The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 90, July 1986 - April, 1987 Page: 321

Book Reviews 321
As Robert M. Utley and others have argued, Sheridan applied the tech-
niques of total war, acquired in the Civil War, to the struggle with
the Trans-Mississippi tribes. And he had little patience with anyone
who wanted war fought on a more limited scale. In conducting war
Sheridan used several proteges, such as George A. Custer, Ranald S.
Mackenzie, and Wesley Merritt. Fulfilling the second part of the title of
the book, Hutton has a particularly good evaluation of these and other
officers who served in the Old Army (Chapter 6, "Personalities, Politics,
and Policies").
Events in Texas receive appropriate attention, including the familiar
but significant campaigns of 1868-1869 and 1874-1875, as well as Re-
construction politics. Hutton seems sympathetic toward the former
Confederates; white southerners, like the Indians, were in their "own
way seeking home rule" (p. 281). The southern Democrats, whom
Sheridan naturally despised as being former Confederates, infused
their politics with murder, lynching, and arson to win with violence
what they could not win honestly at the ballot box. Understandably,
Sheridan sternly opposed the ex-Confederates' use of terror. White
southerners cleverly complained about being oppressed while oppress-
ing the freedmen. When Sheridan placed a "wall of bayonets" (Hutton's
phrase on p. 266) around the government of Louisiana, he did so to
protect the legal government representing the majority of the state's
citizens.
Hutton does an excellent job of describing the varied duties of Sheri-
dan and the army during the Indian-fighting years, showing how often
military assignments were influenced by politics-by the Indian Bu-
reau, eastern reformers, western interests, Congress, or old antago-
nisms (left over from the Civil War) among the army officers them-
selves. Hutton's well-researched book supercedes Carl C. Rister's Border
Command: General Phil Sheridan in the West (University of Oklahoma
Press, 1944) and the pertinent chapters in the standard biography,
Richard O'Connor's Sheridan the Inevitable (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953).
Texas A&M University JOSEPH G. DAWSON III
New Mexico Women: Intercultural Perspectives. Edited by Joan M. Jensen
and Darlis A. Miller. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1986. Pp. viii+409. Introduction, tables, photographs, notes,
appendices, index. $29.95, cloth; $14.95, paper.)
Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, who made their mark in the
field of western women's history in 1980 with a prize-winning article,
"The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of
Women in the West," have in this collection of essays demonstrated that