Indian Fighter Research Articles

The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth

In the often contentious and acrimonious debates over whether the Golden State’s Indigenous peoples were targeted for genocide by white Euro-Americans between 1846 and 1873, inflammatory scalp bounty accusations against the state of California have become a staple of public discourse. California is frequently accused by public leaders, political activists, academic scholars, and others of once having paid cash rewards ranging anywhere from twenty-five cents to twenty-five dollars for Indian scalps, heads, and other body parts in order to wage a deliberate “war of extermination” against its Native peoples. So routinely are these allegations made that they now go largely uncontested and appear to have won nearly universal acceptance as established historical facts. These “facts,” however, are false. The state of California never offered, let alone actually paid, cash bounties for Native American scalps, heads, or other body parts. And, despite numerous similar claims to the contrary, neither did any county—nor, with one possible exception, did any incorporated town or city. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to repeated and unchallenged assertions based on very faulty scholarship, scalp bounty allegations have been allowed to evolve over the past thirty years to become a popular but polarizing myth that serves mainly to inflame public passions and to frustrate rational discourse in what are frequently bruising public quarrels over vital contemporary issues such as tribal sovereignty, reparations for past injustices, casino gaming regulation, and, of course, disputed points of historical interpretation central to the genocide debate. This essay traces the evolution of the pervasive California Indian scalp bounty myth from its origins in the 1990s and examines the numerous different versions that its propagators have put forth over time, despite a near-total lack of concrete supporting evidence. Although scalping itself was widely practiced by state militiamen and volunteer “Indian fighters” like the infamous Jackson Farley and Hi Good, the taking of corporal trophies in California’s genocidal frontier wars did not result from the pursuit of financial reward. Indeed, the remarkably small number of documented cases reveals that Indian scalp bounties remained extremely rare in gold rush California and were seldom offered anywhere except in a scattered handful of isolated and unincorporated rural communities.

Indian Fighters in the Philippines

This article explores the connections between the violence that accompanied U.S. continental expansion in the nineteenth century and the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States following the Spanish-American War. Perhaps geographic distance has served to mask the temporal proximity of these linked periods of U.S. expansion, because this is a connection that has remained largely unexplored in the historiography. Rather than viewing 1898 as a caesura marking the separation between the continental and global phases of American empire, this article explores continuities through an examination of the interaction between imperial culture and military violence. Some U.S. soldiers in the Philippines drew directly on their experiences in wars with Native people, while others narrated their time in the Philippines as an “Indian war” and validated their actions by discursively positioning themselves and their troops as “Indian fighters.” The Indian Wars were translated, through the actions, imaginations, and writing of U.S. soldiers, politicians, and journalists, into a flexible discourse able to travel across space and time. These frontier resonances became one of several structuring narratives that sought to racialize Filipinos in order to justify the war and occupation.

Marriage, Love, and the Nation: The Private Life of an Indian Freedom Fighter

Marriage, Love, and the Nation: The Private Life of an Indian Freedom Fighter

Indian Genocide – A Study Through The Works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

The research expounded the turmoil, uproar, anguish, pain, and agony faced by native Indians and Native Americans in the South Dakota region. To explain the grief, pain and lamentation, this research studies the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lyn. She laments for the people who died and also survived in the Wounded Knee Massacre. The people at that time went through huge exploitation and tolerated the cruelty of American Federal government. This research brings out the unchangeable scenario of the Native Americans and Native Indians. Mr. Padmanaban shed light on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who was activist. Mr. Padmanaban is very influenced with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s thoughts and works. She hails from Sioux Community, a Native American. She was an outstanding and exceptional scholar. She experienced the agony and pain faced by the native people. The researcher, Mr. Padmanaban is concerned the sufferings, agony, pain faced by the South Dakota people at that time. The researcher also is acknowledging the Indian freedom fighters who got India independence after over 200 years of sufferings. The foreign nationals entered our country with the sole purpose of business. Slowly and steadily the took over the reign of the country and ruled us for years, made all of us suffer a lot.

Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis ed. by Alan D. Gaff, Donald H. Gaff

