The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990 Page: 152
598 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
many of these tasks, officers on the scene acted with only minimal
supervision from civilian authorities.2
The control of Indians on the western frontiers proved the army's
most difficult assignment. Ill-defined and inconsistent federal planning
ranging from President Ulysses S. Grant's much-heralded peace policy
to all-out war placed considerable demands upon the judgments of offi-
cers in the field. Problems on the nation's Canadian and Mexican bor-
ders proved particularly frustrating; along both lines hostile Indians
used the international boundaries to escape army retribution. In their
efforts to stop these raids, field officers sought permission to follow and
punish the guilty parties wherever they were found.'
The army's command system often proved inadequate to meet the
challenges posed by Indians west of the Mississippi River. Crucial was
the conflict between the commanding general and the secretary of war
regarding effective control of the army, which had hampered military
efficiency through most of the nineteenth century. Commanding gen-
erals included William T. Sherman (1869-1883) and Philip H. Sher-
idan (1883-1888); both men unsuccessfully sought independence from
the secretaries of war on purely military matters. In practice, matters of
routine detail, such as promotions or the acquisition of supplies, fol-
lowed no consistent, predictable administrative pattern. In some in-
stances the secretary of war, acting on his own initiative or at the presi-
dent's whim, made these decisions; in others the responsibility rested
with the commanding general or one (or more) of the heads of the
army's ten staff bureaus.4
Division commanders, who each controlled enormous geographic re-
gions, were next in the army hierarchy. In 1875, for example, Texas
was a department in the Division of the Missouri, which also included
the departments of Dakota (which included Minnesota along with much
of the Dakota and Montana territories), the Missouri (encompassing
Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, the Indian territory, and the Colorado and
New Mexico territories), and the Platte (encompassing Iowa and the
2Wallace D. Farnham, "'The Weakened Spring of Government'. A Study in Nineteenth-
Century American History," American Historical Review, LXVIII (Apr, 1963), 662-680;
Michael L. Tate, "The Multi-purpose Army on the Frontier: A Call for Further Research," in
The American West" Essays in Honor of W Eugene Hollon, ed. Ronald Lora ('Toledo: University of
Toledo, 1980), 171-20o8; Robert Wooster, The Mltary and United States Indan Policy, 1865-1903,
Yale Western Americana Series, 34 (New Haven, Conn.. Yale University Press, 1988), 14-16.
3Robert M Utley, The Indzan Frontier of the American West, 1846-189o, Histories of the
American Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), provides a recent
survey of Indian policy
4Wooster, The Military and U S. Indzan Policy, 17-24; Russell F. Welgley, History of the United
States Army (1967; enlg. ed., Bloomington. Indiana University Press, 1984), 284-290152
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990, periodical, 1990; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101213/m1/192/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.