For the U.S. Army, Western experiences illustrated its role in ensuring national security and in fostering national development. Its soldiers performed feats of great heroism and rank cruelty. Debates regarding the military's role in projecting Indian policy, the division of power between state and federal authorities, and the size of a professional military establishment reveal the inconsistency in the nation's views of its army.
The end of the Seven Years? War found Britain?s professional army in America facing new and unfamiliar responsibilities. In addition to occupying the recently conquered French settlements in Canada, redcoats were ordered into the trans-Appalachian west, into the little-known and much disputed territories that lay between British, French, and Spanish America. There the soldiers found themselves serving as occupiers, police, and diplomats in a vast territory marked by extreme climatic variation?a world decidedly different from Britain or the settled American colonies. Going beyond the war experience, Army and Empire examines the lives and experiences of British soldiers in the complex, evolving cultural frontiers of the West in British America. From the first appearance of the redcoats in the West until the outbreak of the American Revolution, Michael N. McConnell explores all aspects of peacetime service, including the soldiers? diet and health, mental well-being, social life, transportation, clothing, and the built environments within which they lived and worked. McConnell looks at the army on the frontier for what it was: a collection of small communities of men, women, and children faced with the challenges of surviving on the far western edge of empire.
The papers in this volume are those presented at the Air Force Academy on September 30 and October 1, 1976. They are arranged into four sections: '“The Frontier and American Military Tradition,” “Comparison of Military Frontiers,” “Impact of the Military on the Frontier,” and “Military Life on the Frontier.” Papers in thefirst two sections address the broad sweep of the military experience on the frontier. These papers help provide perspective and conceptualframework within which to fit the more specific studies in the third and fourth sections. The fifth section, “The Seventh Military History Symposium in Perspective” includes the reactions and commentary of three leading military historians. With a few exceptions the papers and commentary in this volume are presented in the order in which they were delivered at the symposium.The Military History Symposium series began in 1677 as an annual event sponsored by the USAF Academy and the Association of Graduates. Since 1970, the symposia have been held biennially. Thepurpose of the series is to provide a forum for scholars in military history and related fields, thereby promoting an exchange of ideas andinformation between scholars and military professionals, another link between thought and application in military affairs.
Of all the U.S. Army posts in the West, none witnessed more history than Fort Laramie, positioned where the northern Great Plains join the Rocky Mountains. From its beginnings as a trading post in 1834 to its abandonment by the army in 1890, it was involved in the buffalo hide trade, overland migrations, Indian wars and treaties, the Utah War, Confederate maneuvering, and the coming of the telegraph and first transcontinental railroad. Douglas C. McChristian has written the first complete history of Fort Laramie, chronicling every critical stage in its existence, including its addition to the National Park System. He draws on an extraordinary array of archival materials–including those at Fort Laramie National Historic Site–to present new data about the fort and new interpretations of historical events. Emphasizing the fort's military history, McChristian documents the army's vital role in ending challenges posed by American Indians to U.S. occupation and settlement of the region, and he expands on the fort's interactions with the many Native peoples of the Central Plains and Rocky Mountains. He provides a particularly lucid description of the infamous Grattan fight of 1854, which initiated a generation of strife between Indians and U.S. soldiers, and he recounts the 1851 Horse Creek and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties. Meticulously researched and gracefully told, this is a long-overdue military history of one of the American West's most venerable historic places.
The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 is the story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield. Repeatedly, Americans used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies, but to shape their nation and their vision of who they were, often in ways not directly associated with shooting wars or combat. That the regular army served as nation-builders is ironic, given the officer corps’ obsession with a warrior ethic and the deep-seated disdain for a standing army that includes Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and debates regarding congressional appropriations. Whether the issue concerned Indian policy, the appropriate division of power between state and federal authorities, technology, transportation, communications, or business innovations, the public demanded that the military remain small even as it expected those forces to promote civilian development. Robert Wooster’s exhaustive research in manuscript collections, government documents, and newspapers builds upon previous scholarship to provide a coherent and comprehensive history of the U.S. Army from its inception during the American Revolution to the Philippine-American War. Wooster integrates its institutional history with larger trends in American history during that period, with a special focus on state-building and civil-military relations. The United States Army and the Making of America will be the definitive book on the army’s relationship with the nation from its founding to the dawn of the twentieth century and will be a valuable resource for a generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and virtually any scholar with an interest in the U.S. Army, American frontiers and borderlands, the American West, or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation-building.
Seventy million dollars in fifty-five years. From Texas' annexation in 1845 until the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army pumped at least that much or more into the economy of the fledgling state, a fact that directly challenges the popular heritage of Texas as the state with roots of pioneer capitalism and fervent independence. In The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845-1900, Thomas T. Smith sheds light on just who bankrolled the evolution of Texas into viable statehood. Smith draws on extensive research gathered from both government archives and Texas army posts in order to evaluate the symbiotic relationship between army quartermasters and the economy of the young state. Texas was the army's largest--and most costly--engagement, absorbing up to thirty percent of the total operating budget and channeling that currency into the commercial development of its frontier. Smith expands on historian Robert Wooster's theory that the military was engaged in an alliance with the political authority in Texas, and using documents such as army contracts for freighting, foraging, and fort leasing, he illustrates how federal fiscal activity spurred commercial growth for the citizens of Texas. Besides the obvious development of towns on the skirts of military bases and of roads between them, the establishment of military spending as a bedrock of the Texas economy and the protector of middle class interests shaped the future of the state's commercial prosperity. Writing with exceptional detail and clarity, Smith traces the emergence of the army's influence and includes analyses of information on army spending and development such as the introduction of army weather and telegraph services to the state, as well as accounts of real estate transactions involving the fort building program. Smith also accounts for army failures, maintaining that no one was truly prepared for the reality of western expansion. As an examination of the complex yet mutually beneficial economic relationship between the nation and the state, The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845-1900 is ideal for anyone interested in the early days of the state as well as in U.S. military and frontier history.
