Cheyenne Raiders

Cheyenne Raiders
Author: Robert Jordan
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2013-01-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780765370143

Thomas McCabe, an agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is sent to live with a tribe in Missouri in 1837. He falls in love with a woman, but must prove himself to the tribe before they can marry.

Cheyenne Summer

Cheyenne Summer
Author: Mort
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781643137100

Evoking the spirit—and danger—of the early American West, this is the story of the Battle of Beecher Island, pitting an outnumbered United States Army patrol against six hundred Native warriors, where heroism on both sides of the conflict captures the vital themes at play on the American frontier. In September 1868, the undermanned United States Army was struggling to address attacks by Cheyenne and Sioux warriors against the Kansas settlements, the stagecoach routes, and the transcontinental railroad. General Sheridan hired fifty frontiersmen and scouts to supplement his limited forces. He placed them under the command of Major George Forsyth and Lieutenant Frederick Beecher. Both men were army officers and Civil War veterans with outstanding records. Their orders were to find the Cheyenne raiders and, if practicable, to attack them. Their patrol left Fort Wallace, the westernmost post in Kansas, and headed northwest into Colorado. After a week or so of following various trails, they were at the limit of their supplies—for both men and horses. They camped along the narrow Arikaree Fork of the Republican River. In the early morning they were surprised and attacked by a force of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors. The scouts hurried to a small, sandy island in the shallow river and dug in. Eventually they were surrounded by as many as six hundred warriors, led for a time by the famous Cheyenne, Roman Nose. The fighting lasted four days. Half the scouts were killed or wounded. The Cheyenne lost nine warriors, including Roman Nose. Forsyth asked for volunteers to go for help. Two pairs of men set out at night for Fort Wallace—one hundred miles away. They were on foot and managed to slip through the Cheyenne lines. The rest of the scouts held out on the island for nine days. All their horses had been killed. Their food was gone and the meat from the horses was spoiled by the intense heat of the plains. The wounded were suffering from lack of medical supplies, and all were on the verge of starvation when they were rescued by elements of the Tenth Cavalry—the famous Buffalo Soldiers. Although the battle of Beecher Island was a small incident in the history of western conflict, the story brings together all of the important elements of the Western frontier—most notably the political and economic factors that led to the clash with the Natives and the cultural imperatives that motivated the Cheyenne, the white settlers, and the regular soldiers, both white and black. More fundamentally, it is a story of human heroism exhibited by warriors on both sides of the dramatic conflict.

Tell Them We Are Going Home

Tell Them We Are Going Home
Author: John H. Monnett
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780806136455

Tell Them We Are Going Home details the courageous journey of the Northern Cheyennes, under the leadership of Little Wolf and Dull Knife, from Indian Territory northward to their homelands in the Powder River country. Incorporating the perspectives of the Cheyennes, the U.S. military, the Indian Bureau, and the Kansas settlers who encountered the traveling Indians, this book provides a complete account of the odyssey. The dramatic fifteen-hundred-mile trek of the Northern Cheyennes through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, lasting from 1878 to 1879, would become one of the most important episodes in American history and in Cheyenne memory.

Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse
Author: Kingsley M. Bray
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2014-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806183748

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts—and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies—to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety. Kingsley M. Bray has plumbed interviews of Crazy Horse’s contemporaries and consulted modern Lakotas to fill in vital details of Crazy Horse’s inner and public life. Bray places Crazy Horse within the rich context of the nineteenth-century Lakota world. He reassesses the war chief’s achievements in numerous battles and retraces the tragic sequence of misunderstandings, betrayals, and misjudgments that led to his death. Bray also explores the private tragedies that marred Crazy Horse’s childhood and the network of relationships that shaped his adult life. To this day, Crazy Horse remains a compelling symbol of resistance for modern Lakotas. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life is a singular achievement, scholarly and authoritative, offering a complete portrait of the man and a fuller understanding of his place in American Indian and United States history.

