More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  Lastly, I thank my son, Jeremy, and my daughter, Katy, for their encouragement and interest.

  Bibliography

  This bibliography is arranged in two sections: first a chapter by chapter commentary on sources I have found useful (in some cases, essential); and second an alphabetical listing of titles and publishers for reference. The alphabetical listing refers to both American and British publishers, not entirely systematically; and the dates of publication may include both the original date and the recent date of reprint. There are of course numerous other titles on the subject, which for reasons of space cannot all be included.

  Chapter 1. First Things First

  As this is an entirely personal chapter, there are no sources other than my own memory and various notes and letters written at the time.

  Chapter 2. La Vente de La Louisiane

  The story of the Louisiana Purchase is found in varying detail in almost every American history book that covers the relevant period. But, as implied in my chapter, only a few of those books mention the role of the British in terms of both the payment arrangements and the naval threat as invoked by President Jefferson. Most authors, in their accounts of Napoleon abandoning his plans to restart a mainland American empire (via New Orleans), concentrate on the deaths caused by yellow fever on the expeditionary force he had dispatched to Santo Domingo (Haiti), and the simultaneous losses suffered by that force in fighting a slave revolt. A few authors (including at least one anonymous entry in Wikipedia) recognize that there were what one calls “other additional factors” in Napoleon’s change of mind. One of the very few detailed accounts of the financial arrangements is contained in a booklet, The Financing of the Louisiana Purchase, published in 2004 (the Purchase’s bicentennial) by ING Bank. A useful overview of the thinking and negotiations is found in what would seem to be a school textbook: The Louisiana Purchase by James P. Barry; likewise, The Letters of Robert R. Livingston: The Diplomatic Story of the Louisiana Purchase by Edward Parsons. A lengthy and detailed narrative covering the dominance of Britain’s fighting fleet throughout the era in question is the subject of The Command of the Oceans - a Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 by N.A.M. Rogers.

  Chapter 3. Lewis and Clark

  The out-and-back journey of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to become so significant to the young nation’s growing knowledge of itself that it is mentioned, at varying length, in every history about those times. A detailed, almost day-to-day account of the enterprise, with many diary extracts, excellent maps and contemporary illustrations, is found in David Holloway’s Lewis and Clark and the Crossing of North America. Likewise, Lewis and Clark by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns is an informative book with many excellent illustrations. Other very useful sources are a lengthy chapter in John H. Hawgood’s America’s Western Frontier and, likewise, in Jeannette Mirsky’s The Westward Crossings. Other books which, at varying length, carry informative accounts include David Lavender’s The American West, Bernard De Voto’s Westward the Course of Empire and The West: Contemporary Records of Expansion across the Continent: 1807-1890 edited by Bayard Still. Lastly, a surprisingly sour and critical assessment of Lewis and Clark’s achievements occurs in Walter Prescott Webb’s classic The Great Plains.

  Chapter 4. Mountain Men

  For a full-length account of the mountain men and their trade, one should read Don Berry’s marvelously researched A Majority of Scoundrels. Its equal is The Beaver Men by the prolific and renowned Nebraskan, Mari Sandoz. John Hawgood, Bernard de Voto and Jeanette Mirsky, as listed just above, all include informative chapters about the fur trade. A variety of historians contribute to The Oxford History of the American West, which contains several sections on different aspects of the fur trade, including a discussion of the rendezvous system. Robert Athearn’s High Country Empire includes a chapter on the mountain men; likewise, The American West - an Appraisal edited by Robert Ferris, and Everett Dick’s Vanguards of the Frontier. Of a more specific nature is Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West by Dale Morgan. A Nation Moving West, edited by Robert Richmond, contains a number of contemporary eyewitness accounts by various travelers during the heyday of the mountain fur trade. For a critical assessment of the exploitive nature of the whole business, particularly where the Indians were concerned, one should read the relevant chapter in Land Grab by John Terrell. Lastly, The Mountain Men by John Neilhardt is a book written entirely in verse about the exploits of various mountain men, including Jedediah Smith and Hugh Glass.

