Monnett's compelling study is the first to examine the Beecher Island Battle and its relationship to the overall conflict between American Indians and Euroamericans on the central plains of Colorado and Kansas during the late 1860s.

The Fetterman Fight ranks among the most crushing defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth-century West. On December 21, 1866--during Red Cloud's War (1866-1868)--a well-organized force of 1,500 to 2,000 Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors annihilated a detachment of seventy-nine infantry and cavalry soldiers--among them Captain William Judd Fetterman--and two civilian contractors. With no survivors on the U.S. side, the only eyewitness accounts of the battle came from Lakota and Cheyenne participants. In Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight, award-winning historian John H. Monnett presents these Native views, drawn from previously published sources as well as newly discovered interviews with Oglala and Cheyenne warriors and leaders. Supplemented with archaeological evidence, these narratives flesh out historical understanding of Red Cloud's War. Climate change in the mid-nineteenth century made the resource-rich Powder River Country in today's Wyoming increasingly important to Plains Indians. At the same time, the discovery of gold in Montana encouraged prospectors to pass through the Powder River region on their way north, and so the U.S. Army began to construct new forts along the Bozeman Trail. In the resulting conflict, the Lakotas and Cheyennes defended their hunting ranges and trade routes. Traditional histories have laid the blame for Fetterman's 1866 defeat and death on his incompetent leadership--and thus implied that the Indian alliance succeeded only because of Fetterman's personal failings. Monnett's sources paint another picture. Narratives like those of Miniconjou Lakota warrior White Bull suggest that Fetterman's actions were not seen as rash or reprehensible until after the fact. Nor did his men flee the field in panic. Rather, they fought bravely to the end. The Indians, for their part, used their knowledge of the terrain to carefully plan and execute an ambush, ensuring them victory. Critical to understanding the nuances of Plains Indian strategy and tactics, the firsthand narratives in Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight reveal the true nature of this Native victory against regular army forces.

One of the legendary figures of the frontier U.S. Army and the Indian Wars, Sandy Forsyth is unknown to most Americans. This volume contains his exciting account of the Battle of Beecher Island in September, 1868.Forsyth commanded a tiny force pinned down on a sand bar in the Republican River for nine days against hundreds of Cheyenne warriors led by Roman Nose. Forsyth was badly wounded but stayed in command as men and horses fell around him.Earlier in his career, he had been an aide-de-camp to Major-General Phil Sheridan during the Civil War. He rode with Sheridan on his famous nighttime ride from Winchester to avert catastrophe at the Battle of Cedar Creek. That story is here, as well as Forsyth's memory of his presence at the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.This is one of the most exciting and well-written memoirs of an officer who served in the Civil War and on the frontier.

Monnett takes a closer look at the struggle between the mining interests of the United States and the Lakota and Cheyenne nations in 1866 that climaxed with the Fetterman Massacre.

An evenhanded account of a tragic clash of cultures On November 27, 1868, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer attacked a Southern Cheyenne village along the Washita River in present-day western Oklahoma. The subsequent U.S. victory signaled the end of the Cheyennes’ traditional way of life and resulted in the death of Black Kettle, their most prominent peace chief. In this remarkably balanced history, Jerome A. Greene describes the causes, conduct, and consequences of the event even as he addresses the multiple controversies surrounding the conflict. As Greene explains, the engagement brought both praise and condemnation for Custer and carried long-range implications for his stunning defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn eight years later.

Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890: Conquering the Southern Plains is the third in a planned five-volume series that will tell the saga of the military struggle for the American West in the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it. Volume III: Conquering the Southern Plains offers as complete a selection of outstanding original accounts pertaining to the struggle for the Southern Plains and Texas as may be gathered under one cover. It contains accounts from such notable military participants as George Armstrong Custer, Nelson A. Miles, Wesley Merritt, and Frederick W. Benteen.