Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States, 1812–1900 (review)

American soldiers, sheltering behind all the protection that the world's only superpower can give them, refer to the Iraqi slums and desert as 'Indian Country.' So did their fathers when they surveyed the Vietnamese jungle from their helicopters. Nineteenth-century wars to subjugate the Natives of America and clear their land for farmers, ranchers, and eastern capitalists endowed the United States Army with some of its earliest and most durable traditions. So argues Virginia Military Institute history professor Bruce Vandervort in his study of North America's nineteenth-century Indian wars.

He also wonders whether the US Army absorbed lessons as well as traditions from its Indian wars. Lacking a general staff to transform lessons into doctrine, Americans left military thinking to generals. One sad result was recurrent disasters when recent West Point graduates led their troops into ambush. Or when brand new Second Lieutenant George Bascom hanged six Apache hostages, including Cochise's brother, and renewed a bloody war.

Generals set the style. Phil Sheridan may have been a Civil War hero but his contempt for Indians made him the co-author, with a rival but kindred spirit, George Armstrong Custer, of the disasters that culminated in the destruction of the 7th Cavalry by the Sioux at the Little Big Horn in 1876. Not that soldiers and their generals get all the blame. An American (and Canadian) myth that amateur soldiers are better than regulars becomes Vandervort's first target. More concerned to enrich historical understanding than to echo old war stories, he nonetheless opens his first chapter with the Battle of Beecher Island. His purpose, however, is to show how Cheyenne Dog Soldiers caught and nearly wiped out a sadly inept Major 'Sandy' Forsyth and his band of prairie-bred, 'Indian-fighter' 'Scouts' in September 1868.

Vandervort's model soldier is General George Crook, whose experience and caution made him a planner and logistician. To pursue Apaches, Crook substituted pack mules for plodding wagon trains. Next, he oversaw packing the mules so that animals were not killed by their loads. On the march, he wore a canvas suit and a straw hat, armed himself with a double-barrelled shotgun, and dismayed his staff by eating with the mule-skinners. Above all, Crook realized that the Apache had skills his own troops and cowboys would never possess, however much they bragged. To locate his enemy, he turned to the Apache's Native enemies and then to their own dissidents.

Mistreated or lied to, Crook agreed, the Apache were dangerous subordinates. His rule was common sense: Don't promise what you can't deliver; if you make a promise, keep it! Managed on such terms, Native scouts had the skill and stamina to find and defeat Crook's official enemy. Crook's unofficial enemies seethed at his challenge to their racism and fired him. His successor, Nelson Miles, promoted from clerk in a china store to general by Civil War experience, despised Crook's way of war. He fired his Apache scouts and, like contemporary European rulers expanding their African colonies, fought his war on the backs of white soldiers and settlers.

The African reference reflects Vandervort's determination to bring Indian wars into a global history. His goal is comparative history, linking the Apache to Zulus and Ethiopians and to their Yaqui neighbours across the Mexican border. While American soldiers battled Seminole and Comanche, Apache and Sioux, the infant Dominion of Canada sent militia expeditions in 1870 and 1885 to impose its sovereignty on the Metis and, in 1885, more brutally, on their Cree allies. Vandervort is not much kinder to Canadians than he is to his fellow Americans, and he draws his mood, though not his knowledge, from William Kinsey Howard's pro-Metis Strange Empire. Like Americans, Vandervort argues, Canadians reacted hysterically to 1885 as though an Indian massacre was the likeliest outcome. The ensuing assimilationist policies fell as heavily on the loyal Blackfoot as...