  Chapter 5. The Overland Trail

  Obviously, most books about the history of the West contain at least a chapter on the California and Oregon Trails. Books which are more specifically given to the story of the overland trails include Wagons West by Frank McLynn, The California Trail by George Stewart and The Great River Road by Merrill Mates. For a full account of the ill-fated Donner Party one should read Ordeal By Hunger by George Stewart; additionally, one should include The Forty-Niners by William Johnson. Francis Parkman’s classic The Oregon Trail, first published in the late 1840s, while fascinating, is only concerned with the first third of the trail; Parkman journeyed no further west than Fort Laramie. Wallace Stegner’s The Gathering of Zion is, of course, mainly concerned with what the author calls “the Mormon trail”.

  Chapters 6 and 7. The Hostiles and the Military, No Survivors

  Given that the Fetterman Massacre was one of the two worst disasters suffered by the Army on the Western plains (the other one, 12 years later, was the even greater Custer debacle), there is no shortage of books and articles which include accounts, long and short, of the events at Fort Kearny in 1866. But if one had to choose three books of thoroughly researched detail and absorbing narrative they would have to be Dee Brown’s The Fetterman Massacre, Where a Hundred Men were Slain by John Monnet and Give Me Eighty Men by Shannon Smith. Most interestingly, Ms. Smith explores the possibility that Captain Fetterman has been subtly denigrated in a process started by Colonel Carrington’s two successive wives. His first wife, Margaret, died four years after the massacre but not before she had written a book about events at Fort Kearny. A few years later, the Colonel married Frances Grummond, the widow of the officer who, leading his cavalry detachment, had raced ahead of Fetterman on the fatal day. In sequence, both women evidently decided that their husband, the Colonel, had been unfairly condemned by his superior officers. So, in their books, they sought to “correct” the record by delicately shifting the blame onto Fetterman; they both imply that he was a gentlemanly but headstrong officer who, in disobeying their husband’s careful orders, was the major cause of the disaster. There must obviously be the possibility that the Colonel was sitting beside his wives... Anyway, their blaming the disaster on Fetterman has long been the generator of the accepted version of events. Shannon Smith finds a good deal of contrary evidence and, thereby, points to the possibility (or probability?) that Captain Fetterman was a much better officer than he appears to be in most of the standard accounts. She also questions the authenticity of Fetterman’s boastful declaration, “Give me eighty men and I will ride through the whole Sioux nation”. Did he ever say it? The wives’ books, held in the archive section of some Western libraries, are Absaraka, Home of the Crows by Margaret Carrington and My Army Life by Frances Carrington. Another interesting account of events at Fort Kearny forms a chapter of Geoffrey Grinnell’s The Fighting Cheyenne.

  Elsewhere, there is a whole slew of absorbing narratives in which each comes at the story from a slightly different angle - though nearly all are critical, to a greater or lesser degree, of Fetterman. Amongst these accounts, one should include Crimsoned Prairie by General S.L.A. Marshall, Frontier Regulars, 1866-91 by Robert Utley, War Cries on Horseback by Stephen Longstreet, Forked Tongues and Broken Treaties edited by Donald Worcester and The Long Death by Ralph Andrist. Lastly, in an absorbing work of fiction (though it is entirely convincing in all its widely researched detail), one learns a
great deal from Where the Rivers Run North by Sam Morton.

  Chapter 8. The Railroad

  There are a number of books that devote themselves entirely to the building of the first transcontinental railroad, and there are other, more wide-ranging histories which include sections on that particular story. In the first category, one should list The Great Iron Road by Robert Howard, High Road to Promontory by George Kraus and Iron Horses to Promontory by Gerald Best. Among books with more general accounts of Western railroads are The Story Of Western Railroads by Robert Riegal, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow by Dee Brown, The Big Four by Oscar Lewis, Railroads of America by Oliver Jensen and Blood, Iron and Gold by Christian Wolmar.