Reviewed by: Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis ed. by Alan D. Gaff, Donald H. Gaff Aaron Astor Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis. Edited and with an introduction by Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2017. ix + 560 pp. Maps, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $49.95 cloth. Civil War historians in recent years have begun to focus more attention on the campaigns in the Far West and Southwest, revealing the connection between federal army campaigns against both Confederates and Native Americans. Particularly noteworthy events like the Sand Creek Massacre or the Battles of Glorieta Pass or Valverde produced military records that have invited [End Page 223] such inquiry. Thanks to Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff, a new source is available to historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era in this theater. Ordered West is an edited set of memoirs written by Lieutenant Charles A. Curtis of the Fifth US Infantry. Curtis was an unlikely source for the Southwest because he was a college-educated man from northern New England, and he returned to his native region after his military service. A student at Lewiston Academy and Bowdoin College in Maine, Curtis entered the federal army in 1861 and impressed Union officers then establishing a defense of Washington. Surviving a friendly-fire wound, Curtis was commissioned into the Regular US Army and ordered to the Far West. After his service completed in 1865 he returned to Vermont and became president of Norwich University, a military academy and college. While serving there he published his memoirs in serial form in three installments of the Montpelier (VT) Argus and Patriot between 1877 and 1880. Curtis’s memoirs produced little attention beyond Vermont when released. Curtis was a quartermaster and so spent most of his time managing the mundane responsibilities of securing food and supplies for his garrisoned troops. He did not participate in any noteworthy battles or confront even a single Confederate soldier. Nor did he witness the most notable postwar campaigns against Native Americans, though he did interact with Navajos and Apaches engaged in military campaigns against other companies in New Mexico. Without a compelling battle narrative or “Indian fighter” tale to regale his eastern readers, Curtis’s memoirs passed into history unnoticed. Still, Gaff and Gaff have compiled and edited those memoirs in highly readable form. Ordered West includes several photographs, annotations, and maps, though the maps could have been more detailed to highlight the natural features in the narrative. Curtis was a talented writer himself, with a keen eye for topography, wildlife, and especially cultural interaction between Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, Native Americans (Apache, Navajo, and Mojave), and mostly Anglo-American military personnel (with a few German immigrants in the ranks too). Curtis follows events chronologically, describing in rich detail his voyage from Kansas City across the Great Plains and along the Santa Fe Trail through southern Colorado and New Mexico. Most of his account addresses his travels between Santa Fe and Las Cruces in New Mexico, with important side journeys to the Jemez Mountains. The last portion of the book includes his narrative of travel into Arizona Territory and his stay at Fort Whipple near Prescott. He concludes with his journey into California and back to the East Coast by sea. Readers of Great Plains Research will find much to enjoy in Ordered West. It fills an important gap in the Civil War literature on New Mexico and Arizona Territory, and it reveals the attitudes of Union officers about the Native peoples of the Southwest in the years before the bloody campaigns of the late 1860s and 1870s. Aaron Astor Department of History Maryville College, Tennessee Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Philosophy of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo- A Critical Analysis

Sri Aurobindo , was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule, for a while became one of its influential leaders and then turned into a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Swami Vivekananda, known in his pre-monastic life as Narendranath Datta, was born in an affluent family in Kolkata. His father,Vishwanath Datta, was a successful attorney with interests in a wide range of subjects, and his mother, Bhuvaneshwari Devi, was endowed with deep devotion, strong character and other qualities. A precocious boy, Narendra excelled in music, gymnastics and studies. By the time he graduated from Calcutta University, he had acquired a vast knowledge of different subjects, especially Western philosophy and history. These, then the Shâstras, the Guru, and the Mother¬land are the three notes that mingle themselves to form the music of the works of Vivekananda .The present paper brings out the critical analysis of the philosophies of the two great spiritual philosophers and writers in a comparative style.

The Modern Return of a Nineteenth-Century Mountain Man’s Ghost: White Masculinity in The Revenant

This essay explores racism, male-centrism, and nationalism (un)covered in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant, focusing on its way of invoking white masculinity. Portraying the hero, Hugh Glass, romantically as a white affectionate toward Native Americans and mixed-bloods, The Revenant is reticent in expressing the historical reality of Glass as an aggressive Indian fighter who contributed to westward expansion. Even worse, the film silently instills the long-lasted racist (mis)belief about Native Americans (plus mixed-bloods) as the ‘Vanishing People’ by making an unbridgeable distance between Glass and his Pawnee wife (and his mixed-blood son). This essay would allow us to see the film’s strategy forging white Americans’ masculine robustness within the levels of gender, race, and nation, where other racial and national groups are characterized as effeminate and immoral in a complex way.

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

During the twenty-seven years bounded by the Mexican and Modoc wars, invading white Americans ruthlessly conquered the approximately fifty California Indian tribes that had eluded Spanish, Mexican, or Russian domination. Triggered by US annexation and the subsequent gold rush, the final subjugation of Native California resulted in a shocking demographic collapse that slashed the state’s Indian population from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to a mere 30,000 by 1870. Although demographer Sherburne Cook carefully calculated that epidemic diseases caused fully 60 percent of this loss and that lethal violence accounted for less than 4 percent, historian Benjamin Madley argues that the “California Indian catastrophe” was no accidental tragedy but rather a clear-cut case of “genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention” (14).To prove his case, Madley has produced a towering book that will long endure as a landmark text in California history. Among its many achievements, this painstakingly researched and thoroughly documented work provides by far the most complete and detailed account ever written about the murderous campaigns waged against Native peoples by the US Army, the California state militia, local volunteer militia units, and irregular bands of self-appointed “Indian fighters.” Grimly, and relentlessly, Madley’s 360-page narrative “focuses on documenting and analyzing deaths due to direct acts of violence” and, in so doing, “reveals many of California’s so-called Indian wars for what they were: genocide campaigns that California Indians violently resisted” (11–12). Determined to let no killing escape the historical record, Madley bolsters his argument with eight appendixes spanning 194 pages. With encyclopedic detail Madley tabulates every murder, battle, and massacre uncovered by his years of research in the primary sources and lists each army, militia, and vigilante expedition as well. According to Madley’s meticulous count, these invariably one-sided encounters claimed the lives of “at least 9,492 to 16,094 California Indians” between 1846 and 1873. As Madley points out, “This more than doubles Cook’s calculation of 4,556 California Indians killed between 1847 and 1865” (12).But did all these terrible killings, spread out across a vast territory and over the course of a quarter century, really add up to a single “American genocide” perpetrated by a “killing machine” built, sanctioned, and funded by politicians and lawmakers in both Sacramento and Washington (13)? Critics will raise at least four objections. First, Madley’s attempt to link so many separate events into a genocidal whole relies on a largely circumstantial and contextual argument that, in turn, depends heavily on the UN Convention’s overly broad and elastic definition of genocide. Consequently, the numerous scholars who reject the UN standard will likely dispute Madley’s overall interpretation.Second, Madley’s analysis does not actually cover all of Native California, since he declines to measure the Spanish or Mexicans by the UN yardstick, and, except for the Cupeño and Wappo, does not examine the post-1846 fate of the numerous tribes that had fallen under earlier colonial rule. Third, the strength of Madley’s evidence for genocide varies considerably from place to place and is far stronger in some cases (such as the army’s slaughter of the Pomo at Clear Lake and Cokadjal in 1850) than it is in others (such as the Modoc War of 1872–73). Similarly, in regard to the respective guilt and complicity of the various alleged perpetrators, the proof offered against the US federal government is not nearly so strong as the damning evidence Madley compiles against the frontier miners, farmers, and ranchers who took so readily to exterminatory “warfare.”Fourth, while Madley’s tally of killings is more than twice that of Cook’s, epidemics, not violence, still remained by far the greater factor in Native mortality, a fact that Madley acknowledges but never squarely confronts, tending instead to submerge the role of disease beneath his thick descriptions of mayhem.Nevertheless, Madley’s case for genocide is overwhelming and compelling in many specific instances. As his evidence makes plain, deliberately exterminatory campaigns devastated at least eighteen California tribes, including the Achumawi, Karuk, Lassik, Nisenan, Nongatl, Owens Valley Paiute, Pomo, Shasta, Sinkyone, Tolowa, Wailaki, Wappo, Whilkut, Wintu, Wiyot, Yana, Yuki, and Yurok.Beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt (and by the standards of any reasonable definition), genocide did in fact play a significant role in the US conquest and subjugation of Native California.

