First published in 1959, this book tells the story of the U.S. Army's role in the winning of the American West.

A reassessment of the military's role in developing the Western territories moves beyond combat stories and stereotypes to focus on more non-martial accomplishments such as exploration, gathering scientific data, and building towns.

With original primary source documents, this anthology brings readers into the vast unknown 19th-century American West—through the eyes of the explorers who saw it for the first time. This volume brings together book excerpts, maps, and illustrations from 12 explorers from the 19th century, highlighting their lives and contributions. Arranged chronologically, the 10 chapters focus on individual explorers, with biographies and background information about and document excerpts from each person. The chapters offer analyses of each document's relevance to the historical period, geographic knowledge, and cultural perspective. This guide shares the important contributions from explorers like Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Jedediah Smith, James P. Beckwourth, John C. Fremont, Susan Magoffin, and John Wesley Powell. It also nurtures readers' historical literacy by modeling historians' methods of analyzing primary sources. Readers will see new and familiar events from different perspectives, including that of a woman traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, one of the most famous African American mountain men, and a Civil War veteran, among many others.

Published in celebration of the Purchase's bicentennial, this resource offers a multifaceted view of a watershed American event. In one easy-access resource, The Louisiana Purchase brings together the work of over 100 experts covering historical figures, relevant legal and historical concepts, states that formed in the new territory, frontier outposts, and the Native Americans uprooted by expansion westward. The book examines every aspect and consequence of Thomas Jefferson's momentous transaction: the largest real estate deal in American history. Readers will learn how the purchase made Manifest Destiny really seem like destiny; how it sparked the rise of America's urban industrial society and inflamed passions over the expansion of slavery; and how it triggered tragic conflicts between the government and Native Americans as well as immeasurable environmental damage. Ideal for students, historians, and public and private libraries, the Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive reference ever compiled on an event so central to the American experience that it seems to lie at the heart of everything triumphant and tragic in our history.

Fort Bowie, in present-day Arizona, was established in 1862 at the site of the famous Battle of Apache Pass, where U.S. troops clashed with Apache chief Cochise and his warriors. The fort’s dual purpose was to guard the invaluable water supply at Apache Spring and to control Indians in the developing southwestern region. Douglas C. McChristian’s Fort Bowie, Arizona, spans nearly four decades to provide a fascinating account of the many complex events surrounding the small combat post. In a sweeping narrative, McChristian presents Fort Bowie in fresh contexts of national expansion and regional development, weaving in threads of early exploration, transcontinental railroad surveys, the overland mail, mining, ranching, and the conflict with the Apaches.

Major Stephen H. Long of the United States Army was the most important government-sponsored explorer in the decade after the War of 1812. He led three major and several minor expeditions up the Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas rivers and the Red River of the north, as well as exploring the central and southern Plains, the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Lakes. His campanions included engineers, cartographers, Naturalists, ethnologists, and artists, and they gathered a wealth of scientific, military, and artistic data about the interior of North America. For years Long’s expeditions have been overlooked or misunderstood; here for the first time they are placed in the context of American scientific development.

The Texas Panhandle-its eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House-is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, w...

The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 is the story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield. Repeatedly, Americans used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies, but to shape their nation and their vision of who they were, often in ways not directly associated with shooting wars or combat. That the regular army served as nation-builders is ironic, given the officer corps’ obsession with a warrior ethic and the deep-seated disdain for a standing army that includes Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and debates regarding congressional appropriations. Whether the issue concerned Indian policy, the appropriate division of power between state and federal authorities, technology, transportation, communications, or business innovations, the public demanded that the military remain small even as it expected those forces to promote civilian development. Robert Wooster’s exhaustive research in manuscript collections, government documents, and newspapers builds upon previous scholarship to provide a coherent and comprehensive history of the U.S. Army from its inception during the American Revolution to the Philippine-American War. Wooster integrates its institutional history with larger trends in American history during that period, with a special focus on state-building and civil-military relations. The United States Army and the Making of America will be the definitive book on the army’s relationship with the nation from its founding to the dawn of the twentieth century and will be a valuable resource for a generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and virtually any scholar with an interest in the U.S. Army, American frontiers and borderlands, the American West, or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation-building.