Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, 1848–1886 ed. by Janne Lahti (review)

With Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, Janne Lahti has provided an outstanding anthology on enlisted members of the nineteenth-century United States Army. Lahti pulls off an important feat: he has combined serious academic scholarship with biography-driven essays that will feed the general public's appetite for military personalities. Lahti's contributers include Robert Wooster, one of the leading historians of the frontier army; Jerry Thompson, an authority on Texas and the Southwest; James Leiker, author of books on African American soldiers and Cheyennes; Lance Blyth, a government historian who specializes in intersections between borderlands history and violence; and William Kiser, whose most recent book deals with Indian slavery and debt peonage. Four other contributers, with backgrounds ranging from active military service, indigenous history, and public history, add a range of perspectives to the volume.

Lahti and colleagues seek to move beyond the battle-driven narratives so common to Western military history. Instead, they integrate military history with themes that are the basis of recent borderlands scholarship, including violence, empire-building, and settler colonialism. The anthology focuses on national and local scales alike, drawing attention to shifting federal policies and soldiers' malleable identities. None of the men who appear in this volume were soldiers for very long. Moreover, they were a diverse set—Apache, African American, Hispanic, German, and Anglo American. Shifting motivations propelled them in and out of the army; their fortunes took them to the Southwest and beyond.

The most striking feature of this book is the skill with which the authors recreate their subjects' lives. In the absence of manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and other sources that form the basis of the biographer's toolkit, the contributors have had to turn to enlistment records, pension claims, hospital registers, and newspapers in order to rescue these men from obscurity. Blyth focuses on Apaches, the Mexican military colony of Janos, and cycles of reciprocity, retaliation, and cooperation. Kiser highlights enlisted men and the "fruitlessness of their exertions" in pinning down elusive Native opponents; he also draws attention to one army officer's reluctance to wage destructive war on indigenous communities. Thompson examines the role of Nuevomexicanos who served in the Civil War, as well as the effect of borderlands violence on those who wielded violence themselves. In an essay on a Union soldier, Megan Kate Nelson demonstrates that knowledge of treacherous landscapes was essential to surviving the borderlands. Wooster advances our understanding of the borderlands by pointing out that the "quest for physical and economic security . . . led the newcomers to control the violence" around them (119). James Leiker points out that, for some borderlands residents, violence was a stabilizing and unifying force. Essays on Mickey Free (by Victoria Smith) and a Hanover-born soldier (by Thomas "Ty" Smith) round out the volume. Lahti's essay (the last in the collection) describes the life of Tlodilhil, a White Mountain Apache, and thus keeps indigenous experiences at the forefront.

Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands reminds us that deductive reasoning is not the only way to do history, and that our work can and should be based in part on the art of supposition. For every strict conclusion the authors draw, their biographies are also open ended. Why did men drift around the country? What prompted them to change their names? Were they escaping debts, ex-wives, or both? What might they have been doing in the years when their presence in the historical record was at its most shadowy? In more than one instance, the contributors are content to wonder what happened, and to let us do the same.

The authors make clear that the United States Army was far from a monolith, and that its members did not react to indigenous peoples or borderlands landscapes with one mind. Moreover, they highlight the complex and often contradictory demands placed upon the small constabulary force. Enlisted men, often pigeonholed as drudges or foreign-born opportunists, come to life in this book.