Transforming Captivity Narratives in Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009)

Indian captivity narrative genre, or of non-Indians held by Indians, has long been described establishing both a triumphalist narrative of national progress and a template for American identity, in contrast with American Indian identity.1 As often noted, the Indian captivity narrative is marked by its perpetual metamorphosis, well its status as the archetype of American culture, or its foundation text.2 Richard Slotkin, in his trilogy on the myth of the American frontier, traces the critical function of the captivity narrative, alongside the story of the Indian fighter, in the development of the colonial project and then national ideology beginning in the seventeenth century. two figures of the frontier myth that Slotkin identifies-the captive and the Indian fighter-were codified and systematized in James Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth-century frontier romances and have persisted in various permutations through popular literature, theater, art, and film to the present day.3 While political exigencies informed those permutations, so did cultural confrontation. Focusing in particular on the key roles of gender and familial relations in the genre, June Namias concludes, The popularity of the captive story came from a fascination with both the other and the self. One's own culture, one's own family, one's own gender, that whole complex of Anglo-American culture one inherited by being raised on the American continent, was brought into relief.4 captivity narrative prompted such reflection, argues Joshua David Bellin, and exhibited in a multiplicity of ways the intercultural exchanges that pro- duced the narrative in the first place.5 Its descendants in literature and in film, for all of their revisions to the historical antecedents, nonetheless carry forward the record of exchange between American Indians and white captives and combatants.Running parallel yet counter to the Indian captivity narrative tradition are accounts of American Indians held captive, or what have been termed captivity narratives.6 In the context of colonial negotiations, warfare, Christian evangelism, and educational institutions, American Indians were repeatedly interned by Euro-Americans determined to exert political-geographical control and to expunge Native culture, particularly through forced English literacy. resulting as-told-to and autobiographical narratives in English stand echoes, revisions, and even inversions of the Indian captivity narrative. Alumni of the federal boarding school system, such Francis La Fleshe (Omaha), Zitkala-Sa (Dakota), Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), recount with deep emotion and sharp irony the physical and psychological pain they suffered in the process of acculturation. They also celebrate Native students' strategies to assert independence, express individuality, develop leadership, use Native languages, and undermine federal goals of homogenization and assimilation.7 Thus, the reverse captivity narrative, like its foil, takes up questions of individual survival, cultural identity, and national membership.What happens when the reverse captivity narrative, like the Indian captivity narrative before it, makes its way into other genres, especially film? Does the filmic adaptation of the boarding school narrative echo or depart from the adaptation of the captivity narrative? More specifically, how does the reverse captivity narrative brought to film animate the genre's central concern with linguistic colonialism? And how does the Western-a genre grounded in archetypal struggle between savagery and civilization but perpetually revised since the mid-twentieth century to reflect the violence of US settler colonialism and imperialism8-continue to evolve in the context of American Indians' experience in captivity? In this essay, I begin to answer these questions by focusing on a recent independent film that productively, provocatively embraces the intertextuality of both the Indian captivity and the reverse captivity narratives and their role in the construction-and deconstruction-of a mythic West. …

The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane by Richard W. Etulain (review)

