Having banished eastern Native peoples to lands west of the Mississippi, President Andrew Jackson's government by 1833 needed a new type of soldier to keep displaced Indians from returning home. And so the 1st Dragoons came into being. Will and John Gorenfeld tell their story-an epic of exploration, conquest, and diplomacy from the outposts of ......
In War-Path and Bivouac, published in 1890, John Finerty (1846-1908) recalled the summer he spent following George Crook's infamous campaign against the Sioux in 1876. Historians have long surmised that Finerty's correspondence covering the campaign for the Chicago Times reappeared in its entirety in Finerty's celebrated book. But that turns out ......
A year after John Bradstreet's raid of 1758-the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years' War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)-Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great "American" victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted ......
A year after John Bradstreet's raid of 1758-the first and largest British-American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years' War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)-Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great "American" victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted ......
If we do in fact "remember the Alamo," it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: the commanding officer's slave, a young man known simply as Joe. What Joe saw as the Alamo fell, recounted days later to the Texas Cabinet, has come down to us in records and newspaper reports. But who Joe was, where he came ......
Born in 1888 in what would soon be Oklahoma Territory, Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation. After attending the Sac and Fox agency school and Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas, he transferred to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle he led the football team to victories over some of the ......
Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. FrEmont, 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 ......
No person excited greater emotion in Kansas than James Henry Lane, the U.S. senator who led a volunteer brigade in 1861-1862. In fighting numerous skirmishes, liberating hundreds of slaves, burning portions of four towns, and murdering half a dozen men, Lane and his brigade garnered national attention as the saviors of Kansas and the terror of ......
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. ......
