Military History Is Alive and Well in the "West"

The military history of the American West has captivated audiences ever since Lewis and Clark returned from the Pacific to publish their journals in 1810. The work of many professional scholars in the years since has covered conflict along the Missouri River in 1823, encounters along the trails west, and the Mexican and Civil Wars, but perhaps no two events have attracted more attention than the Great Sioux War of 1876 and the ensuing conflict with the Nez Perce the next year. The two books under consideration here add to that history in several different ways. Both books offer newcomers to the field of Western military history good reading and a mostly fair treatment of the individuals involved in these well-known stories while also providing historians with some new points to consider.

Sharfstein is known as a master of biography, and his study of over six hundred pages proves this point. He focuses mainly on Oliver Otis Howard, a fascinating military figure of both the Civil War and the West, and on Chief Joseph, a Nez Perce political leader who helped engineer his people's famous flight across the northwest. Often called the bible-thumping general, Howard lost an arm in the war and stuffed a bible under the stump as he paraded here and there. Howard is also considered a reformer who first worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and later tried his best to bring peace to the west; he was a strong advocate of Grant's Peace Policy, as Sharfstein points out on numerous occasions. Howard's assignment to the Department of Columbia in the 1870s is where the story begins, with the general trying to sort out the confusing circumstances regarding the Nez Perce Treaty of 1863, which created a reservation but also left a large segment of the tribe (known as the non-Treaty Nez Perce) outside the agreement, Indians who followed a number of leading chiefs including Joseph. Most of the early years of Howard's tenure in the Pacific Northwest were peaceful, including many trips from Fort Vancouver into the regions of what is today eastern Washington and western Idaho. Here, Sharfstein provides wonderful descriptions of the land, its peoples, military officers and the political debate that soon loomed over the Wallowa Valley of western Idaho, land that Chief Joseph and his followers claimed but that had supposedly been ceded in the 1863 treaty.

A crisis erupted in the early 1870s as more and more settlers threatened to overrun the valley. Historians today often identify the situation as one where "settler sovereignty" clashed with Native claims to the land, but such nuances of history are not of much interest to Sharfstein, who focuses instead on biographical descriptions of Indian agents, military officers, Indian leaders, and a handful of others. At times, however, the author wanders off into material that should have been edited out of the book, such as an entire chapter on Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Howard's aide-de-camp, who took a side trip to Alaska. The descriptions of Sitka and other aspects of Wood's journey, while interesting, fail to fit into the subject of Sharfstein's book, a problem that recurs with descriptions of military life along the Columbia River, steamboat traffic, and the like.

Once the author returns to the subject at hand, there is a clear description of the growing conflict between Nez Perce Indians, white settlers, and the army over the Wallowa Valley lands. While there was anger on all sides in the councils between the groups, Howard tried to maintain peace and order, even traveling to Washington, D. C. to attempt to convince army and political authorities to rectify the problem. He was certainly sympathetic with Chief Joseph's argument that...