Soldiers West: Biographies From The Military Frontier

The biographical articles in Soldiers West demonstrate that the individual Army officer [of the 19th century] was a dynamic force in the frontier and regional development of the United States. Not simply blue-clad bearers of the Stars and Stripes into frontier domains, men such as Stephen H. Long, Benjamin H. Grierson, and John G. Bourke were instruments of Manifest Destiny, with far-reaching consequences for the United States, the western region, Native populations, and the army itself. However geographically isolated the standing Army was from the nation's centers of power, its officers were often intimates of powerful public figures, such as Senator Thomas H. Benton and President Ulysses S. Grant and great industrialists or financiers such as Grenville Dodge and Jay Cooke, who held the future of the frontier regions in their hands. No other federal department was more critical than the regular Army to enlarging the American people's knowledge of the West, subduing Native populations, and aiding the development of the region's natural resources. These biographies also explore the evolution of American society from the Jacksonian era that championed individual enterprise to post-Civil War modernity that imposed the national agenda on the American society--Introduction.

• | Author: Paul Andrew Hutton|Durwood Ball
• | Publisher: University Of Oklahoma Press
• | Publication Date: May 13, 2014
• | Number of Pages: 420 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0806144653
• | ISBN-13: 9780806144658