Sioux War Dispatches, Reports from the Field, 1876–1877

Trouble began when gold was discovered on the Sioux reservation in South Dakota in 1874. Anxious to preserve a fragile peace, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered local military forces to turn away the swarm of gold seekers but soon gave up and concluded that the Sioux needed to be crushed once and for all. Abrams (Crying for Scalps: St. George Stanley’s Sioux War Narrative) has written a meticulously detailed history of the brutal campaign that accomplished this. Each of 18 chapters interweaves the author’s account of events with contemporary newspaper articles, letters, official communiqués, and journal entries. These provide colorful, often fanciful, details, anecdotes, and opinions that alternately admire the troops, look on the war and its leaders with a critical eye, and view Indians as either noble, persecuted, or depraved savages. Plenty of histories cover this small but relentlessly depressing war, most recently Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand. Abrams breaks no new ground but delivers a mass of information from observers on the spot. 25 illus., 7 maps. (May)