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FRONTIER REGULARS by Robert M. Utley

FRONTIER REGULARS

By

Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 1974
Publisher: Macmillan

Enthusiasm for Indian fighting now jars as much as praise of U.S. exploits in Vietnam, but it underpins this account of Western battles after the Civil War. The extermination of the Indians, or at least of their land rights, was, Utley feels, not genocide but ""domination."" Since it is hard to romanticize surprise massacres of Indian villages (although Utley, a National Parks Service Director, insists there were acts of humane discretion as well), the book is mainly a chronicle of the fighting, together with sketches of men, officers, weaponry, and politics. Utley rolls through the 1866 Fort Kearney battle, Hancock's War, the early Apache fights, Sheridan's winter campaign against Black Kettle, the conquest of the Sioux, the Nez Perce war, Mexican border skirmishes and so forth. The significance of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre is that it put an end to the Indian search. and-destroy operations and officially dissolved the frontier. An entry in the Wars of the United States series, this will interest students of military logistics and lovers of bloodshed more than historians of human conflict.