Frontiersmen in Blue; The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. xv, [1], 384 pages. Endpaper map. List of Maps, Abbreviations Used in Footnotes, Illustrations, Introduction, Bibliography, and Index. Chapters are Manifest Destiny and the Army; The Mandate of Congress; The Frontier Army, 1848-61; Garrisoning the Great Plains; Occupying the Southwest; Pacific Outpost; Rise of the Plains Indian Barrier, 1854-61; Rio Grande Campaigns, 1854-61; Operations in the Pacific Northwest, 1855-60; Fort Sumter and the Western Frontier; The Army of the Pacific, 1861-65; The Army of the Southwest, 1862-65; Sibley, Sully, and the Sioux, 1862-64; Plains Aflame, 1864; Plains Campaigns, 1865; Legacy and Prospect, 1866; Bibliography, and Index. Between 1848 and 1865 the men in blue fought with nearly all the eastern tribes on fields with names like Blue Water, Rush Spring, Rio Gila, Apache Pass, Crooked Creek, Four Lakes, Spokane Plain, and infamous Sand Creek. The author describes many of these skirmishes in consummate detail, injecting an extra dimension of reality with detailed descriptions of garrison life, from the agonizingly long stretches of total isolation to the lightning moments of high-pitched action drama. The Frontiersmen in Blue set up regional defense systems that endured without fundamental change until the Indian problem no longer required military involvement. Their signal achievements, definitively chronicled here, marked an important chapter in the history of westward expansion--a chapter that is fundamental to an understanding of the more celebrated role of the military in the final conquest of the West that followed the Civil War. Robert Marshall Utley (born October 31, 1929) is an American author and historian who has written sixteen books on the history of the American West. He is a former chief historian for the National Park Service. Much of his writing deals with the United States Army in the West, especially in its confrontations with the Indian tribes. He writes: "the frontier army was a conventional military force trying to control, by conventional military methods, a people that did not behave like conventional enemies and, indeed, quite often were not enemies at all. This is the most difficult of all military assignments, whether in Africa, Asia, or the American West. ' The Western History Association annually gives out the Robert M. Utley Book Award for the best book published on the military history of the frontier and western North America. He attended Purdue University, receiving a Bachelor of Science in history. He then attended Indiana University for graduate school, receiving a Master of Arts in history in 1952. Following his graduation, Utley served in the U.S. Army, and then joined the National Park Service. In 1997 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement given by the Society for Military History. Derived from a Kirkus review: For the United States Army, as Robert M. Utley proves in this excellent study, "the two decades that began with the Mexican War and closed with the Civil War hold much greater significance than implied by the attention devoted to it by historians." As the nation moved westward, its emigrating citizens first came into meaningful contact with the Indians of its vastly enlarged western domain. With nearly all the tribes during this period the blue-clad frontiersmen of the Regular and Volunteer armies skirmished inconclusively, and with a few they fought conclusively. In protecting the settlements, in policing the trail routes, and in warring with the Indians, their achievements and failures between 1848 and 1865 contributed importantly to a major chapter in the history of westward expansion. Mr. Utley's book is scholarly without being pedantic, authoritative without being overbearing, convincing and entertaining. A promising first volume in Macmillan's A History of the United States Army series.