Powder River Odyssey

Powder River Odyssey PDF Author: David E. Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
The entry for September 8, 1865, is terse: “We marched and fought over 15 miles today.” With these few words civilian military engineer Lyman G. Bennett characterized the experience of the 1,400 men of the Powder River Expedition’s Eastern Division as they trudged through largely unexplored territory and faced off with American Indians determined to keep their hunting grounds. David E. Wagner’s Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole’s Western Campaign of 1865 tells the story of a largely forgotten campaign at the pivotal moment when the Civil War ended and the Indian wars captured national attention. The expedition’s mission seemed simple: punish the bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho that had attacked white emigrants and commercial traffic moving west along the Oregon Trail. But the army’s western command failed to appreciate either the resolve of their enemies or the difficulties of the terrain. Cole’s men, ill-provisioned from the outset, began to die of scurvy two months into the campaign and contemplated mutiny. Bennett’s previously unpublished journal and other primary sources clarify and correct previous accounts of the expedition. Fifteen detailed maps reflect the author’s intimate knowledge of the topography along the expedition’s route. Wagner’s documentary account reveals in stark detail the difficulties inherent in the army’s attempt to pacify the American West.

Powder River Odyssey

Powder River Odyssey PDF Author: David E. Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
The entry for September 8, 1865, is terse: “We marched and fought over 15 miles today.” With these few words civilian military engineer Lyman G. Bennett characterized the experience of the 1,400 men of the Powder River Expedition’s Eastern Division as they trudged through largely unexplored territory and faced off with American Indians determined to keep their hunting grounds. David E. Wagner’s Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole’s Western Campaign of 1865 tells the story of a largely forgotten campaign at the pivotal moment when the Civil War ended and the Indian wars captured national attention. The expedition’s mission seemed simple: punish the bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho that had attacked white emigrants and commercial traffic moving west along the Oregon Trail. But the army’s western command failed to appreciate either the resolve of their enemies or the difficulties of the terrain. Cole’s men, ill-provisioned from the outset, began to die of scurvy two months into the campaign and contemplated mutiny. Bennett’s previously unpublished journal and other primary sources clarify and correct previous accounts of the expedition. Fifteen detailed maps reflect the author’s intimate knowledge of the topography along the expedition’s route. Wagner’s documentary account reveals in stark detail the difficulties inherent in the army’s attempt to pacify the American West.

Patrick Connor's War

Patrick Connor's War PDF Author: David E. Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806192178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The summer of 1865 marked the transition from the Civil War to Indian war on the western plains. With the rest of the country's attention still focused on the East, the U.S. Army began an often forgotten campaign against the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Led by Gen. Patrick Connor, the Powder River Indian Expedition into Wyoming sought to punish tribes for raids earlier that year. Patrick Connor's War describes the troops' movement into hostile territory while struggling with bad weather, supply shortages, and communication problems. David E. Wagner's carefully assembled account carries readers along the trail of Connor's men and allows soldiers to give firsthand impressions of the land and campaign. The author draws on journals, letters, and reports--especially the James H. Kidd Papers, a copy of Connor's expedition report previously believed burned, and the newly discovered C. M. Lee diary--to reconstruct a day-by-day chronology that finds the men trudging, sometimes barefoot and half starved, over unforgiving terrain. The thrill and danger of buffalo hunts and skirmishes with Indians punctuated an arduous trek across the northern plains. Copious maps tie narrative to topography by plotting Connor's route and the paths of the units under him. Also included is a detailed account of the civilian road-building expedition of James Sawyers, whose fate became intertwined with the Powder River expedition. Two dozen illustrations and biographical sketches of main players round out the work. This first major campaign of the post-Civil War Indian wars has been largely overlooked by historians--but should be no longer. Patrick Connor's War breaks new ground by bringing the expedition to life in fascinating detail that will satisfy scholars and engage general readers.

Jim Bridger

Jim Bridger PDF Author: Jerry Enzler
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806175796
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Frémont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of. His adventures are fit for remaking into the tall tales Bridger himself liked to tell. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman’s full measure for the first time—and tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud. Born in 1804 and orphaned at thirteen, Bridger made his first western foray in 1822, traveling up the Missouri River with Mike Fink and a hundred enterprising young men to trap beaver. At twenty he “discovered” the Great Salt Lake. At twenty-one he was the first to paddle the Bighorn River’s Bad Pass. At twenty-two he explored the wonders of Yellowstone. In the following years, he led trapping brigades into Blackfeet territory; guided expeditions of Smithsonian scientists, topographical engineers, and army leaders; and, though he could neither read nor write, mapped the tribal boundaries for the Great Indian Treaty of 1851. Enzler charts Bridger’s path from the fort he built on the Oregon Trail to the route he blazed for Montana gold miners to avert war with Red Cloud and his Lakota coalition. Along the way he married into the Flathead, Ute, and Shoshone tribes and produced seven children. Tapping sources uncovered in the six decades since the last documented Bridger biography, Enzler’s book fully conveys the drama and details of the larger-than-life history of the “King of the Mountain Men.” This is the definitive story of an extraordinary life.

The Powder River

The Powder River PDF Author: Win Blevins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781639773503
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
A soulful odyssey to reclaim one's homeland... The northern Cheyenne call Powder River country their sacred home. Now held captive far to the South in so-called Indian Territory, the remnants of this once-mighty nation are growing weak. To survive, the Cheyenne must battle their way to their ancestral home, fending off the pursuit of well-armed soldiers. Among this outnumbered band are Adam Smith Maclean, born both white and Cheyenne, and his beautiful wife Elaine, a strong-willed New Englander determined to stand by Adam and his desperate, daring people on their trek through the hostile heart of the West-toward the welcoming banks of their beloved Powder River. An adventurer's story told like never before, the Rivers of the West saga follows those compelled by the evocative grasp of the untamed frontier, looking to carve out a place in America's most awe-inspiring backcountry.