Reviewed by: The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane by Richard W. Etulain Cheryl A. Wells (bio) The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane. By Richard W. Etulain. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. 416. Cloth, $24.95.) Richard W. Etulain’s The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane represents an attempt to read the “silent spaces” of Martha Canary’s, later [End Page 610] Calamity Jane’s, life in an endeavor to untangle fact from fiction and reveal her in flesh and blood and in popular culture and imagination (31). The author offers measured and “educated guesses” based on historical research as well as lore, myth, admittedly sketchy biographies, and fanciful writings of popular culture to fill in these spaces with mixed results (xv). Problematically, but unabashedly and purposely offering no “specific thesis” or framework, Etulain divides his work into two parts (xvi). The first half of his work focuses on piecing together a biographical narrative of Martha Canary’s life from childhood through to her transformation into Calamity Jane and ultimately her death. With a sharp eye that carefully sorts and chronicles the vast amounts of circulating misinformation, Etulain attempts to unbraid the strands of truth from the strands of fiction, which have obscured the life of Martha Canary. He details the Canary family’s migration west, Martha’s birth, her parents’ death, and her ensuing abandonment and migratory lifestyle around the West. Martha emerges as a desperate, sometimes vulnerable, and often needy woman “adrift in a pioneer man’s world, without home, family, or occupation,” which leads to her masculinization in appearance, attitude, and occupation (4). Here Etulain misses a golden opportunity for a fruitful engagement with Peter Boag’s brilliant 2011 work Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, an engagement that would have no doubt added a depth and understanding to Calamity Jane’s domination of Martha and perhaps her popularity in the eyes of the public. How and when the created and evolving myth of Calamity Jane digested the realities of Martha’s identity in popular imagination are unclear. Perhaps owing in part to rampant rumors of her serving with General Custard, participating in Crook’s expedition, and romancing Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, by 1876, emerged as the “notorious woman of a frenetic frontier” (114). She appeared as a staple in sensationalistic dime novels and embellished newspaper accounts. Calamity Jane seemingly embraced and cultivated her growing outrageous reputation. Her private persona as Martha continued to struggle in the face of her thriving public persona as Calamity Jane. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed a marriage or marriages and the birth of Martha’s children, yet it was “her masculine dress, drinking, and errant behavior” that grabbed the nation’s attention (128). While Calamity Jane dominated the public sphere, in private Martha wandered restlessly in search of elusive stability. The twentieth century witnessed Martha’s decline, ending on August 1, 1903, with her death, most likely related to her alcoholism. [End Page 611] Death, however, did nothing to dampen the public’s already wetted appetite for the adventures—real, imagined, and fabricated—of Calamity Jane. The second part of Etulain’s work traces the emergence and evolution of Calamity Jane in popular culture from roughly 1877 into the twenty-first century and offers a kaleidoscopic view of Calamity Jane’s incarnations. During her lifetime, local, regional, and national newspapers as well as Calamity Jane’s own words shaped and reshaped her image into legend. Writers trumpeted her Wild West shows, and as she aged they “castigat[ed] her as an increasingly destitute, drunken, wretched wreck of a woman” (204). In death, her identity remained obscured, for Calamity Jane, or Mrs. M. E. Burke, not Martha Canary, lies buried under an error-riddled tombstone in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. Even her obituary in the nation’s leading newspaper, the New York Times, mischaracterizes and erroneously romanticizes her life by declaring her, among other things, the “Woman Who Became Famous as an Indian Fighter” (205). The national mythologizing of Calamity Jane curiously fell out of vogue between 1905 and 1930 only to fiercely reemerge. Dime novels, films, radio broadcasts, television productions, musicals, novelists, and biographers...

Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th US Cavalry by Robert W. Lull (review)

Reviewed by: Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th US Cavalry by Robert W. Lull Michael Burns Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th US Cavalry. By Robert W. Lull. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013. ix + 289 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 cloth. The military campaigns of the American Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West have received [End Page 311] little attention from historians. In his biography of James M. Williams, the original commander of the Union’s First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and an officer with the US Regulars after the war, Robert W. Lull provides a depiction of the frontier’s Civil War as well as the army’s role in westward expansion after 1865. Williams contributed to many important events in the Great Plains, both as a peripheral and central player. After arriving in Kansas in 1856, Williams, a staunch abolitionist, took part in Bleeding Kansas, established the First Kansas Colored Infantry in 1862, and ably led it and eventually a brigade through most of the Trans-Mississippi Civil War. While commanding, Williams supported the equal treatment of black officers and soldiers. After the conflict, Williams joined the Eighth US Cavalry in Arizona and New Mexico territories. Wounded while on patrol in July 1867 and discharged as a result, Williams settled in Colorado and remained active with the Grand Army of the Republic. He died in Washington dc in February 1907 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. While Lull tracks Williams’s entire life, he primarily focuses on the Civil War years. This provides an interesting opportunity to discuss the racial dynamics of the conflict in the Great Plains. Williams led white, black, and Indian soldiers into battle, and his men fought both white and Indian Confederates. This racial tension led to atrocities on both sides, but Lull focuses mainly on those of white Confederates against black troops. The unique nature of battle in the Trans-Mississippi West also emerges from the narrative. Unlike the large-scale traditional battles east of the Mississippi, the fighting that involved the First Kansas consisted of primarily small unit actions and hit-and-run attacks. This type of warfare, Lull argues, prepared Williams for his post–Civil War command. As a former military officer himself, Lull’s discussions of military actions are the greatest strength of his study. Outside the military dimensions, Lull’s study possesses some weaknesses. As is common with many biographies, Williams comes off as a one-dimensional hero who rarely made mistakes. Providing some discussion of Williams’s personal or professional problems that resulted from his own actions would have made him even more interesting. Despite the book’s purpose, Williams disappears at times, making it seem like a history of the First Kansas Colored Infantry rather than a biography. Additionally, Lull’s section on the Indian Wars employs a fairly traditional approach. The Apache emerge as obstacles to American progress and the US Army as the vehicle of American civilization. Little complexity exists. Yet Lull interprets a little-known theater of the American Civil War. Using Williams as a central character adds a humanistic dimension to the mid-to late-nineteenth century conflicts in the West. As a result, Lull shows how historians can still employ biographies to explore larger concepts of American history. Michael Burns Department of History and Geography Texas Christian University Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Son by Philipp Meyer (review)

