Desultory Genocide
ORR, LEONARD
Desultory Genocide Crimsoned Prairie By S.L.A. Marshall Scribners. 256 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Leonard Orr In the 1941 film They Died with Their Boots On, Errol Flynn, going by the unlikely nom...
...Each ended in massacre...
...Many American Indian tribes pursuing an agricultural existence largely consistent with European customs of land ownership and usage were utterly dispossessed...
...Hard-charging recklessness was rampant as leaders got on the scent of dangerously smiling fortune...
...Without reconnaissance or communication with other units in the area, Custer sent his Seventh Cavalry Regiment headlong, uncoordinated and piecemeal against an encamped Sioux and Cheyenne force probably five times its size...
...Although a few of the Founding Fathers favored the rights and survival of the native tribes, it appears today that pioneer society as a whole consistently required their further subjugation...
...Anthony Quinn, in full Hollywood Indian regalia, came out to bid his adversary once more and for the last time to war...
...Yet, in concentrating on the disruption and decline of the tribes, it has regarded the famous campaigns almost exclusively from the Indian side...
...Marshall singles out Chief Joseph as the true genius of the retreat, although he was never in tactical command: "The cornerstone of generalship, however, is not tactics, an elementary subject, but the mastery of human nature...
...Army has never understood deep-penetration reconnaissance, the use of human decoys, L-shaped ambushes, and quick dispersal after battle...
...By focusing on the U.S...
...Since the book has neither footnotes nor a bibliography, its neat and damning analyses of the Army's own battle records seem to proceed unsupported...
...troops under the command of Nelson A. Miles...
...Among his earlier books, Men Against Fire, a review of small-unit combat during World War II, is considered a classic...
...One is reminded of General William Westmoreland's colossal multidivision assaults that yielded water buffalo alone as booty...
...Army's role, S.L.A...
...The former was provoked by the slaughter of a cow that had been left to die, the latter by the theft of some eggs...
...But in these more sophisticated times the history of our dealings with the Indians has undergone the usual revision...
...Some, notably the bitter medicine man Sitting Bull, escaped to Canada...
...By the time of the American Revolution approximately a quarter-million Indians from 30 tribes had taken to following the herds...
...He rode his own reinforced battalion into ambush and encirclement where it was swiftly destroyed...
...whom Miles himself said, probably accurately...
...Despite the superficial glamour that attends the Plains Wars, they were in fact the last pitiful agonies of a sorry procession...
...Now, in response to the general neglect of the U.S...
...for example, the white man was on a horse...
...Forced to divide into smaller bands in order to feed themselves, the Indians were pursued by the Army all that year, and large numbers of them were killed or returned to semicaptivity...
...indeed, the mutual bloodbath of 1862 depopulated a large section of Minnesota...
...Domesticating the horse enabled the formerly sedentary agriculturalists to develop a nomadic way of life based on buffalo hunting...
...As Marshall observes elsewhere, the rapid disappearance of the buffalo herds and the resulting starvation, both encouraged by the Army, were the whites' main allies...
...Yet if Crimsoned Prairie clearly benefits from the author's expertise, it suffers from his lack of discipline as a historian...
...they became increasingly dependent on reservation food allotments to survive...
...Marshall draws, tantalizing comparisons between the tactics employed by the Plains Indians and those of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army...
...it has since more than doubled the percentage of active shooters...
...Training was in sad disrepair...
...His oft-repeated notion that the Plains Wars were the inevitable consequence of the clash of a nomadic lifestyle with a more powerful industrial and agricultural society is both trivial and false...
...For instance, many of the Sioux at Little Bighorn were already reservation Indians who slipped away in anticipation of one final battle and then sneaked back afterward...
...This peaceful, largely unoffending tribe, threatened with expulsion from its homeland, reluctantly went to war in an effort to escape to Canada and dealt defeat after defeat to Army columns sent to stop it...
...The next campaign, the three-pronged Dakota expedition that began in June 1876 and included Custer's Last Stand, became one of the major struggles of the era...
...In addition, the white man's low regard for the Indian's military prowess and the casual destruction and murder distinguishing both sides in the Plains Wars suggest the more disagreeable truth that each was incapable of viewing the other as more than subhuman and was unwilling to incorporate into a mutually beneficial society...
...Army in a half-dozen major campaigns, for which sketches and maps of the battlefields are included...
...He is also a man of...
...Nevertheless, the aftermath of this episode was the final reduction of Sioux and Cheyenne power...