War Party in Blue

War Party in Blue
Author: Mark van de Logt
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2012-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806184396

Between 1864 and 1877, during the height of the Plains Indian wars, Pawnee Indian scouts rendered invaluable service to the United States Army. They led missions deep into contested territory, tracked resisting bands, spearheaded attacks against enemy camps, and on more than one occasion saved American troops from disaster on the field of battle. In War Party in Blue, Mark van de Logt tells the story of the Pawnee scouts from their perspective, detailing the battles in which they served and recounting hitherto neglected episodes. Employing military records, archival sources, and contemporary interviews with current Pawnee tribal members—some of them descendants of the scouts—Van de Logt presents the Pawnee scouts as central players in some of the army's most notable campaigns. He argues that military service allowed the Pawnees to fight their tribal enemies with weapons furnished by the United States as well as to resist pressures from the federal government to assimilate them into white society. According to the author, it was the tribe's martial traditions, deeply embedded in their culture, that made them successful and allowed them to retain these time-honored traditions. The Pawnee style of warfare, based on stealth and surprise, was so effective that the scouts' commanding officers did little to discourage their methods. Although the scouts proudly wore the blue uniform of the U.S. Cavalry, they never ceased to be Pawnees. The Pawnee Battalion was truly a war party in blue.

Fort Bascom

Fort Bascom
Author: James Bailey Blackshear
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806154268

Motorists traveling along State Highway 104 north of Tucumcari, New Mexico, may notice a sign indicating the location of Fort Bascom. The post itself is long gone, its adobe walls washed away. In 1863, the United States, fearing a second Confederate invasion of New Mexico Territory from Texas, built Fort Bascom. Until 1874, the troops stationed at this site on the Eroded Plains along the Canadian River defended Hispanic and Anglo-American settlements in eastern New Mexico and far western Texas against Comanches and other Southern Plains Indians. In Fort Bascom, James Bailey Blackshear presents the definitive history of this critical outpost in the American Southwest, along with a detailed view of army life on the late-nineteenth-century western frontier. Located in the middle of what General William T. Sherman called “an awful country,” Fort Bascom’s hardships went beyond the army’s efforts to control the Comanches and Kiowas. Blackshear shows the difficulties of maintaining a post in a harsh environment where scarce water and forage, long supply lines, poorly constructed facilities, and monotonous duty tested soldiers’ endurance. Fort Bascom also describes the social aspects of a frontier assignment and the impact of the Comanchero trade on military personnel and objectives, showing just how difficult it was for the army to subdue the Southern Plains Indians. Crucial to this enterprise were logistics, including procurement from civilian contractors of everything from beef to hay. Blackshear examines the strong links between New Mexican Comancheros and Comanches, detailing how the lure of illegal profits drew former military personnel into this black-market economy and revealing the influence of the Comanchero trade on Southwestern history. This first full account of the unique challenges soldiers faced on the Texas frontier during and after the Civil War restores Fort Bascom to its rightful place in the history of the U.S. military and of U.S.-Indian relations in the American Southwest.

The Galvanized Yankees

The Galvanized Yankees
Author: Dee Brown
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2012-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1453274170

The little-known true Civil War story of the Confederate soldiers who served in the Union Army by a #1 New York Times–bestselling author. Historian Dee Brown uncovers an exciting episode in American history: During the Civil War, a group of Confederate soldiers opted to assist the Union Army rather than endure the grim conditions of POW camps. Regiments containing former Confederates were not trusted to go into battle against their former comrades, and instead were sent to the West as “outpost guardians,” where they performed frontier duties, including escorting supply trains, rebuilding telegraph lines, and quelling uprisings from regional American Indian tribes, which were sweeping across the Plains. This is an account of an extraordinary, though often overlooked, group of men who served in unexpected ways at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history. From the bestselling author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Galvanized Yankees is “an accurate, interesting, and sometimes thrilling account of an unusual group of men [and] a fresh and informative study of the Old West in transition from frontier to stable society” (The New York Times Book Review). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Critical White Studies