Riverman

Riverman PDF Author: Ben McGrath
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451494016
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
“This quietly profound book belongs on the shelf next to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.” —The New York Times The riveting true story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers—and then disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This book “contains everything: adventure, mystery, travelogue, and unforgettable characters” (David Grann, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon). For decades, Dick Conant paddled the rivers of America, covering the Mississippi, Yellowstone, Ohio, Hudson, as well as innumerable smaller tributaries. These solo excursions were epic feats of planning, perseverance, and physical courage. At the same time, Conant collected people wherever he went, creating a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting. Ben McGrath, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was one of those people. In 2014 he met Conant by chance just north of New York City as Conant paddled down the Hudson, headed for Florida. McGrath wrote a widely read article about their encounter, and when Conant's canoe washed up a few months later, without any sign of his body, McGrath set out to find the people whose lives Conant had touched--to capture a remarkable life lived far outside the staid confines of modern existence. Riverman is a moving portrait of a complex and fascinating man who was as troubled as he was charismatic, who struggled with mental illness and self-doubt, and was ultimately unable to fashion a stable life for himself; who traveled alone and yet thrived on connection and brought countless people together in his wake. It is also a portrait of an America we rarely see: a nation of unconventional characters, small river towns, and long-forgotten waterways.

Interrupted Odyssey

Interrupted Odyssey PDF Author: Mary Stockwell
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809336715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this first book devoted to the genesis, failure, and lasting legacy of Ulysses S. Grant’s comprehensive American Indian policy, Mary Stockwell shows Grant as an essential bridge between Andrew Jackson’s pushing Indians out of the American experience and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welcoming them back in. Situating Grant at the center of Indian policy development after the Civil War, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians reveals the bravery and foresight of the eighteenth president in saying that Indians must be saved and woven into the fabric of American life. In the late 1860s, before becoming president, Grant collaborated with Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian who became his first commissioner of Indian affairs, on a plan to rescue the tribes from certain destruction. Grant hoped to save the Indians from extermination by moving them to reservations, where they would be guarded by the U.S. Army, and welcoming them into the nation as American citizens. By so doing, he would restore the executive branch’s traditional authority over Indian policy that had been upended by Jackson. In Interrupted Odyssey, Stockwell rejects the common claim in previous Grant scholarship that he handed the reservations over to Christian missionaries as part of his original policy. In part because Grant’s plan ended political patronage, Congress overturned his policy by disallowing Army officers from serving in civil posts, abandoning the treaty system, and making the new Board of Indian Commissioners the supervisors of the Indian service. Only after Congress banned Army officers from the Indian service did Grant place missionaries in charge of the reservations, and only after the board falsely accused Parker of fraud before Congress did Grant lose faith in his original policy. Stockwell explores in depth the ousting of Parker, revealing the deep-seated prejudices that fueled opposition to him, and details Grant’s stunned disappointment when the Modoc murdered his peace commissioners and several tribes—the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Sioux—rose up against his plans for them. Though his dreams were interrupted through the opposition of Congress, reformers, and the tribes themselves, Grant set his country firmly toward making Indians full participants in the national experience. In setting Grant’s contributions against the wider story of the American Indians, Stockwell’s bold, thoughtful reappraisal reverses the general dismissal of Grant’s approach to the Indians as a complete failure and highlights the courage of his policies during a time of great prejudice.

Powder River

Powder River PDF Author: Struthers Burt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


New Fields of Adventure

New Fields of Adventure PDF Author: M Jane Johansson
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621908615
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Lyman Gibson Bennett (1832-1904) was a Federal soldier who saw extensive service in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. A writer of considerable energy, wit, and intelligence, Bennett's wartime diaries recount his diverse and wide-ranging military record, stretching geographically from the prairies of Illinois to the Rocky Mountains, while a postwar account details, among other things, his labors to recruit "Mountain Feds" in the Ozarks. This volume provides the perspective of an individual who was both a topographical engineer and a common soldier. As a member of the Thirty-Sixth Illinois Infantry, Bennett provided one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the pivotal Battle of Pea Ridge, March 7-8, 1862. By December 1863, Bennett was promoted to first lieutenant in the newly formed Fourth Arkansas Cavalry (US) and wrote an invaluable first-person account of guerrilla fighting in the Ozark mountains. M. Jane Johansson's critical presentation of his writings will prove useful to scholars of the Ozarks, landscape studies, and the Civil War in the West"--

Morning Star Dawn

Morning Star Dawn PDF Author: Jerome A. Greene
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806135489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
From a recognized authority on the High Plains Indians wars comes this narrative history blending both American Indian and U.S. Army perspectives on the attack that destroyed the village of Northern Cheyenne chief Morning Star. Of momentous significance for the Cheyennes as well as the army, this November 1876 encounter, coming exactly six months to the day after the Custer debacle at the Little Bighorn, was part of the Powder River Expedition waged by Brigadier General George Crook against the Indians. Vital to the larger context of the Great Sioux War, the attack on Morning Star’s village encouraged the eventual surrender of Crazy Horse and his Sioux followers. Unbiased in its delivery, Morning Star Dawn offers the most thorough modern scholarly assessment of the Powder River Expedition. It incorporates previously unsynthesized data from the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and other repositories, and provides an examination of all facets of the campaign leading to and following the destruction of Morning Star’s village.

Powder River

Powder River PDF Author: Maxwell Struthers Burt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Get Book Here

Book Description