  Chapter 9. Custer and Little Big Horn

  Given that George Armstrong Custer is the most written about man in all the military history of the United States, it would be wrong of me, as a layman, to suggest that any particular books are markedly superior to any of the others. So the following, all informative, are simply the ones with which I am most familiar: The Sioux War of 1876 by John Gray, The Custer Album by Lawrence Frost, The Custer Myth by Col. W. Graham, The Custer Reader edited by Paul Hutton, The Custer Companion by Thom Hatch, A Terrible Glory by James Donovan, Custerology by Michael Elliott, The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick, To Hell With Honor by Larry Sklenar, Custer’s Luck by Edgar Stewart, Glory Hunter by Frederick Van de Water, Custer by Jay Monaghan, Son of Morning Star by Evans Connell, The General Custer Story by Lauran Paine and Soldiers Falling into Camp by Robert Kammer and Frederick Lefthand. Interesting accounts of recent archaeological discoveries (following the grass fires of the mid 1880s) are found in They Died with Custer by Scott, Willey and Connor and Archaeology, History and Custer’s Last Battle by Richard Fox. Additionally, there are a number of booklets that are well worth studying; they include The Custer Adventure compiled by Richard Upton, The Custer Battlefield by Robert Utley, Custer Made a Good Decision by Major Robert Morris and Army Failures against the Sioux in 1876 by Francis Taunton in the British Custeriana series. Books that come at the story with less detail and/or from a slightly different perspective include Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen Ambrose and Crazy Horse by Kingsley Bray. That last book, by an Englishman, is deeply impressive in terms of both its scope and detail. No less notable is Robert Utley’s wonderfully researched Sitting Bull - an American Patriot; in which he covers far more than the biography of the Sioux chief. For a critical analysis of the weaponry carried by Custer’s cavalrymen, read The “Trap-door” Springfield in Service by Colonel Philip Shockley. As mentioned in the main text, both Custer and his wife wrote books which have the added interest of being written from a personal viewpoint and more or less contemporaneously with the events they describe: My Life on the Plains by General George Custer and Boots and Saddles by Elizabeth Custer. Lastly, The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer by Douglas Jones is an interesting novel that hypothesizes about what might have happened had Custer survived.

  Chapter 10. Wounded Knee

  As its title implies, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation by Robert Utley is almost entirely devoted to an account of the Wounded Knee engagement and all the events that led up to it; Mr. Utley returns to the story, though at much shorter length, in his Frontier Regulars. Then, as one might expect, Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee ends with two very informative chapters on the Ghost Dance and the subsequent events at Wounded Knee itself. Likewise, there are useful pages of text and several impressive photographs in The West by Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns and Duncan Dayton. Other worthwhile sources are in General S.L.A. Marshall’s Crimson Prairie and in Ralph Andrist’s The Long Death. For an unequivocally “army” version of events, one should read The Wounded Knee and Drexel Mission Fights by Major L. McCormick, who was the 7th Cavalry’s adjutant at the time. A fictionalized (but not necessarily inaccurate) version of events is Ghost Dance by John Norman.

  The 1973 hostilities generated a stream of print and broadcast copy at the time. But the first book to examine the long-standing roots of the 1973 “revolt” was The Road to Wounded Knee; written by Robert Burnette (President of the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council) and John Koster (a white journalist), it argues the Indian cause with passion - though not, as far as one can tell, at the expense of accuracy. In 2000, 27 years after the events it examines, there came Wounded Knee 2 by Rolland Dewing, a thoroughly researched narrative and analysis which seems to raise all the relevant political questions and, where possible, to point to most of the answers. Ten years earlier, the 1973 Superintendent of the Pine Ridge Reservation’s office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Stanley Lyman, published Wounded Knee 1973, a Personal Account. I have read a 5,000-word essay by Sonya Scott entitled Wounded Knee: Intra-tribal Conflict or Response to Federal Policies? and the full transcript of a TV documentary, We Shall Remain, made for the Public Broadcasting Service; this includes revealing contributions from, amongst others, the leader of the US Marshals, from Russell Means of AIM and from the “disputed” President of the Oglala Tribal Council, Dick Wilson. There is also a good website at www.woundedkneemuseum.org.

  The books listed above cover the 1890 and 1973 “confrontations” at Wounded Knee in some detail. But for an account which is both broader and more personal in its historical perspective, do read Joe Starita’s The Dull Knives of Pine Ridge: a Lakota Odyssey. In poignant detail, the author follows the hopes, frustrations and despairs of a leading Sioux family across 150 years and five generations - from the Custer battle to Wounded Knee (1890), then on via both World Wars, to Vietnam and Wounded Knee (1973); or, as the author puts it, “from Custer to Saddam Hussein, from the Sun Dance to Holy Communion, from buffalo meat to pizza”. By the same author comes I Am A Man, which tells the moving story of the Ponca people’s mistreatment down the years, and of their Chief Standing Bear’s long search for justice.

