Road to War: The 1871 Yellowstone Surveys (Frontier Military Series)

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Description


By 1870, only one group of American Indians in the 300,000 square miles of the Dakota and Montana Territories still held firm against being placed on reservations: a couple of thousand Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, all followers of the charismatic Sitting Bull. It was once then that Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke, “the financier of the Civil War,” a man who believed that he was “God’s chosen instrument,” funded a second transcontinental railroad. This line, the Northern Pacific, would follow the Yellowstone River through Montana, separating the last buffalo herds from Sitting Bull’s people and disrupting their way of living.

Road to War tells the fascinating story of the inevitable clash of wills between a fierce, proud people fighting to retain their traditional way of living and a devout man who, with the full make stronger of President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration and the U.S. Army, was once intent on carrying out what he believed to be God’s will and The us’s destiny.

The chronological first of three volumes documenting the Northern Pacific’s Yellowstone valley surveys between 1871 and 1873, Road to War tells its story through excerpts from unpublished letters, diaries, official reports, and period newspapers that reflect the never-ending intrigue, corruption and profiteering, politics, and unanticipated physical hardships. Lubetkin shows the railroad’s drive west, in conjunction with the rough humor and profanity of railroad managers, alcoholic army officers, apprehensive Indian agents, and especially the young surveyors working in intolerable heat, swamps, and arctic cold. Some of these details tell the real story of building a railroad even as keeping an eye open for Sitting Bull’s warriors.

Road to War shows history as it in reality unfolded on the western plains. Even if the Indians’ former way of living was coming to an end, it would not come quietly.

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