created unforgettable experiences for the frontier soldiers, but their lives were similar to those of soldiers since time immemorial. Garrison duty was dull routine occasionally punctuated by moments of terror and confusion in battle. One thing made frontier soldiers' lives a little different than most of their predecessors: they had baseball as a form of entertainment to help while away their off-duty hours.

During the two decades prior to the Civil War, baseball emerged as the premier team sport in America. Warren Goldstein's excellent study Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball, for example, clearly delineates the...