Reviewed by: The Son by Philipp Meyer Don Scheese Philipp Meyer, The Son. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 561pp. Cloth, $27.99; paper, $16.99; e-book, $12.49. “No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth” (164), says Peter McCullough, the conscience of this epic novel and the son of Colonel Eli McCullough, legendary Indian captive turned Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, and eventual patriarch of a 250,000-acre “proper acreocracy” (501) in southeastern Texas along the Nueces River. Dispossession and the legacies of conquest are the main themes here, in a family history (genealogical chart included) spanning the years 1836 to 2012. The author chronicles the displacement and near extermination of the Comanches by the first waves of pioneer settlers, the removal of the Mexicans by the Texans, then the gradual takeover of ranchers and cattlemen by the petroleum industry. The narrative is constructed from three different points of view: that of Eli McCullough, recounted through a wpa recording from the 1930s; that of his son Peter, chronicled through journal entries dating from the 1916–17 period, the time of the modern Mexican Revolution; and that of Eli’s great-great-granddaughter Jeanne Anne, a stalwart Republican feminist matron whose recollections take us up to the present. We see how the lives of these three individuals intersect and are affected by a grand sweep of historical events and forces: the conflicts with the Comanches, the US-Mexican War, the Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the oil boom and subsequent embargo of the post–World War II era, and the two Iraq wars. Some figures, like the Colonel, seem to make and transcend history; others, like his son Peter, the Comanches, and the Mexican Americans who live along the border in the early twentieth century, are victimized by it. Jeanne Anne, with more than a bit of the Colonel in her blood, comes into her own after the premature death of her oil-catter husband and learns to profit from the boom-and-bust cycles of the industry, eventually becoming a legend in her own right and twice gracing the cover of Time magazine. I found most riveting those early portions of the novel representing Eli’s captivity narrative. Part ethnographic study of the [End Page 414] Comanches, part potboiler narrative and coming-of-age story of a thirteen-year-old white boy slowly inducted into the culture of the most powerful tribe on the Southern Plains, this aspect of the tale represents a revision of the revisionist school of western American history. To some degree the long-dominant myth of rugged individualism is challenged in the novel: “The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing” (311), says Maria, whose once-aristocratic family has been ousted from its rancheria along the border. However, the Comanches, through young Eli’s interactions with chiefs and medicine men and “squaws,” are depicted not as politically correct Dances with Wolves–type Noble Red Men but simply as people, human beings who love their land, families, and tribe and who will do anything, no matter how seemingly brutal, to save their homeland. Reflecting back on his life, Eli extols his time with the tribe as “the greatest summer I ever had” (207), and when he is forced to return to white society because of the tribe’s decimation by smallpox, he laments that the forty acres of his host’s property felt “like a postage stamp. I was used to having twenty million or so at my disposal” (333). But in the end even as powerful and legendary a figure as the Colonel is a victim of historical forces, in this case manifest destiny and progress. “There are many things I have wanted to save,” he says to Peter late in life: “the Indians, the buff alo, a prairie where you could look twenty miles and not see a fence post. But time has passed those things by” (352). As well as a historical novel, this work is also an environmental history describing one of the greatest transformations of a bioregion...

Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry

Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry

Frontier Cavalry Trooper: The Letters of Private Eddie Matthews, 1869–1874 ed. by Douglas C. McChristian (review)

