Good overview of the major players and events of the Indian wars after the Civil War. Very striking how otherwise honorable men like Sherman and Sheridan never seemed to question the morality of moving entire peoples off their land; how corrupt the Indian agents were as a group; how quickly bands of Indians could move entire communities from one place to another, and how often it was necessary; how often bands could lose everything to soldiers, then somehow recover and re-equip. Made me wonder how I would have carried myself if I had been one of the officers working face-to-face with the chiefs. We white folks did an incredible amount of shit to the tribes. ( )

(2022)NF. Another very good history. This one tells the story of the relentless effort to keep native Ameiricans out of the way as the white population moved west. They were considered a pest that needed to be exterminated if necessary to make ?Manifest Destiny? a successful philosophy. In the meantime this vast people had no real idea why or how threatening this was until it was too late. Brands concentrates William Sherman, Phillip Sheridan and Geronimo as central to this movement. Obviously, many more characters were involved and he weaves them into this tale. KIRKUS: A sweeping history of the Indian Wars and two iconic fighters.The Geronimo campaign has been so intensely studied for the last 150 years that it's hard to imagine there's much new information to discover. Noted historian Brands finds news, though, by placing the war against the Apaches in the larger context of the Indian Wars generally, from the mass hanging of Sioux rebels in 1862 to the Modoc Wars, Little Bighorn, the Red Cloud War, and more. A central figure in those campaigns was William Tecumseh Sherman, who, ironically, bore the name of an early champion of Native American resistance. Stationed in Florida during the time of the Indian removals from the East, he opined that ?Florida�was of little value to us? and suggested that Native tribes should be moved there and not what he considered the more valuable lands of Oklahoma. Transferred to the West after heroic service in the Civil War, he told a militant White audience bent on annihilating neighboring tribes, ?I don't see how we can make a decent excuse for an Indian war.? Yet, when the occasion demanded, Sherman could be as ruthless as he was in Georgia, noting that the foremost goal of war was not extermination¥a word he used sometimes inadvisedly¥but instead economic disaster. Reflecting Sherman's thinking, Gen. Philip Sheridan wrote, ?reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one great conflict.? The application of that technique brought mixed results, and Geronimo held out to the end. Brands is particularly good in placing all this in a political as well as military context, with Sherman wrestling with Indian Agency bureaucrats in Washington over whether they or the Army should oversee matters of war, peace, and, in the end, cultural extermination.An excellent, well-written study¥like most of the author's books, a welcome addition to the literature of westward expansion.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022ISBN: 978-0-385-54728-4Page Count: 416Publisher: Doubleday

William t. Sherman and the last campaign against Geronimo