The Frontier Army: Episodes from Dakota and the West ed. by R. Eli Paul (review)

This compilation offers an amalgam of authentic first-persons voices set in context by authoritative editors in the form of prologues and annotations, while the mainstay of the title rests on brief topical essays. These also are provided by some of the most respected names in the field.

For instance, in the former category the anthology’s editor, Eli Paul, reprints a September 5, 1855, letter written by Lieutenant Marshall Tate Polk II, nephew of the former president of the United States and aide de camp to Colonel William S. Harney. With nearly two decades of experience as a dragoon officer, the veteran Harney boasted a long career in command of frontier soldiers. It was in this capacity that he led a force in pursuit of a band of Lakota, who had been harassing movement of parties traveling overland through their territory. Finding an encampment along Blue Water Creek in western Nebraska, Harney’s hard-charging soldiers attacked the village of Chief Little Thunder. Afterwards, Harney prepared his summary of what is now an obscure engagement, one of hundreds that occurred in the trans-Mississippi West. Unlike the colonel’s account that numbered among the “vast volume of historical records, reports, and correspondence—much of it written for public consumption,” Polk had a different audience in mind. As Paul indicates, the young officer “was not writing to an army superior or for a partisan newspaper back home or for later publication in his memoirs.” Instead, he penned a personal letter meant only for the eyes of a young lady named Evelina McNeal Bills (p. 12). As such, the appearance of this rare first-hand account ably sets the stage for the remainder of the entries.

Following a similar course, the next piece by a dedicated student of the Plains Indian Wars, Paul Hedren, draws upon a lesser-known incident of the “Great Sioux War” of 1876. Rather than the usual focus on cavalry, refreshingly, Hedren reveals the role of the “redlegs” of the Fourth U.S. Artillery told through an original source from an equally unhailed informant, enlisted man Harry Cooke Cushing. This primary perspective, with Hedren’s concise contextual explanation, adds much to the volume.

Similarly, the next submission by the late Douglas C. McChristian, “Shot Today and Kill Tomorrow: The Function of Artillery during the Indian Campaigns, 1866–1890,” carries on the theme of the wagon soldiers, who from time to time went on campaigns alongside the more celebrated horse soldiers and infantrymen. While sprinkling in primary sources, McChristian, as is the case with all the other authors in the articles that follow, provides a topical essay rather than offering complementary explanations to reprinted nineteenth-century accounts.

Following this same model, Lori A. Cox-Paul’s “No Time to Fight: Recreation in the Frontier Army” recaps off-duty pursuits by the soldiers in garrison and on campaign. Brian W. Dippie’s “‘A Very Good Friend to the Army’: The Frontier Soldier in the Western Art of Frederic Remington” adds to Dippie’s preeminent scholarship analyzing this iconic artist. Similarly, Frank N. Schubert’s “Remembering the Buffalo Soldiers: Memorials to the Black Soldiers of the Indian Wars Era” demonstrates why many consider him the dean of this once obscure, and now crowded, field. In the process of exploring art and popular culture, Schubert eloquently puts to rest “the mythic view that the [black] soldiers and the Indians shared some common bond.” He points out that “the notion that the Indians called” the black troops in army blue “‘buffalo soldiers’ as a sign of respect for their fighting abilities” and represented a sort of early day “Rainbow Coalition” in fact “ignores reality” (pp. 162–63).

The inclusion of the highly respected Jerome A. Greene’s “Lakota Perspectives on Wounded Knee, 1890,” and an “Appendix of the Notable Works on the Frontier Army by Thomas R. Buecker and John...