Indian Wars of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, 1812-1900

Abstract

With this book, Bruce Vandervort, professor of modern European and African history at the Virginia Military Institute, turns his attention from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. He also broadens his approach into a multilayered comparative study that deftly blends military, political, and cultural history. His prior monograph, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830 – 1914 (Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), focused on European wars to colonize Africa. He also edits the Journal of Military History.Part 1 (chapters 1 – 4) lays out the sophisticated comparative framework for this study of wars against native societies. Several characteristics set Vandervort’s work apart from, and above, most studies of military campaigns against native peoples. We gain comparative insights into Canadian, U.S., and Mexican governmental policies and military approaches. But he considers not only the tactics and strategies of the Euro- American powers but also those of the native forces. For example, he quotes George F. G. Stanley, writing in 1936, on “similarities between the fighting styles of the Boers and the Métis” (p. 225). We also learn a great deal about the equestrian “fluid style of warfare” of Plains Indians (p. 6) and the guerrilla tactics so successfully practiced by many native groups. One of the most revealing sections of the book is chapter 2, which contrasts Indians’ “ways of war” with Euro-American views and approaches. The analysis shows clearly that “religion suffused every aspect of Indian life, war included” (p. 66).Vandervort provides a richly nuanced comparative analysis. Not only do we find native versus European comparisons on a variety of topics, but also comparisons of Canadian, U.S., and Mexican officer corps, training, and weaponry. He provides a cogent critique of the inappropriateness of nineteenth-century U.S. military doctrine to engage the irregular warfare they faced in the plains. The demise of Custer’s command at the Little Big Horn also gets appropriate criticism: the result of “other’s mistakes and of the hubris and hunger for glory of their commander” (p. 186). Vandervort adds global comparisons of colonial wars against indigenous populations in Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. This is a work of transnational history in the very best sense of the term.The specific case studies are laid out chronologically in part 2 (chapters 5 – 10). Vandervort begins with the “Great Clearance” of Creeks, Seminoles, and others east of the Mississippi from 1815 through 1842. He then journeys south to examine Mexican campaigns against the Yaqui and the Maya in Yucatán from 1821 to 1876. Chapter 7 returns to the United States, focusing on the suppression of Plains Indians from 1848 though 1877. Vandervort next examines the “conquest of Apachería” from 1860 to 1886, considering both U.S. and Mexican strategies and actions. We then move north to the Canadian prairies to analyze campaigns against the Métis and the Cree. We then return to Mexico and the continued repression and oppression of the Yaqui and Maya during the Porfiriato. Organizationally, part 2 is not as explicitly comparative as part 1, but readers will already have a good grasp of similarities and differences and thus can draw their own comparisons.We also find significant historiographical debate and revisionist arguments throughout the book. Vandervort finds “technological determinism” to be “only a partial explanation for the success of Western-style armies” (p. 15). To explain the success of government forces in the “little wars” that he examines, he posits as the crucial factors “the resolution of internal conflicts and the subsequent consolidation of national power in the white settler states” (p. xvi). On the Mexican front, Vandervort makes a case that, in Sonora, the much-maligned Rurales “were given the job of tracking down and rounding up dissident Yaquis and shipping them off to the henequen fields of Yucatán” (p. 230). The view that the U.S. Civil War offered “a hiatus to Indians in the West” he dubs “highly misleading” (pp. 170 – 71).The author draws mainly upon the very large English-language literature available for North American military frontier history, but he also supplements with selected sources in French and Spanish. Sixteen very good maps supplement the text, but, oddly, the book includes no other illustrations. Devotees of comparative, military, and frontier history will find this excellent study stimulating and informative. However, the clarity of the arguments and of the writing renders the book accessible to student and general audiences as well.