22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning, elegant epistle! Well written and comprehensive, October 30, 2008
This review is from: Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth (Hardcover)
I was somewhat leery of this book, after reading that the author was a prof of NA history,... fearing it would be an PC apologist for the NA viewpoint. It is not. I am no stranger to the Fetterman fight, having read Dee Brown's "the Fetterman Massacre", Shannon Smith's "Give me 80 Men", "The Bloody Bozeman" by Johnson, etc. I found this book to be a highly readable, interesting account, which summerizes and dissects many other earlier accounts of the Fetterman disaster. Monnett does a wonderful job, carefully, delicately dissecting the battle and participants with a sharp scalpel...and reveals the truths of what actually happened and did not happen. He also delves into the motives of the various participants who survived (just as Ms. Smith above). One of the great epic stories of annihilation of U.S. army troops, by indigenous peoples using little more than bow and arrows! (only 6 of the 81 found with gunshot wounds) This book presents both sides of the fight with neutrality/reality. Easy to read, hard to put down!
This is really the Rosetta stone of the Fetterman fight, which I feel sure will be in any serious library of western studies. I highly recommend this book!!
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good alternative thinking on the Fetterman fight, August 12, 2009
This review is from: Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth (Hardcover)
This book is an excellent addition to the literature on the Fort Phil Kearny saga. Rather than rehash the Carrington version of events, Monnett looks a little deeper to other information about Fetterman, Grummond, and other key players. He also does a fair job of analyzing the field itself and what could be reconstructed about the battle from the location of soldier remains and the physical evidence, both contemporaneous and archaeological.
Although the complete truth will never be known, he makes a fairly convincing case that Fetterman has been unfairly maligned by history, and that Carrington never set the record straight as to do so would both injure the widow of the true culprit, Lt. George Grummond, and expose to some extent Carrington's deficiencies as post commander at Phil Kearny. Add to that the fact that Carrington later married the widow Grummond, and Fetterman bore the brunt of the blame for the massacre. As Monnett shows, he may not even have spoken those legendary and fateful words about riding through the entire Sioux nation with 80 men.
At this point in history, it seems unlikely that Fetterman will ever be "rehabilitated" - the event is both too obscure to most and too deeply ingrained to others. But Monnett's book makes a good start. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to go beyond Dee Brown in understanding the Fetterman Fight.
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39 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, PC, Full of Errors and Repetitious, December 17, 2008
This review is from: Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth (Hardcover)
The author is a PC "ethnohistorian" who acknowledges that this work is revisionist. However, he points to blaming Lt Grummond instead of Capt. Fetterman for the defeat (assisted by Col. Carrington), as his revisionist theory. Okay, that would be a magazine article, not a 241 page book.
The author makes so many erroneous statements, it is difficult to know where to start. He gives his anti-war credentials early, stating "... a majority of serious (military history) scholars of this subfield, and I definitely include myself in the mix, are among the most vocal antiwar activists in Western Civilization." He recognized that Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" exhibited marginal historical methodology, factual errors and serious omissions, but then lauds the book as revolutionary and inspiring. I guess if the book had been entirely fiction, it would have been even more important.
He states that the Euro-American exploitation of American Indians was "the greatest depopulation and sometimes outright genocide in the history of the world." Gee, and here I thought World War II, the campaigns of the Mongols, or the Taiping Rebellion took top honors in those categories. The author notes the "geophysical changes" on the Great Plains in the two decades before 1866 and their importance. Okay, there was a widespread drought for ten years, but the not "geophysical changes." An 80 man unit (company sized) becomes a "battalion" and he mentions the Power River area multiple times as having "a rich history of cultural interaction." Huh? Before the acquisition of the horse, the Plains Indians were a hunter-gatherer culture in the Late Stone Age. "Rich" is definitely an overblown adjective. The horse was only the Indians' second domestic animal after the dog. The use of overblown adjectives is one of the many problems in this work, for example the hanging of a Cheyenne warrior at Fort Laramie was described as "ghastly" and "part of a violent breakdown of civilization." More humorously, the author says, "Today the Powder River Basin looks much the same as it did in 1865." No doubt he has photographic evidence for that contention.
The calculation of 6.5 bison per person per year needed for Indian subsistance and the author's discussion is almost identical to the same presentation in "Comanche Empire." This seems rather high in both accounts assuming the average bison weighed 2,000 pounds and gave a dressed weight of 800 pounds of meat. That would mean each Indian man, woman and child needed 5,200 pounds of meat per year or 14 pounds per day to survive. Another calculation in question was the consumption of wood for firewood. The author states the Indians needed 3,000 pounds of wood per year for 100 people and that this represented 15 acres of woodland. As every woodcutter knows, 3,000 pounds is somewhere around a half cord of wood (depending on the type of wood) and represents 3-4 full grown trees. Doesn't sound like 15 acres of woodland to me.
The author repeats himself over and over again to make his points which are not very important to begin with. He seems to view the women of the time through modern ideas using such terms as "gender-role prescription" and such academic speak, and bases much (if not all) of his work on the Indian side on oral accounts passed down through the generations. Author Monnett states that oral accounts are useful and must be taken into consideration -- after all, the Indians know their history better than anyone else. Maybe, but in any other historical context, non-contemporaneous oral accounts would be largely ignored. There is a great deal of research concerning oral accounts being passed down disproving their accuracy. So why are the Indians an exception?
At any rate, I found this book to be light, fleshed out with very doubtful "facts" and testimonials, and overall with a great amount of repetition. That being said, there is some good here, although the reader will have to wade through a lot of extra wordiness to extract it. The author may very well be correct that the blame for the loss of Fetterman's command should rest on shoulders other that his, but why do we need to know what happened in Minnesota in 1862 (in a very quick overview) to understand this? Revisionism is not always done well, and is not always an improvement on earlier scholarship. In this case the author is clearly on the side of the Indians, and tends to treat all the Army officers and other white men with a level of distrust and condemnation. The best parts were the maps and diagrams.
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