On the Plains with Custer and Hancock: The Journal of Isaac Coates, Army Surgeon

As America expanded its horizons from the grasslands and marshes of the prairie in Illinois to the unobstructed view of the plains west of the Mississippi, life for the soldier became more adventurous and more dangerous. American Indians, initially passive and curious, became combative and protective of their homeland and hunting grounds. Sometime after 1867, an intelligent, educated young Army surgeon organized his notes into a narrative about life with the Seventh Cavalry, before the Cavalry’s and Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn River.

Surgeon Isaac Coates emphasizes the hardships of campaigning, and the tragedy that ultimately resulted in the virtual elimination of the Plains Indian. His short journal, although less than one hundred pages and covering only the two-month period of his sojourn with the Seventh Cavalry, is a gem, the kind that historians dig out of attics—as W. J. D. Kennedy did. Unfortunately, Coates’s journal has little to offer medical historians. Like so many early physicians traveling west, he was more interested in recording his new experiences and sights than in writing about the mundane practice of medicine. True, medicine in the mid-nineteenth century, in most instances, had little to offer patients other than compassion, and a few drugs.

However, the cause and treatment of scurvy were well known, and Coates did relate his experience with scurvy, an all-too-common problem when the Army was on the move in the desolate West. During the Indian wars, the usual antiscorbutics found in the soldier’s diet were not readily available. Scurvy was a common problem because the men existed for weeks, even months, on nothing but coffee, hardtack, and bacon. In addition, most soldiers and western immigrants probably had only borderline levels of stored vitamin C, and symptoms of scurvy could become manifest if their diet was deficient in this vitamin. Coates states, “Not one man in ten was free from it [scurvy]” (p. 109). If the Army had learned from the American Indian, whose diet included plants, herbs, and tea rich in vitamin C, the soldiers could have been spared the ravages of this illness.

Several interesting comments appear in Coates’s text. He coincidentally juxtaposes cereal and General Mills, a medical officer: Coates describes “a magnificent farming district with all the cereals growing luxuriantly”; a few sentences later he states, “I was not long in finding General Mills” (p. 45; today, of course, “General Mills” is a leading processor of cereal). I also enjoyed Coates’s evaluation of the German people: “These Germans are philosophers. They enjoy life. They make the most of this existence—lager and music in the next being uncertain, perhaps not even a meerschaum” (p. 44). Would he have said that if he could have known that Germany would start two world wars within the next seventy-five years? And I am sure the modern city dweller would agree with Coates’s evaluation of the city dweller as an “enervated, sentimental fop—rutting like a peacock. What an insipid thing is he when compared with a western farmerboy” (p. 43).

Kennedy has written an excellent account of the historical events surrounding the tragedy of the Seventh Cavalry, but he is lax when adding reference notes. For instance, he records that Dr. Coates practiced in Chester (Pennsylvania), Reno (Nevada), Pueblo (Colorado), and Scorro (New Mexico), but he gives no hint as to the source of his information (p. xi). Likewise, his bibliography is incomplete and lacks information that scholars could use. For instance, he refers to Eugene Fitch Ware’s The Indian War of 1864 (1994) and Rachel Sherman Thorndike’s The Sherman Letters (1894) in the notes, but he leaves them out of the bibliography (p. 157).

These minor criticisms aside, On the Plains with Custer and Hancock is interesting reading and a testament to Coates’s intelligence and education...