Reviewed by: Frontier Cavalry Trooper: The Letters of Private Eddie Matthews, 1869–1874 ed. by Douglas C. McChristian Gary L. Cheatham Frontier Cavalry Trooper: The Letters of Private Eddie Matthews, 1869–1874. Edited by Douglas C. McChristian. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Pp. 432. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.) The son of a Civil War veteran, young William Edward “Eddie” Matthews left his rural Maryland home with two friends to seek out a new life in Ohio. Shortly after their arrival in the Buckeye State his friends returned home, leaving Matthews alone and unemployed. Despite his “destitute” situation, Matthews chose to remain in Ohio to avoid returning home to a “strained relationship with his father” (xv). Jobless at nineteen years of age, Matthews decided to join the U.S. Army at a Cincinnati recruiting station. The Army sent Matthews to the West where he lived a life of adventure in military service during the Indian campaigns of the [End Page 87] 1870s, but his military career ended in a conviction and court-martial for forging a document to pay the debt of a fellow soldier. Sometime after being released from prison Matthews moved to Sellersville, Pennsylvania, where he took a job in a cigar factory, married, and fathered a child. In later life Matthews became a “local celebrity” as an “old ex-cavalryman” and “Indian fighter” (398). Following the death of his wife, Matthews moved in with his son in New Jersey, where he passed away in 1932. The volume begins with an engaging introduction written by the book’s editor, Douglas C. McChristian, which sets up nine chapters comprised of Matthews’s letters. The chapters cover different periods of Matthews’s “unvarnished” letters that were “written to home folks” between 1869 and 1874 (xvi, xviii). McChristian begins each chapter with background information that sets the stage for the correspondence to follow, and he identifies each letter by its date and the place from where it was written. This makes it easy to follow Matthews’s travels and post assignments. As a scholar and author of several articles and books dealing with the history of the U.S. Army on the western frontier, McChristian skillfully places the letters in their historical context with the use of explanatory footnotes. In addition, there was little need to edit the letters because Matthews was fairly well educated and an eloquent writer. Although reading nearly four hundred pages of letters might seem tedious at first, doing so carries the reward of being taken back to a time when the West was still largely unsettled. The beautifully written letters present an intimate look into Matthews’s personal thoughts and the reality of frontier Army life. They are filled with fascinating details related to historical events and little-known places. In addition, Matthews’s correspondence shows the personal struggles that soldiers on the frontier experienced when far from home. Some of his letters express the joy that he felt serving in the cavalry, but others talk about the tedium of being an enlisted man and longing to return home to Maryland. For example, after a long day of sitting in a saddle on a march with his fellow troopers, he wrote: “If there ever was a lot of happy men, it was us.” But, only two days later Matthews wrote about his “bondage in the service of the United States” and longing to be free of the Army (181). With the letters and editorial comments largely focusing on New Mexico, Arizona, and surrounding region, readers are given a first-hand glimpse into late nineteenth-century society and life on the southwestern frontier. In addition, the inclusion of more than twenty carefully selected illustrations and maps help the reader visualize the places and events related to Matthews’s letters. This is an engaging book and important contribution to understanding the day-to-day life of a regular soldier on the frontier. Gary L. Cheatham Northeastern State University–Tahlequah Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier by Bob Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier by Bob Thompson Paul Andrew Hutton Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier. By Bob Thompson. (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012. Pp 384. Illustrations, map, notes on sources, bibliography, index.) Bob Thompson, former editor of the Washington Post Sunday magazine, came late to his fascination with Davy Crockett. He escaped the great craze of the baby boomer generation only to be ensnared by his young daughter Lizzie’s fascination with the Crockett story. Lizzie’s introduction was the hypnotic—or irritating, depending on your musical tastes—“Ballad of Davy Crockett” written by Disney screenwriter Tom Blackburn as narrative transition and filler for the three-part 1955 television show. That program revived the somnolent Crockett legend and catapulted Davy back into the front rank of American heroes. Lizzie, like so many other American children, outgrew Davy and moved on, but it was not so easy for her father. He was haunted by the many ghosts of Davy Crockett, both historic and modern, and so he went in search of them and their cultural meaning. We are all the better for his quest. Students of the literature of American memory will recognize Thompson’s book as kin to Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic (1998), although not nearly as acerbic, and Michael Elliott’s Custerology (2007), although not nearly as academic, and even a bit of a distant cousin to John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962). This is road-trip history at its best, a journey across both time and space that entertains as well as educates—much like the song that started it all. Thompson writes with grace in a breezy style that makes for a good read. Thompson explores the life of the real Crockett from his Limestone, Tennessee, birthplace (in a valley of course, not on a mountaintop) through his various incarnations as bear hunter, Indian fighter, politician, freedom fighter, and martyr. In his own lifetime Davy was many things, and after his death he became even more. A living symbol of the Jacksonian “Age of the Common Man,” he became in death a martyr to national expansion and the embodiment of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to conquer a continent. His 1955 rebirth, with Walt Disney as able midwife, spoke to the symbolic Crockett as a buckskin-clad Cold Warrior who was also racially tolerant, a fighter for social justice, and disdainful of political corruption. He was the perfect hero for a generation that [End Page 100] would soon embrace John F. Kennedy and usher in an era of vast social change. Thompson’s journey ends, of course, at the Alamo, where he cannot resist that great issue of the manner of Crockett’s death. His interviews with the two leading protagonists in that grand debate, William Groneman and James Crisp, are more informative on the reasons for the continuing fascination with Crockett than on the actual details of the hero’s death, but that is the nature of this delightful book. A bevy of Crocketteers from all walks of life also appear along the way, from Tennessee school teacher Jim Claborn and businessman Joe Swann to Hollywood film-maker David Zucker, Professors Michael Lofaro and Stephen Hardin, National Park Service historian Danny Martinez, Alamo hostess Joan Headley, and bestselling Texas novelist Stephen Harrigan. All share a mutual fascination with the author on both the real and imagined Crockett. All, in one way or another, are still haunted by the ghost of Davy Crockett. Buckle up and go on the road with Bob Thompson and Davy Crockett. It is not about the destination, of course, but rather all about the journey. You will come away amused, enlightened, and perhaps a bit haunted by the vivid personalities, complex histories, and many ghosts you meet along the way. Paul Andrew Hutton University of New Mexico Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry by Robert W. Lull (review)

