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.

"No one interested in the history of the American West or in women's history should miss this well-written, carefully researched, comprehensive treatment of a subject that previous scholars have largely ignored. Based on the writings of more than fifty women who accompanied their husbands to remote duty posts in the far west.

Collects the letters of the wife of Civil War major general Benjamin H. Grierson, describing daily life and hardships at frontier posts like Fort Riley, Fort Concho, Fort Davis, and Fort Grant

"Paul Hutton’s study of Phil Sheridan in the West is authoritative, readable, and an important contribution to the literature of westward expansion. Although headquartered in Chicago, Sheridan played a crucial role in the opening of the West. His command stretched from the Missouri to the Rockies and from Mexico to Canada, and all the Indian Wars of the Great Plains fell under his direction. Hutton ably narrates and interprets Sheridan’s western career from the perspective of the top command rather than the battlefield leader. His book is good history and good reading."–Robert M. Utley

Between 1867 and 1875, George Armstrong Custer contributed fifteen letters under the apt pseudonym Nomad to the New York-based sportsman's journal Turf, Field and Farm. Previously available only in a collector's typescript edition, the Nomad letters offer valuable insight into the character of the Boy General as he gives expression to his abiding love for hunting, horses, and hounds. Vivid accounts of days in the field after buffalo and deer alternate with letters that attest to Custer's passion for Kentucky thoroughbreds and trotters and his devotion to his favorite hunting dogs. Moreover, the letters show Custer as a student of literature who constandy alluded to works of fiction and drama and who loved to quote poetry as he self-consciously honed his skills as a writer. The Nomad letters also open the way to controversy since three of the letters written in 1867, as Brian Dippie's careful annotations make clear, offer a strikingly different account of Custer's ill-starred induction into Indian fighting than the accepted version recorded five years later in his memoirs, My Life on the Plains. Composed only a few months after the abortive Hancock Expedition that led to Custer's court-martial and suspension from rank and pay for one year, the Nomad letters are full of a passion and venom absent from My Life on the Plains. They provide an immediate response to the events of 1867 that will interest all students of the Western Indian wars and of Custer's fascinating career.