...Joseph was the: great unifying force, the best brain,, the logistician...
...About the Plains Wars Marshall concludes: "Commanders hunted the Sioux with brass bands . . . while not bothering to get their scouts out...
...in Anglo-America they were simply pushed aside...
...After he discovered that even in the hottest infantry engagements only 25 per cent of the soldiers involved fired their weapons, the Army adjusted basic combat training accordingly...
...Reviewed by Leonard Orr In the 1941 film They Died with Their Boots On, Errol Flynn, going by the unlikely nom de guerre of George Armstrong Custer, charged alone down a hill toward an appalling mass of mounted braves...
...The first two campaigns he takes up in detail are the Mormon Cow War of 1854 and the Little Crow War of 1862...
...In Latin America the Spaniards integrated the indigenous populations, however unfairly, into an economic system...
...The struggle to maintain their adopted way of life made them fiercer and more formidable, but disunity, lack of strategy, and an inability to support anything like an army in the field hindered their resistance to 19th-century white settlers...
...It seems the U.S...
...Fewer and fewer Indians could support themselves on the Plains...
...Especially revealing is his description of Army life at the time-the ranks filled by immigrants and Civil War veterans, discipline marred by widespread discontent and desertion, officers disaffected by postwar demotions, and off-duty hours consumed by a common tendency to drunkenness...
...At the beginning, Marshall says, "The whole operation proceeded as if, rather than hunting Indians, the Army was seeking a memorable defeat...
...Marshall's credentials for a study of tactical operations are impressive...
...In his long career...
...Marshall's acquaintance with the capabilities of soldiers under combat stress, his knowledge of tactics, and his understanding of the influence of the terrain in small-unit fighting all contribute significantly to his reconstructions of the important battles...
...Fetterman's Charge, named for the braggart commander who led 80 troopers into fatal ambush, was a kind of high point of this war...
...In short, it was a time not unlike our own, when public esteem for the Army sank significantly, when the military was given unpleasant duties and performed accordingly, and when its effectiveness was at best questionable...
...Fortunately, most of Crimsoned Prairie is devoted to describing the performance of the U.S...
...The culture of the Plains Indians actually derived from the Conquest that heralded their doom, for it was the victorious Spaniards who brought the horse to the Americas...
...The writing is above average, but the narrative tends to coyness in its humor and to officer's-club adage in its critique...
...Joseph cannot accuse the United: States of one single act of justice...
...After being defeated at the hands of Red Cloud and the Oglala Sioux, the Army was forced-in a formal treaty-to relinquish its beleaguered forts along the Bozeman Trail...
...ordinary competence was so atypical that it often brought decoration...
...Considerably more attention is given to three unfortunate operations that embarrassed the Army publicly and aroused much popular interest in their own day...
...He offers a sweeping perspective and much sharp detail for the general reader and the specialist alike...
...And so began another reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which, in a few particulars, did resemble the original...
...Almost routinely, forces were wasted, communications were neglected, and supply was mismanaged, though seldom was any commander relieved for his sins...
...The further Marshall strays from the field of battle, the less cogent his arguments become...
...The Nez Perce, whose famous flight Marshall describes so precisely, were primarily a farming, fishing and horse-breeding people...
...The first of these was the Bozeman Trail War of 1866-67, where Colonel Henry B. Carrington, one of the few capable if not brilliant commanders on the Plains, attempted to open up Sioux territory...
...Marshall has produced Crimsoned Prairie, a critical account of "those major pieces of the struggle that are most pivotal, characteristic, or dramatic...
...It was an era of military regression where the fundamentals were almost forgot...
...Only the quick reaction of Captain Benteen and his troops enabled the other two thirds of the divided regiment to link up and save themselves from Custer's fate...
...Occasionally...
...Slowing unaccountably at the Yellowstone River, only a few days, drive from the border, the band was cut off by U.S...
...Yet, the world being what it is, one cannot imagine that today's Army will be long kept in desuetude or that our respect for it will remain so low...
...And one hopes books like Crimsoned Prairie will help us remember what our military forces have done in our name...
...Only the rare officer performed a simple mission sensibly...
...Army's perspective, the book does obscure some important facts about the battles it details and about the Plains Wars in general...
...The result, a kind of desultory genocide, was not pretty...
...The final campaign chronicled in Crimsoned Prairie is the long march of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce...
...The grim ballet of the Plains Wars has been described by some fine revisionist scholarship...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 11
