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  • Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life and Times of a Career Army Officer
  • Robert Wooster
Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: The Life and Times of a Career Army Officer. By Wayne R. Kime. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8061-3709-6. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvii, 646. $45.00.

Following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy in 1848, Richard Irving Dodge spent the next forty-three years as a U.S. Army officer, eventually rising to the rank of full colonel. His able service in a variety of military assignments—line officer, provost marshal, post commander, member of innumerable boards and courts martial, Indian fighter, aide to commanding general William T. Sherman, and regimental commander—led the influential Army and Navy Journal to pronounce him "a duty officer second to none" (p. 269). In this exhaustively researched and richly detailed volume, Wayne R. Kime demonstrates that Dodge's record "earned him an honorable place in the history he once envisioned" (p. 513). [End Page 1143]

Dodge's career was hardly typical of that of an officer of his time. After capably leading the three companies assigned him during the First Battle of Bull Run, Dodge, a North Carolinian unsympathetic to the Confederacy but unwilling to continue "the horrid necessity of fighting my own brothers" (p. 47), asked for, and received, noncombat assignments for the rest of the Civil War. He seems not to have engaged in the unseemly personal feuding for promotion or favor engaged in by so many of his fellow officers. And, most ironically, Dodge is probably best remembered not for his military service, but for his having written two popular books, The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants and Our Wild Indians.

Having prepared a critical edition of Dodge's first book, as well as editing four published volumes of Dodge's journals, Kime is intimately familiar with both his subject and the appropriate research materials, and that familiarity is evident throughout this excellent and informative biography. Among its many strengths, the book is particularly good in detailing the nineteenth-century army's inner dynamics, as Dodge's administrative skills invariably left him the victor in minor bureaucratic skirmishes on issues ranging from exposing frauds against the government to improving the quality of potatoes served to enlisted men. Also worth special mention is Kime's sensitive analysis of Dodge's marital difficulties, for the latter's love of the frontier and the outdoors invariably clashed with his wife's more urbane interests, leading the two to spend most of their marriage living apart from one another.

The present volume will serve as the definitive biography of this well-liked and adventurous "soldier's soldier" (p. 145). Two issues, however, somewhat limit its readership and broader importance. The first is the author's decision to write a "life and times" biography, which makes even a well-written narrative of this size (over five hundred pages of text) a bit daunting for general readers and tiresome for specialists already familiar with the context. The second is more interpretive in nature. Kime rightfully portrays Dodge as a sharp critic of the Indian Bureau and the government's Indian policy, but in the process has a tendency to overlook Dodge's—and the army's—prejudices that made devising and implementing a truly fair Indian policy impossible from the outset.

Robert Wooster
Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi, Texas
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