The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996 Page: 419

Book Reviews

first incidents occurred in 1899 at Texarkana and near Houston when Tenth
Cavalry soldiers returned to Texas by railroad after the Spanish-American War.
In the same year, the Twenty-fifth Infantry at Laredo and the Ninth Cavalry at
Rio Grande City became involved. At El Paso in 1900oo a clash between police and
infantrymen led to two deaths and a prison term for one soldier.
In 1906, after service in the Philippines, three companies of the Twenty-fifth
Infantry came to Brownsville. They were soon charged with carrying out a raid
upon the city in retaliation for harassment. Despite a lack of clear evidence, they
were discharged from the army. Minor incidents at El Paso the same year stirred
opposition to other black troops.
During the Mexican Revolution, the Ninth Cavalry was involved in a 1911
clash in San Antonio over segregated streetcars. Black prisoners of war returned
from Mexico to a hero's welcome at El Paso in 1916, when a law officer killed a
black infantryman in Del Rio.
The Twenty-fourth Infantry guarded military construction at Waco and
Houston in 1917. A clash at Waco led to the punishment of six soldiers. Police
violence in Houston resulted in retaliation by the troops, several deaths, and the
execution or imprisonment of more than a hundred soldiers.
Garna Christian, professor of history at the downtown campus of the
University of Houston, concludes that local press and officials seldom conducted
fair investigations into these incidents unless they feared economic losses if the
troops were removed. Military investigations seemed more thorough in some,
but not all, cases. Soldiers, proud of their wartime service, acted from frustration
when confronted with discrimination at home.
This book reflects sound research in federal and state records. One of its val-
ues is the discussion of interaction between blacks and Hispanics along the Rio
Grande. The author presents a lively narrative with generally balanced conclu-
sions. Only in trying to fit Brownsville events into a larger pattern does the analy-
sis seem unconvincing. Nevertheless, this should become the standard study of
these racial confrontations.
Texas Tech University ALWYN BARR
The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. By Willard H.
Rollings. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Pp. ix+320o. ISBN o-
8262-1006-6. $17.95, paper.)
Upon its 1992 publication, Willard H. Rollings's The Osage: An Ethnohistorical
Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains immediately assumed a significant place in
Native American historiography. The Osage, who dominated the Prairie-Plains
region for more than a century and a half, had been somewhat neglected by his-
torians. In his study, Rollings examines Osage culture and history during the ini-
tial years of European contact (1673-1840) not from the viewpoint of whites,
but from the perspective of the Osage themselves. An earlier effort in this vein,
John J. Mathews's The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961), is impressionis-
tic and in many ways less useful than Rollings's study.

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