The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West by Robert M. Utley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West by Robert M. Utley William A. Dobak The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West. By Robert M. Utley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The years after the Civil War saw ever-increasing organization, both private and corporate, in the American West. As civilian entities of the federal government multiplied, so did those of the military branch, often assuming strange shapes that were ill-adapted to the army’s post-war tasks in the West. Robert M. Utley, one of the foremost historians of the nineteenth-century western military, has undertaken a sketch of the army’s activities during the two decades that followed the Civil War. His approach is biographical. Among the generals Utley discusses are: Philip Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri (the central part of the United States during most of these years); Alfred Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota (the Territories of Dakota and Montana, headquarters at St. Paul); Christopher C. Augur and Edward O. C. Ord, commanders (consecutively) of the Department of the Platte (Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah, headquarters at Omaha) and the Department of Texas (Texas and sometimes the Indian Territory, with headquarters at San Antonio). One of the longest serving generals was John Pope, whose spectacular failure at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862 sent him to the Plains for twenty-one years, mostly in the Department of the Missouri (Kansas, Colorado, [End Page 467] New Mexico, and sometimes the Indian Territory, with headquarters at Fort Leavenworth). Other high-ranking officers, each the subject of a chapter, are George Crook, Oliver O. Howard, and Nelson A. Miles. These latter officers’ experience was largely with indigenous tribes in the Military Division of the Pacific (Arizona, California, and the Pacific Northwest, including part of Idaho). The army’s chief duty, before and after the Civil War, was to guard transportation routes, wagon roads before 1865, and railroads after that. This duty led to the awkward shapes of military departments, which were often dictated by the availability of water for draft animals and later for steam engines. Water was likewise a requisite for Indian tribes—for people, horses, and game animals. Competition for water and grass was a frequent source of conflict between ethnic groups in the West. These conflicts form the focus of The Commanders. The exploits of lower ranking officers, Mackenzie and Custer among them, take backstage to the performance of lesser known but higher ranking men who helped to orchestrate the series of conflicts known as the Indian Wars. The episodic violence Utley records, though, was only one facet of Indian-white relations during the post-Civil War years. For instance, the army fed Indians in addition to fighting them. When Indian agencies ran out of rations to issue, the commissary at a nearby army post would often make up the deficit, with higher headquarters in Washington, D.C., reconciling the accounts. General Pope believed that to hold Indians on a reservation without food was a crime against humanity. During the last three years of his tenure in the Department of the Missouri, Pope also devoted about half his cavalry force to driving the “Boomer” invaders from the Oklahoma District (roughly, today’s greater Oklahoma City), where white settlement was forbidden under the terms of a treaty. This might have been a better book if Utley had concentrated on the lesser known incidents of peaceful interaction between Indians and the army, with which the history of the postbellum West abounds, instead of persisting in detailing the record of hostilities that the post-Civil War generation took part in as junior officers. William A. Dobak Hyattsville, Maryland Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association