Reviewed by: Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry by Robert W. Lull John D. Huddleston Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry. By Robert W. Lull. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013. Pp. 308. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.) Retired Army officer Robert W. Lull has penned the first biography of controversial Civil War and Indian fighter General James M. Williams. Born in 1833 in northern New York, Williams moved with his family westward to Wisconsin in 1844. The youngest son of a large family, Williams soon realized that he had little future on the family farm. Therefore, he began studying law, and in 1856 he and his brother Sam moved to Leavensworth, Kansas, opening a book and stationery shop. The two brothers were soon drawn into the slavery issue, opposing Missouri-based pro-slavery partisans. The author acknowledges that it is “highly probable” that Williams, a follower of future U.S. Senator James Henry Lane, participated in attacks on pro-slavery supporters in Kansas, although no formal records exist. By the start of the Civil War, recently elected U.S. Senator Lane procured a commission as a Union brigadier general and, despite not formally accepting his commission and thereby voiding his position within the Senate, began to raise units for the North, including the Kansas Third Regiment with newly appointed Captain James M. Williams. Fighting on the Kansas-Missouri border between Lane’s Jay-hawkers and pro-slavery bands featuring the likes of William Quantrill was horrific; the sackings of Osceola and Lawrence, Kansas, respectively, show the devastation of the conflict. Resigning from Lane’s Brigade in May 1862, Williams became a Union recruiter, specifically targeting blacks for Union service and even officer commissions. By the time the U.S. War Department objected to black recruitment and especially to the commissioning of black officers, it was too late. With Williams commanding, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry had already taken to the field. Rising to the rank of brevet brigadier general, Williams frequently led his black troops to victory, although the 1st Kansas suffered defeat and subsequent atrocities at the hands of the Confederates at Poison Springs, Arkansas, in April 1864. With the end of the war, Williams sought and received a commission in the much smaller postwar army, becoming a captain of the 8th Cavalry in October 1866. Serving in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, Williams’s command pursued hostile Indians with the same vigor that he had pursued pro-slavery advocates in Kansas before the war. By 1873, because of conflicts with several of his superior officers, which resulted in him being court-martialed and suffering from the effects of five battle wounds received during his military service, Williams resigned and entered private life as a pioneer businessman and rancher at Trinidad, Colorado. In 1890 the U.S. Senate Committee on Military Affairs reviewed Williams’s service record and concluded that he had been the victim of “legalized injustice” (222), essentially overturning his court-martial and temporarily restoring him to duty so he could he could be awarded a pension. James M. Williams died in Washington, D.C., on February 15, 1907, likely from complications of a wound suffered while fighting Indians in Arizona. Like many figures in American history, James Williams’s life was controversial. He was a Kansas Jayhawker, he recruited blacks for Union service before it was acceptable to do so, and he even commissioned black officers. Significantly, his [End Page 442] black troops were the first to best white Confederates in battle during the war, and he mercilessly pursued and killed Indians in the post-Civil War American West. Lull’s text will be of primary interest to military historians and especially to those who follow the lives of pre-Civil War opponents of slavery. John D. Huddleston Schreiner University Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

Indian Hater, Indian Fighter, Indian Killer: Melville's Indictment of the “New Nation” and the “New World”

LeviathanVolume 14, Issue 1 p. 94-99 Indian Hater, Indian Fighter, Indian Killer: Melville's Indictment of the “New Nation” and the “New World” LESLIE MARMON SILKO, LESLIE MARMON SILKOSearch for more papers by this author LESLIE MARMON SILKO, LESLIE MARMON SILKOSearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 March 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2011.01553.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume14, Issue1March 2012Pages 94-99 RelatedInformation

Type Certification of 18 Ni Maraging Steels for Landing Gears

Maraging steels exhibit unique properties, such as high strength with excellent fracture toughness, ease of machining and above all distortion free thermal processing. These attractive properties and advantages of maraging steel do not outweigh the initial cost resulting from high alloy content and especially in certain structural components where in much of the forging is machined as swarf. However, with the constant drive to prove the technology when maximum strength and stiffness per unit volume becomes the major criteria, the choice of material may overwhelmingly become maraging steel. Above requirements necessiate a landing gear material for Indian fighter aircraft to have a combination of high strength, sufficient stiffness, excellent fatigue strength, utmost cleanliness, resistance to micro-structural degradation, freedom from surface anomalies, good corrosion & stress corrosion resistance and superior toughness to meet the current damage tolerant design criteria. M/s Midhani in consultation with airworthiness authorities took up the task to develop & manufacture this steel to the laid down type test schedule. The steel has satisfactorily met all the requirements and landing gear has been successfully forged, machined and fitted to the prototype. This paper describes the metallurgical aspects that are relevant for developing the maraging steel along with a brief note on the properties - chemical, microstructural and mechanical. An attempt is made in the presentation to show that the indigenously developed and produced maraging steel is indeed at par with aeronautical grade materials, including maraging steels of international sources.

Symbolism, Economic Depression, and the Specter of Slavery: William Henry Harrison’s Speaking Tour for the Presidency

