Customer Reviews

The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890 (Histories of the American frontier)

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Utley's The Indian Frontier of the American West presents a brief overview of America's clash with the frontier indian culture over a fifty year period. What is a fascinating story unfortunately disappoints in Mr. Utley's hands.

The information relating to scores of major tribes during several decades of relationship with the US involves a large cast. This book presents the briefest of sketches relating to conflicts, treaty negotiations and battles. Characters pop into the book and disappear just as quickly. The middle of the book provides a chronological accounting of the two decades after the Civil War, and that is where it has its difficulty. Perhaps this is just too thin a book to cover such a broad expanse. What is presented in this middle is a recitation of vignettes, persons and events, none presented in enough detail to grip the reader or provide any meaningful flavor to this narrative.

The author has more luck in his chapters that are not chronological. They book-end the story. A brief on how American indian policy arrived to mid century (1800's) and two at the end on the Indian reform movement and the closing of the frontier are much more tightly written and interesting.

I think the author just tried to accomplish too much and ended up with a broad brush stroke of what should be a fascinating story. The material reads like a school text book, facts are presented rather than a story told. This makes for dry reading at times.

Overall, this is a passable book for anyone wanting to get an overview of Plains Indian history. For those wanting a fascinating story, they may want to check out Connell's Son of the Morning Star.

This book is written largely from the perspective of the Indians of the American West but Utley does a good job of including insight into why the white man acted the way they did. His conclusion at the end of the book is "Given who these people were (the whites), what they knew, and what they believed, it is difficult to see how they might have behaved differently enough to have brought about a result that would be acceptable today". What struck me throughout the book was how often agreements that were made with the indians were ignored, violated, and broken. The book is well written and easy to read. If you want a good overview of the American West from 1846-1890, this is a must read.

Robert Utley was long a leading historian for the National Park Service, making major contributions to our understanding of the stories around many national historic sites on the Great Plains. He began work in the 1950s, as a very traditional historian of US military history in the Indian Wars. Fortunately, he has changed with the times. The new preface to this book outlines some of the ways in which he has changed, though I wish he would change even more. This book treats both the US and the Indian sides with respect, though Utley never confronts the core inequity of Euro-American invasion; after all, Native Americans didn't invade Europe. While he's balanced in treating the campaigns and battles, imbalance in that big picture provides more subtle bias throughout the book.

Utley tries to cover the entire "frontier" (a term he uses advisedly), including brief mentions of Alaskan Natives but not Hawai'ians. He discusses the more exceptional cases of Indian Territory / Oklahoma, Alaska, and the Pueblos against the background of the conflict on the Great Plains. California gets minor treatment, Oregon and Washington almost none.

As you'd expect from this capsule, the book tries to cover a lot of material in less than 250 pages, with a lot of photographs. As a result, it doesn't go into much depth. It provides a good factual overview, and a good introduction to the history. Many of the chapters have some analytical paragraphs at their start and end, but this interpretive material should have been strengthened throughout the book.

There is interesting information here for folks that want an overview of the Indian Wars period, but not a lot of detail if you, like me, need detailed historical information. It's easier to read than "Frontier Regulars" by the same author but not as detailed.

On a summer evening in Denver, Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, rose in the Opera House to speak. Every mushroom townlet west of Paducah threw up a clapboard opera house first thing. In them, baggy pants comedians sang coon songs and recited dialect kneeslappers to expand the cultural horizons of the whites. Possession of an opera house was how you knew you were in the presence of civilization. Indians didn't have them.

As historian Robert Utley recreates the scene, Doolittle told his hearers that the question at hand was whether the Indians should be placed on reservations and taught to support themselves or simply be exterminated.

Doolittle, at least up to that night, seems to have entertained an exalted view of the attainments of his countrymen. Utley quotes him: "There suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless upon some battlefield;-- a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the Opera House -- 'Exterminate them! Exterminate them!' "

This happened in the year of grace 1865.

And so they did. Back in Wisconsin, at the next poll they exterminated Doolittle, politically.

"The Indian Frontier of the American West" is one of 20 volumes by leading scholars in the Histories of the American Frontier Series. Lavishly (though somewhat muddily) illustrated and tightly written, it takes, like Senator Doolittle, the high road.

It makes revolting reading.

Utley's theme, written in 1984, long before Professor Samuel Huntington got rich saying the same thing, is that the world views of the American Indians and the Euro-American invaders were so divergent that they never could understand one another. He locates this originally in religion -- the Indians believed in positive and negative deities who could be recruited or propitiated to keep nature going, the whites in an acquisitive deity who wanted them to make nature holler uncle.

