Yellowstone Denied

Frontier soldier and explorer extraordinaire, Gustavus Cheyney Doane was no stranger to historical events. Between 1863 and 1892, he fought in the Civil War, participated in every major Indian battle in Montana Territory, and led the first scientific reconnaissance into the Yellowstone country—his report on that expedition even contributed to the establishment of Yellowstone National Park. Doane was always close to being at the right place at the right time to secure lasting fame, yet that fame always eluded him, even after his death. Kim Allen Scott rescues Doane from obscurity to tell the tale of an educated and inventive man who strove in vain for recognition throughout his life. Yellowstone Denied is a psychological portrait of a complex and intriguing individual. During his thirty years in uniform, Doane nearly achieved the celebrity he sought, but twists of fate and, at times, his own questionable behavior denied it in the end. Scott’s critical biography now examines the man’s accomplishments and failures alike, and traces the frustrated efforts of Doane’s widow to see her husband properly enshrined in history. Yellowstone Denied is also a revealing look at military culture, scientific discovery, and western expansion, and it gives Doane the credit long denied him.

"George Black rediscovers the history and lore of one of the planet's most magnificent landscapes. Read Empire of Shadows, and you'll never think of our first—in many ways our greatest—national park in the same way again." —Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder Empire of Shadows is the epic story of the conquest of Yellowstone, a landscape uninhabited, inaccessible and shrouded in myth in the aftermath of the Civil War. In a radical reinterpretation of the nineteenth century West, George Black casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history - the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars and the "civilizing" of the frontier - and charts its course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its mysteries: Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a gifted but tormented cavalryman known as "the man who invented Wonderland"; the ambitious former vigilante leader Nathaniel Langford; scientist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran to Yellowstone; and Gen. Phil Sheridan, Civil War hero and architect of the Indian Wars, who finally succeeded in having the new National Park placed under the protection of the US Cavalry. George Black1s Empire of Shadows is a groundbreaking historical account of the origins of America1s majestic national landmark.

A graduate of West Point, General Hugh Lenox Scott (1853–1934) belonged to the same regiment as George Armstrong Custer. As a member of the Seventh Cavalry, Scott actually began his career at the Little Big Horn when in 1877 he helped rebury Custer’s fallen soldiers. Yet Scott was no Custer. His lifelong aversion to violence in resolving disputes and abiding respect for American Indians earned him the reputation as one of the most adept peacemakers ever to serve in the U.S. Army. Sign Talker, an annotated edition of Scott’s memoirs, gives new insight into this soldier-diplomat’s experiences and accomplishments. Scott’s original autobiography, first published in 1928, has remained out of print for decades. In that memoir, he recounted the many phases of his distinguished military career, beginning with his education at West Point and ending with World War I, when, as army chief of staff, he gathered the U.S. forces that saw ultimate victory in Europe. Sign Talker reproduces the first—and arguably most compelling—portion of the memoir, including Scott’s involvement with Plains Indians and his service at western forts. In his in-depth introduction to this volume, editor R. Eli Paul places Scott’s autobiography in a larger historical context. According to Paul, Scott stood apart from his fellow officers because of his enlightened views and forward-looking actions. Through Scott’s own words, we learn how he became an expert in Plains Indian Sign Language so that he could communicate directly with Indians and bypass intermediaries. Possessing deep empathy for the plight of Native peoples and concern for the wrongs they had suffered, he played an important role in helping them achieve small, yet significant victories in the aftermath of the brutal Indian wars. As historians continue to debate the details of the Indian wars, and as we critically examine our nation’s current foreign policy, the unique legacy of General Scott provides a model of military leadership. Sign Talker restores an undervalued diplomat to well-deserved prominence in the story of U.S.-Indian relations.