Symbolism, Economic Depression, and the Specter of SlaveryWilliam Henry Harrison’s Speaking Tour for the Presidency Jeffrey Bourdon (bio) During the first electioneering speech ever given by a presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison displayed a flair for the dramatic as he refuted charges made against him by Martin Van Buren’s Democratic Party. Harrison gave the thirty-minute improvised speech from a platform in front of the National Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, on June 5, 1840. The former war hero started by denying the allegation that a “conscience-committee” kept him in a cage while they answered all of his campaign correspondence. Harrison also denounced claims that he belonged to the Federalist Party, sympathized with the abolition movement, or voted for the Missouri Compromise with reservations. The presidential candidate even demonstrated his preoccupation with European immigrants’ opinions by refuting a rumor from a Cincinnati-based German newspaper that accused him of running away from approaching Indians while serving under General Wayne in the early 1790s. The former Indian fighter joked that his detractors were apparently unaware “that the only possible security to young Harrison’s scalp . . . was in keeping out of the woods.” According to one source, this comment was followed by “loud and irrepressible laughter.” Finally, the speaker displayed his awareness of the importance of symbolism in the campaign. In February, the Baltimore Register had accused the candidate of being content with living in a log cabin and drinking hard cider on a modest monthly pension. Since then, the Whigs had spent considerable energy to turn it into an effective campaign theme—“The Log Cabin/Hard Cider” campaign. Harrison reminded his listeners that “It is true that a part of my dwelling house is a log cabin, but as to the hard cider—(pause).” According to the [End Page 5] Ohio Confederate, “The laughter which followed the allusion to the ‘hard cider’ branch of the story, drowned the voice of the speaker.”1 Harrison had a long history in Ohio. After being commended by General Anthony Wayne for valor at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, he received a promotion to captain a year later at an outpost located in North Bend, Ohio. Harrison married his wife, Anna, at North Bend before resigning from the military in 1798. One year later, the Northwest Territory elected Harrison as its first representative in Congress. When Ohio became a separate territory in 1801, President John Adams appointed Harrison governor of the Indiana Territory. After his performances at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 and the Battle of the Thames in 1813, Harrison started acquiring a national reputation as a war hero. In 1816, Ohio voters elected Harrison to the House of Representatives, where he remained for six years. After he lost his seat in the House in 1822, Harrison was chosen to represent Ohio as a U.S. senator. Six years later, President John Quincy Adams appointed the senator to be the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Colombia. After three years in Colombia, Harrison returned to North Bend to resume his career as a farmer and was elected as the clerk of courts for Hamilton County.2 In 1836, the newly formed Whig Party ran Harrison as one of three regional candidates for the presidency. The western Whig candidate made several public appearances and brief speeches and surprised the party with a strong showing in the election. Harrison’s career, personality, and success in 1836 combined to help him become the Whig’s first national candidate in 1840. Harrison most likely chose Ohio as the site for his campaign tour because it was his home state. (There is evidence that he gave only one speech out of state, in Carthage, Indiana.) And while there is no indication as to why Harrison chose to stay so close to home, his age during the campaign, sixty-seven, as well as the financial aspects of long-distance travel probably both served as factors in his decision. Certainly his brief appearances in Ohio during the presidential contest of 1836 helped prepare Harrison for his electioneering tour four years later, starting at the National Hotel in Columbus. In his first speech directly to the...

Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861 (review)

20ogBook Reviews265 service would boost the fortunes of their region and pave the way for a southern transcontinental railroad. Elsewhere, in his discussion of Henry Skillman's mail operations in Texas during the early 1850s, Sells says that "Negro soldiers" provided protection for Skillman's mail line (131-132). Buffalo soldiers were not detailed to the Texas frontier until after the Civil War. The above arejust a few of die many errors that diminish diis overview's odierwise commendable assets. Sells, a Colorado native now retired from the financial services industry, clearly has a strong affinity for his subject matter. Readers will find much of the book informative and many of the stories engaging. This work provides an illustrative example, however, of why copyeditors at every publishing house are wordi their weight in gold. Texas Christian UniversityGlen Sample Ely Texas Devils: Rangen and Regulars on tL· Lower Rio Grande, 1846—1861. By Michael L. Collins. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Pp. 328. Illustrations , notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780806139395, $26.95 cloth.) Anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Texas Rangers and the United States Army and the role they played in the history of the Lower Rio Grande will thoroughly enjoy this refreshing and tantalizing book. In a grand sweeping narrative, Collins ably demonstrates that the Mexican War was only die beginning of a series of tumultuous events on the border. As many as five thousand Texas Mounted Volunteersjoined Gen. Zachary Taylor 's army on die Rio Grande in 1 846. Although Taylor viewed the Rangers as brave and gallant, he saw them as lawless and uncontrollable. Rangers such as Ben McCulloch,John Salmon "Rip" Ford, Walter P. Lane,John Coffee "Jack" Hays, and Samuel Hamilton Walker all became legendary during the war. A veteran of the Mier Expedition and the "black bean" incident, Walker came to be known as the ¦ "Thunderbolt of die Texas Rangers." Killed at the Batde of Humanda at the end of the war, he is best remembered today for the Colt Walker revolver, the largest and most powerful black powder repeating handgun ever made. As an adjutant in the Rangers, Ford came to be known as "R. I .P." after writing "Rest in Peace" at die end of letters of condolence. One of the most interesting Texas volunteers, however, is John Joel Glanton who is referred to as a half-savage Indian fighter with a penchant for scalping die enemy, and who was certain to have been courtmartialed as a war criminal had he not escaped back to Texas. After a murderous, scalp hunting career murdering Indians in northern Mexico, Glanton arrived at the Yuma Crossing on die Colorado River where he seized control of the ferry from the Yuma Indians. In response, the Yumas caught Glanton and his men in a drunken stupor, killed and scalped most of them, and then cremated their bodies in a big bonfire. Largely men of myth with a barbaric code of conduct and notorious for their excessive violence and biting racism, "Los Diablos Téjanos" left deep and lasting scars on die history of the border that remain to this day. In the 1 850s, the lower Rio Grande was also plagued by filibusters lusting for conquest, many of them Knights of the Golden Circle. Some dreamed of creat- 266Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober ing a Republic of the Sierra Madre as an independent buffer state in northern Mexico. Probably die best known filibuster wasJosé María de Jesús Carvajal who rallied several hundred Texas mercenaries into a mob called the "Liberating Army of Northern Mexico." In what was known as the "Merchant's War," Carvajal and his rabble captured Camargo and attacking Matamoros, only to be defeated by a superior force of the Mexican army in street-to-street, house-to-house fighting. Certainly the most serious uprising on the Rio Grande, one that would send hundreds of Texas Rangers and the United States Army scurrying for the Rio Grande, was the Cortina War of 1859-1860. Although Collins did not have available a recent biography of Cortina that corrects many of the errors of previous writings on die subject, his treatment of this...