The March to Monterrey: The Diary of Lt. Rankin Dilworth (review)

BOOK REVIEWS235 life was half-hearted, he was always at his happiest in the company of other men, especially with a drink or a tankard in his hand. So enamored of "club life" was Scott that hejoined virtually every social club in the New York City as well as in Plainfield, New Jersey, where he and his family moved in 1875. His almost pathological obsession with socializing would be humorous but for the fact that it led to the alcoholism that blighted the middle years of the artist's life and cost him his family and perhaps the opportunity fora more successful professional career. Scott salvaged an otherwise rudderless life when he took a temperance pledge and was later selected, along with fellow artists Walter Shirlaw, Peter Moran, Gilbert Gaul, and Henry R. Poor, to serve as a "special agent" for the 1 890 census of Native Americans. Scott, whose duties were to preserve in his artwork and in photographs the "fast disappearing phases of Indian life," traveled to the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), then on to the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma in New Mexico, and finally to the Hopi communities of northeast Arizona . Titterton's biography gains in interest as it details the story of Scott's travels among the Indian tribes of the Southwest, for these experiences kindled in the artist a renewed enthusiasm for life and inspired a compassion for the misunderstood and largely mistreated peoples of the reservations and pueblos. Scott saw firsthand the corruption of Indian agents and the disregard for Indian traditions in the policies ofthe Bureau ofIndianAffairs and he spoke out frankly in his reports against such practices as compulsory boarding schools for Indian children, a program that broke up families. Scott argued that the Indians of the Southwest should be left largely alone to follow their ancient customs. A number of Scott's drawings and photographs illustrate the 683 pages of the Report on Indians TaxedandIndians Not Taxed; this may be his most significant achievement . Scott also made a trip to the Dakotas and a return trip to the Hopi pueblos before he closed, one imagines with some regret, the most challenging and interesting chapter of his life. Scott died alone, mostly forgotten, and in poverty, surrounded by his canvases and the many Indian artifacts he brought home from the Southwest, in 1901. Ben Bassham Kent State University The March to Monterrey: The Diary ofU. Rankin Dilworth. Edited by Lawrence R. Clayton and Joseph E. Chance. (Ei Paso: Texas Western Press, 1996. Pp. xxv, 1 19. $12.50, paperback.) The journal of Rankin Dilworth, an undistinguished regular army officer only two years out of West Point when he was mortally wounded at Monterrey (his only experience of combat), provides a simple yet subtly idiosyncratic memoir that both complements and enriches one's reading of other American war narratives. Dilworth's silence on politics and diplomacy, his thoughts on army 236CIVIL WAR HISTORY life, and his mixed reactions to Mexico and its inhabitants were representative enough ofhis fellow officers, but his briefjottings contain a revealing openness that suggests the innocence and uncertainty as well as the exuberance and selfconfidence of the American youth who embodied Manifest Destiny. Indeed, Dilworth's journey through northern Mexico reads like a military Wanderjahr, full of romantic daydreams, an artless fascination with women, and sentimental longings for home. Initially sounding more like tourists than the vanguard of empire, on several occasions Dilworth and his fellows seem to have drifted into a mirage of blissful isolation from the realities of war that anticipated South Pacific by nearly a century, and his musings reflect an idyllic undertone in the literature of Americans at war that has never been adequately explored. This dreamlike tone notwithstanding, the reader's reverie will be interrupted by the young lieutenant's forthright expression of his fears for the future, as on the Fourth of July when after two weeks without word from Matamoros he wrote that "we are as those without hope. I see that providence intends that we shall go no further into the country" (40). Indeed, it is not Dilworth's romanticism and sentimentality—common enough in the literature of the time...