During the nineteenth century, gridding, graphing, and surveying proliferated as never before as nations and empires expanded into hitherto "unknown" territories. Though nominally geared toward justifying territorial claims and collecting scientific data, expeditions also produced vast troves of visual and artistic material. This book considers the explosion of expeditionary mapping and its links to visual culture across the Americas, arguing that acts of measurement are also aesthetic acts. Such visual interventions intersect with new technologies, with sociopolitical power and conflict, and with shifting public tastes and consumption practices. Several key questions shape this examination: What kinds of nineteenth-century visual practices and technologies of seeing do these materials engage? How does scientific knowledge get translated into the visual and disseminated to the public? What are the commonalities and distinctions in mapping strategies between North and South America? How does the constitution of expeditionary lines reorder space and the natural landscape itself? The volume represents the first transnational and hemispheric analysis of nineteenth-century cartographic aesthetics, and features the multi-disciplinary perspective of historians, geographers, and art historians.

This newest volume in Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments series offers an unforgettable portrait of the Nez Perce War of 1877, the last great Indian conflict in American history. It was, as Elliott West shows, a tale of courage and ingenuity, of desperate struggle and shattered hope, of short-sighted government action and a doomed flight to freedom. To tell the story, West begins with the early history of the Nez Perce and their years of friendly relations with white settlers. In an initial treaty, the Nez Perce were promised a large part of their ancestral homeland, but the discovery of gold led to a stampede of settlement within the Nez Perce land. Numerous injustices at the hands of the US government combined with the settlers' invasion to provoke this most accomodating of tribes to war. West offers a riveting account of what came next: the harrowing flight of 800 Nez Perce, including many women, children and elderly, across 1500 miles of mountainous and difficult terrain. He gives a full reckoning of the campaigns and battles--and the unexpected turns, brilliant stratagems, and grand heroism that occurred along the way. And he brings to life the complex characters from both sides of the conflict, including cavalrymen, officers, politicians, and--at the center of it all--the Nez Perce themselves (the Nimiipuu, "true people"). The book sheds light on the war's legacy, including the near sainthood that was bestowed upon Chief Joseph, whose speech of surrender, "I will fight no more forever," became as celebrated as the Gettysburg Address. Based on a rich cache of historical documents, from government and military records to contemporary interviews and newspaper reports, The Last Indian War offers a searing portrait of a moment when the American identity--who was and who was not a citizen--was being forged.

On the morning of January 23, 1870, troops of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry attacked a Piegan Indian village on the Marias River in Montana Territory, killing many more than the army’s count of 173, most of them women, children, and old men. The village was afflicted with smallpox. Worse, it was the wrong encampment. Intended as a retaliation against Mountain Chief’s renegade band, the massacre sparked public outrage when news sources revealed that the battalion had attacked Heavy Runner’s innocent village—and that guides had told its inebriated commander, Major Eugene Baker, he was on the wrong trail, but he struck anyway. Remembered as one of the most heinous incidents of the Indian Wars, the Baker Massacre has often been overshadowed by the better-known Battle of the Little Bighorn and has never received full treatment until now. Author Paul R. Wylie plumbs the history of Euro-American involvement with the Piegans, who were members of the Blackfeet Confederacy. His research shows the tribe was trading furs for whiskey with the Hudson’s Bay Company before Meriwether Lewis encountered them in 1806. As American fur traders and trappers moved into the region, the U.S. government soon followed, making treaties it did not honor. When the gold rush started in the 1860s and the U.S. Army arrived, pressure from Montana citizens to control the Piegans and make the territory safe led Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan to send Baker and the 2nd Cavalry, with tragic consequences. Although these generals sought to dictate press coverage thereafter, news of the cruelty of the killings appeared in the New York Times, which called the massacre “a more shocking affair than the sacking of Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita” two years earlier. While other scholars have written about the Baker Massacre in related contexts, Blood on the Marias gives this infamous event the definitive treatment it deserves. Baker’s inept command lit the spark of violence, but decades of tension between Piegans and whites set the stage for a brutal and too-often-forgotten incident.

The history and lore of Yellowstone National Park.