Frontier Regulars - by Robert M Utley (Paperback)

About the Book

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Macmillan, c1973.

Book Synopsis

In Frontier Regulars Robert M. Utley combines scholarship and drama to produce an impressive history of the final, massive drive by the Regular Army to subdue and control the American Indians and open the West during the twenty-five years following the Civil War.

Here are incisive accounts of the campaign directed by Major General William Tecumseh Sherman--from the first skirmishes with the Sioux over the Bozeman Trail defenses in 1866 to the final defeat and subjugation of the Northern Plains Indians in 1890. Utley's brilliant descriptions of military maneuvers and flaming battles are juxtaposed with a careful analysis of Sherman's army: its mode of operation, equipment, and recruitment; its lifestyle and relations with Congress and civilians.

Proud of the United States Army and often sympathetic toward the Indians, Utley presents a balanced overview of the long struggle. He concludes that the frontier army was not "the heroic vanguard of civilization" as sometimes claimed and still less "the barbaric band of butchers depicted in the humanitarian literature of the nineteenth century and the atonement literature of the twentieth." Rather, it was a group of ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) men doing the best they could.

From the Back Cover

This book combines scholarship and drama to produce an impressive history of the final, massive drive by the Regular Army to subdue and control the American Indians and open the West during the twenty-five years following the Civil War.

Review Quotes

"An excellent piece of scholarship and writing. Lucid, balanced, comprehensive, interpretative, and thoroughly documented, it is a scholar's dream and a layman's delight."--Library Journal

About the Author

Robert M. Utley is a preeminent historian of the West and the author of numerous award-winning books, including The Last Days of the Sioux Nation; Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (Nebraska, 1981); Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend (Nebraska, 1998); and Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (Bison Books, 1991).