Critical White Studies
Author: Richard Delgado
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 710
Release: 1997
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781439901519

No longer content with accepting whiteness as the norm, critical scholars have turned their attention to whiteness itself. In "Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror," numerous thinkers, including Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Peggy McIntosh, Andrew Hacker, Ruth Frankenberg, John Howard Griffin, David Roediger, Kathleen Heal Cleaver, Noel Ignatiev, Cherrie Moraga, and Reginald Horsman, attack such questions as: *How was whiteness invented, and why? *How has the category whiteness changed over time? *Why did some immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, start out as nonwhite and later became white? *Can some individual people be both white and nonwhite at different times, and what does it mean to pass for white? *At what point does pride in being white cross the line into white power or white supremacy? *What can whites concerned over racial inequity or white privilege do about it? Science and pseudoscience are presented side by side to demonstrate how our views on whiteness often reflect preconception, not fact. For example, most scientists hold that race is not a valid scientific category -- genetic differences between races are insignificant compared to those within them. Yet, the one drop rule, whereby those with any nonwhite heritage are classified as nonwhite, persists even today. As the bell curve controversy shows, race concepts die hard, especially when power and prestige lie behind them. A sweeping portrait of the emerging field of whiteness studies, "Critical White Studies" presents, for the first time, the best work from sociology, law, history, cultural studies, and literature. Delgado and Stefancic expressly offer critical white studies as the next step in critical race theory. In focusing on whiteness, not only do they ask nonwhites to investigate more closely for what it means for others to be white, but also they invite whites to examine themselves more searchingly and to look behind the mirror.

Dee Brown on the Civil War

Dee Brown on the Civil War
Author: Dee Brown
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 845
Release: 2017-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1504049594

Three true tales of Civil War combat, as recounted by a #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The acclaimed historian of the American West turns his attention to the country’s bloody civil conflict, chronicling the exploits of extraordinary soldiers who served in unexpected ways at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history. Grierson’s Raid: The definitive work on one of the most astonishing missions of the Civil War’s early days. For two weeks in the spring of 1862, Col. Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher, led 1,700 Union cavalry troops on a raid from Tennessee to Louisiana. The improbably successful mission diverted Confederate attention from Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi and set the stage for the Siege of Vicksburg. General Sherman called it “the most brilliant expedition of the war.” The Bold Cavaliers: In 1861, Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan and his brother-in-law Basil Duke put together a group of formidable horsemen, and set to violent work. Morgan’s Raiders began in their home state, staging attacks, recruiting new soldiers, and intercepting Union telegraphs. Most were imprisoned after unsuccessful incursions into Ohio and Indiana years later, but some Raiders would escape, regroup, and fight again in different conflicts. “Accurate and frequently exciting” (Kirkus Reviews). The Galvanized Yankees: The little-known and awe-inspiring true story of a group of captured Confederate soldiers who chose to serve in the Union Army rather than endure the grim conditions of prisoner of war camps. “An accurate, interesting, and sometimes thrilling account of an unusual group of men who rendered a valuable service to the nation in a time of great need” (The New York Times Book Review).

Native America

Native America
Author: Michael Leroy Oberg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-06-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1118714377

This history of Native Americans, from the period of first contact to the present day, offers an important variation to existing studies by placing the lives and experiences of Native American communities at the center of the narrative. Presents an innovative approach to Native American history by placing individual native communities and their experiences at the center of the study Following a first chapter that deals with creation myths, the remainder of the narrative is structured chronologically, covering over 600 years from the point of first contact to the present day Illustrates the great diversity in American Indian culture and emphasizes the importance of Native Americans in the history of North America Provides an excellent survey for courses in Native American history Includes maps, photographs, a timeline, questions for discussion, and “A Closer Focus” textboxes that provide biographies of individuals and that elaborate on the text, exposing students to issues of race, class, and gender