Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891

by Robert M. Utley

Overview

In Frontier Regulars Robert M. Utley combines scholarship and drama to produce an impressive history of the final, massive drive by the Regular Army to subdue and control the American Indians and open the West during the twenty-five years following the Civil War.

Here are incisive accounts of the campaign directed by Major General William Tecumseh Sherman—from the first skirmishes with the Sioux over the Bozeman Trail defenses in 1866 to the final defeat and subjugation of the Northern Plains Indians in 1890. Utley's brilliant descriptions of military maneuvers and flaming battles are juxtaposed with a careful analysis of Sherman's army: its mode of operation, equipment, and recruitment; its lifestyle and relations with Congress and civilians.

Proud of the United States Army and often sympathetic toward the Indians, Utley presents a balanced overview of the long struggle. He concludes that the frontier army was not "the heroic vanguard of civilization" as sometimes claimed and still less "the barbaric band of butchers depicted in the humanitarian literature of the nineteenth century and the atonement literature of the twentieth." Rather, it was a group of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) men doing the best they could.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803295513
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	12/28/1984
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	299,152
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.03(d)
Lexile:	1350L (what's this?)

About the Author

Other Bison Books by Robert Utley are Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent life, Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend, and Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865.