  Chapter 11. Cowboys and Cow-towns

  Again, I list the books I know best: The Cattle Towns by Robert Dykstra, Prairie Trails and Cowtowns by Floyd Streeter, Vanguards of the Frontier by Everett Dick, A Nation Moving West edited by Robert Richmond and Robert Mardock, Cow Country by Edward Dale, The Cattlemen by Mari Sandoz, Cowboys and Cattlemen edited by Michael Kennedy and Nothing But Prairie and Sky by Walker Wyman. The American West - an Appraisal edited by Robert Ferris contains an interesting chapter called ‘The Cowboy - Then and Now’. Likewise, Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains has a chapter called ‘The Cattle Kingdom’. Lastly, The Cowboys by William Forbis is a detailed and marvelously illustrated part-work with scores of early photographs.

  Chapter 12. The Cattle Barons

  Most of the books listed for the last chapter also cover, often in depth, the era of the cattle barons. For example, Cowboys and Cattlemen (see above) has several chapters grouped under the section ‘Rangeland Royalty’; one of those chapters features Moreton Frewen. Additionally, I would point to The Beef Bonanza by James Brisbin, Land Grab by John Terrell and The Swan Land and Cattle Company by Harmon Mothershead. Lastly, Moreton Frewen’s Western Adventures by L. Milton Woods is both impressively researched and an entertainingly good read.

  Chapter 13. Range War

  The story of the Johnson County War is told, at varying length, in a range of Western histories. But three full-length and thoroughly researched accounts (though varying in some details) are The War on Powder River by Helena Huntington Smith, The Johnson County War by Bill O’Neil and, most recently, Wyoming Range War by John Davis. For an absorbing collection of accounts (40 of them in over 120 pages) written by some of the actual participants (on both sides) and observers of the “invasion” and its aftermath, there is nothing to compare with The Powder River Country edited by Margaret Brock Hanson. In The Johnson County War - a Pack of Lies the author, Jack Gage, has had the inventive idea of writing what amounts to two quite contrasting books within the same cover: the first tells the story entirely from the perspective of the barons and their merce
naries; the second from that of the settlers and would-be small ranchers. Additionally, there is an interesting biography of a leader of the “invasion” and one of Wyoming’s most notorious range detectives/assassins in Robert DeArment’s Alias Frank Canton. Other relevant books include The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate, 1889 by George Hufsmith and The Banditti of the Plains - the Crowning Infamy of the Ages by A.S. Mercer; this was the book that was virtually banned when first published in the mid 1890s.

  Interesting accounts of the conflict are found in the issues of two local newspapers through most of 1892: both are available at the Wyoming State Archives and at the public libraries in Buffalo and Cheyenne. The Cheyenne Daily Leader presents the story from the cattle barons’ viewpoint; The Buffalo Bulletin takes the opposing stance.

  Chapter 14. Butch Cassidy and all that

  Since the famous film, the lives of Butch, Sundance and Etta have spawned scores of articles in magazines and journals of Western history. But among full-length books there are three which seem to lead the way. First is Larry Pointer’s In Search of Butch Cassidy; in this readable and informative account, Pointer convincingly argues that Butch came back to live out his days under the pseudonym of William Phillips. Taking a direct and interestingly contrary view is Digging Up Butch Cassidy by Anne Meadows. Last, most recent and impressively researched is Butch Cassidy - a Biography by Richard Patterson, who seems undecided about Butch’s alleged return; or perhaps he has decided that the evidence in each direction is equally convincing. Following closely on the three books just listed is one co-authored by Butch’s sister: Butch Cassidy, My Brother by Lula Betensin. One of Butch’s associates in the Wild Bunch, Matt Warner, eventually went straight and even became a deputy sheriff; in 1938 he co-wrote The Last of the Bandit Riders, which contains a number of interesting reflections on Butch Cassidy and his colleagues. Also in 1938, the Utah author referred to in my main text, Charles Kelly, wrote The Outlaw Trail: the Story of Butch Cassidy. Twenty years later, with further research, he wrote a revised edition which, particularly in its details of the alleged Bolivian shoot-out, must surely have inspired the climax of William Goldman’s famous 1969 film. The published screenplay, as one might expect, makes a quirky and entertaining read.