The whites misunderstood their deity, who -- in a message sent later, called the Dust Bowl -- intended the buffalo range to be left alone.

Admitting brutish behavior on both sides, Utley calls in his summation for judging the whites not by our standards but by theirs. This is strange, since our professed standards are what they professed at the time.

Curiously, the great, great grandsons of the men who knew that the One True God intended all of the West beyond the 100th meridian to be settled by farmers and ranchers, now argue that the One True Free Market Economy demands that the farms and ranches be wound up so that cheaper beef and wheat can be imported from far parts, on the never-never.

It is no wonder the Indians could never figure out the white man.

From the moment the Europeans set foot in America, the one thing they all agreed upon was that the Indian must go. Utley contends that "public sentiment overwhelmingly favored destruction by civilization rather than by killing." This is manifestly not so.

Public opinion supported, from first to last, extermination by starvation. The Americans' policy was exactly that followed later by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, except that while the Stalinist assault on the Ukrainians lasted only two years and killed only a small percentage of them, the American assault on the Indians lasted nearly 300 years and killed almost all of them.

He makes much of the Lake Mohonk reformers (named for the spa where they met each summer in the Catskills) who wished a kindler, gentler extermination. The Mohonks, all evangelical Protestants, "saw nothing worth saving" in Indian culture. The Indians and the Catholics felt pretty much the same way about evangelical Protestantism, with rather more justification.

The army, the railroads, the traders and the settlers went about exterminating the Indians via the tried and true methods perfected in colonial times. That great Democratic institution, the Congress, forswore itself on hundreds of occasions, until by 1886, at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, the last organized resistance of the Indians was destroyed.

Utley calls for evaluating this carnage in light of the highmindedness of the reformers, who displayed "a strange mixture of genuine humanitarianism and crass self-interest." It was strange all right, amounting to a demand to "give us your land and your children." One might call it biblical.

There is another way, though, to look at idealism -- whether of Crow Dog, a school Indian who murdered an army officer in order to be received back by his people, or of educationists who wanted to give the Indians "Just what we need for a better life! French horn, Italian, water polo . . ." (from "Temporarily Humboldt County," Firesign Theater). It is the way of Isaiah Berlin, who experienced much idealism in his long life.

He learned to distrust idealists of all kinds.

Utley is a retired Historian of the National Park Service and has written many books on a variety of aspects of history of the American West. This one is a concise study which departs from the soldier-chase-Indian approach that is so typical of other books on this topic. He does not join in the applause and praise of the achievements of the White man, nor does he glorify the Indians. So he must have a rather balanced judgment on events.
He has the interesting perception that the growing Indian hostility towards the white man in the half century following the Mexican War was directed less at the white man per se than at the hated reservation system itself. I visited some of the historic sites (Apache Pass, Cochise Stronghold, Little Big Horn etc) and found that self-critical perspective even written on sign boards. But, although a wide variety literature is available, the common credo and documentation is still a little backward and should be adapted to a less patriotic view. This is true for this book.
Beyond the dedication to "conquest by kindness", after the kid had already fallen into the well, most of the aims of the Peace Policy in Indian wars times were hardly original. For years reformers and policy makers had called for "concentration" of the Indians on reservations, for their "civilization" through education, Christianity, and agricultural self-support, for a cleansing of the Indian Bureau of corruption and inefficiency, and for replacement of the treaty system with something better suited to the actual status of the Indian. The chief mistake was that too late the white people accepted the Indians as citizens with - at least - the same rights. Too long they were treated as non-humans with no rights at all. No sooner as the last revolting Indians - the Apaches - were pacified, it was detected that they deserved human rights application. But it was too late. It was already in the end of the 19th century.
The Indian Frontiers can be seen as essentially closed by 1890. For the Indians, however, the legacy of the frontier period endured through the first three decades of the twentieth century and, in many respects, even beyond. The conquest of the West is seen as an explanation for Americas uniqueness. But is it not more wise to think that the cultural cross-fertilization that occurred first in the frontier zones and later in an America that welcomed and encouraged the cultural, spiritual, political and economic revival of the Indians and increasingly recognized their rich contributions to American life explains the American uniqueness better? "Modern America became...a blend of its immigrant and native heritages."

Utley's works on the conflicts in the American West from prior to the Civil War until the last Apache surrender are all good ones. As a general survey for an understanding of that aspect of the whole period I'd say this is one of the best on the market. Although it lacks a lot in specific detail if your interest involves a particular geography, tribe or time, it provides a good lay view of the era.