"Shootin' - Lynchin' - Hangin'," announces the advertisement for Tombstone's Helldorado Days festival. Dodge City's Boot Hill Cemetery sports an 'authentic hangman's tree.' Not to be outdone, Deadwood's Days of '76 celebration promises 'miners, cowboys, Indians, cavalry, bars, dance halls and gambling dens.' The Wild West may be long gone, but ......
Historical Accounts of the Grattan Massacre, 1854-1855
On August 9, 1854, U.S. Army lieutenant John L. Grattan led a detachment of twenty-nine soldiers and one civilian interpreter to a large Lakota encampment near Fort Laramie to arrest an Indian man accused of killing a Mormon emigrant's cow. The terrible series of events that followed, which became known as the Grattan Massacre, unleashed the ......
The Pleasant Valley War and the Trauma of Violence
In the late 1880s, Pleasant Valley, Arizona, descended into a nightmare of violence, murder, and mayhem. By the time the Pleasant Valley War was over, eighteen men were dead, four were wounded, and one was missing, never to be found. Valley of the Guns explores the reasons for the violence that engulfed the settlement, turning neighbors, families, ......
Health and Medical Transitions Among Southern California Indians
Native Americans long resisted Western medicine - but had less power to resist the threat posed by Western diseases. And so, as the Office of Indian Affairs reluctantly entered the business of health and medicine, Native peoples reluctantly began to allow Western medicine into their communities. Fighting Invisible Enemies traces this transition ......
In this unique history of the "Lost Battalion" of World War I, Alan D. Gaff tells for the first time the story of the 77th Division from the perspective of the soldiers in the ranks. On October 2, 1918, Maj. Charles W. Whittlesey led the 77th Division in a successful attack on German defenses in the Argonne Forest of northeastern France. His unit, ......
Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West
In his Rules for Wife Behavior, Colonel Joseph Whistler summed up his expectations for his new bride: 'You will remember you are not in command of anything except the cook.' Although their roles were circumscribed, the wives of army officers stationed in British India and the U.S. West commanded considerable influence, as Verity McInnis reveals in ......
Indians in the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos Missions
The Spanish crown wanted native peoples in its American territories to be evangelized and, to that end, facilitated the establishment of missions by various Catholic orders. Focusing on the Franciscan missions of the Sierra Gorda in Northern New Spain (Mexico) and the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos in what is now Bolivia, Frontiers of Evangelization ......
Emory Upton (1839-1881) is widely recognized as one of America's most influential military thinkers. His works-The Armies of Asia and Europe and The Military Policy of the United States-fueled the army's intellectual ferment in the late nineteenth century and guided Secretary of War Elihu Root's reforms in the early 1900s. Yet as David J. ......
Mountain men were the principal figures of the fur trade era, one of the most interesting, dramatic, and truly significant phases of the history of the American trans-Mississippi West during the first half of the 9th century. These men were of all types - some were fugitives from law and civilization, others were the best in rugged manhood some ......
