"The Last Campaign" chronicles the final American frontier wars; Expansionism.

 

"This ambitious but flawed book documents the conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans in the late 19th century

The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America. By H.W. Brands. Doubleday; 416 pages; $32.50

IN 1867, in the wake of an attack led by the Sioux that wiped out a military company, Congress sent emissaries to the Great Plains in an effort to end Native American resistance to white settlement once and for all. The Great Peace Commission, composed of three generals and four civilian commissioners, met with military leaders and tribal chiefs from the Cheyenne and Oglala and Lakota Sioux in their northern plains homelands. Without question, their report later noted, the government's treatment of the continent's indigenous people had been "uniformly unjust". In the words of Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, "the faith of treaties solemnly entered into [had been] totally disregarded and Indian territory wantonly violated" by successive waves of miners and pioneers.

However justified, the bloody reprisals had to stop. The army's advice to the commission was blunt: the United States could either wage all-out war to build its new transcontinental railroads or it would have to withdraw and leave the land to its original inhabitants. "The war must be vigorous, or arrangements had better be made for its discontinuance," said Winfield Hancock, commander of the Army's Department of the Missouri. After a further meeting with the Navajos to the south, the commission reluctantly agreed. Brute force might be the only way to separate whites and Natives, it argued, since the two sides could not get along.

The peace commission's work is a little known and illuminating chapter in the history of the final American frontier wars (or "Indian Wars") conducted by the United States, most intensely in the two decades following the civil war. The section devoted to it in "The Last Campaign" is the most interesting bit in a new book of popular history that otherwise rehashes well-known material.

Subtitled "Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America", the latest book by H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas, is fundamentally a military story that ranges across a vast expanse. He presents the crushing of America's Native peoples as a single overarching campaign spearheaded by General William Sherman, the military giant whose scorched-earth tactics helped clinch the North's victory in the civil war.

Mr Brands, who has written bestselling biographies of several American statesmen, relies on accounts of dozens of battles between the 1850s and 1880s, from the Little Bighorn to the Modoc war. He quotes from the memoirs of famous chiefs and generals as well as 19th-century newspaper reports. This reader's eyes glazed over at the detailed eyewitness descriptions of umpteen skirmishes and the logic of their inclusion is not always clear: most have been better described in more focused studies or the first catalogue of these conflicts published in 1970, Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee".

Yet the broad view does allow the author to identify important common threads. One by one, he notes, every Native American tribe faced their own devastating choice: submit to relocation and abandon the nomadic way of life, or fight and die. In 1865 indigenous people numbered fewer than 400,000 against 30m settlers backed by battle-hardened soldiers. "We were hedged in by two evils," wrote a Choctaw chief, "and we chose that which we thought the least."

Mr Brands also does a good job of underlining the degree to which it was white settlers--not the armed forces--who demanded Native Americans' removal. Sherman himself thought as much. After touring eastern Colorado and Wyoming in 1866 the general said he could see no "decent excuse" to fight peaceful Utes or Cheyennes and Arapahoes, who were "off after the buffaloes". It was the farmers who were "the real pressure for garrisons and an Indian war", as they hoped to sell their crops to the army. But his tolerance evaporated later that year, after the Fetterman Fight, when the Lakota Sioux wiped out 81 soldiers on the plains. The battle prompted Sherman to declare all-out war.

Despite the promise of its title, Geronimo and Sherman never meet; nor is the Apache chief's tale particularly compelling. The only narrative flourish Mr Brands permits himself is the assertion that the colonising Europeans were simply "tribes" akin to those they found competing for territory across the continent. The colonists and their army didn't so much wage a new war as join one that had been under way for centuries, he asserts. "Of all the tribes that trod the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific, between the Rio Grande and the Lake of the Woods, one had finally conquered, dispersed or outlasted the rest," he grandly concludes.

It is a false equivalence that lets "a few tribes from the old world" neatly off the hook for well-documented genocide.” [1]

·  ·  ·  1. "'The Last Campaign' chronicles the final American frontier wars; Expansionism." The Economist, 22 Nov. 2022, p. NA.