Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey

Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey
Author: M. John Lubetkin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2013-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806145447

Progress on the nation’s second transcontinental railroad slowed in 1873. The Northern Pacific’s proposed middle—the 250 miles between present Billings and Glendive, Montana—had yet to be surveyed, and Sioux and Cheyenne Indians opposed construction through the Yellowstone Valley, the heart of their hunting grounds. A previous surveying expedition along the Yellowstone River in 1872 had resulted in the death of a prominent member of the party, the near-death of the railroad’s chief engineer, the embarrassment of the U.S. Army, and a public relations and financial disaster for the Northern Pacific. Such is the backdrop for Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey, the story of the expedition told through documents selected and interpreted by historian M. John Lubetkin. The U.S. Army was determined to punish the Sioux, and the Northern Pacific desperately needed to complete its engineering work and resume construction. The expedition mounted in 1873—larger than all previous surveys combined—included “embedded” newspaper correspondents and 1,600 infantry and cavalry, the latter led by George Armstrong Custer. Lubetkin has gathered firsthand accounts from the correspondents, diarists, and reporters who accompanied this important expedition, including that of news correspondent Samuel J. Barrows. Barrows’s narrative—written in a series of dispatches to the New York Tribune—provides a comprehensive, often humorous description of events, and his proficiency with shorthand enabled him to capture quotations and dialogue with an authenticity unmatched by other writers on the survey. The expedition marched west from the Missouri River in mid-June of 1873 and, in three months, covered nearly 1,000, often grueling miles. Encompassing the saga of transcontinental railroading, cultural conflict on the northern plains, and an array of important Indian and Anglo-American characters, Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey will fascinate Custer fans and anyone interested in the history of the American West.

Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey

Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey
Author: M. John Lubetkin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2013-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806145439

Progress on the nation’s second transcontinental railroad slowed in 1873. The Northern Pacific’s proposed middle—the 250 miles between present Billings and Glendive, Montana—had yet to be surveyed, and Sioux and Cheyenne Indians opposed construction through the Yellowstone Valley, the heart of their hunting grounds. A previous surveying expedition along the Yellowstone River in 1872 had resulted in the death of a prominent member of the party, the near-death of the railroad’s chief engineer, the embarrassment of the U.S. Army, and a public relations and financial disaster for the Northern Pacific. Such is the backdrop for Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey, the story of the expedition told through documents selected and interpreted by historian M. John Lubetkin. The U.S. Army was determined to punish the Sioux, and the Northern Pacific desperately needed to complete its engineering work and resume construction. The expedition mounted in 1873—larger than all previous surveys combined—included “embedded” newspaper correspondents and 1,600 infantry and cavalry, the latter led by George Armstrong Custer. Lubetkin has gathered firsthand accounts from the correspondents, diarists, and reporters who accompanied this important expedition, including that of news correspondent Samuel J. Barrows. Barrows’s narrative—written in a series of dispatches to the New York Tribune—provides a comprehensive, often humorous description of events, and his proficiency with shorthand enabled him to capture quotations and dialogue with an authenticity unmatched by other writers on the survey. The expedition marched west from the Missouri River in mid-June of 1873 and, in three months, covered nearly 1,000, often grueling miles. Encompassing the saga of transcontinental railroading, cultural conflict on the northern plains, and an array of important Indian and Anglo-American characters, Custer and the 1873 Yellowstone Survey will fascinate Custer fans and anyone interested in the history of the American West.

Before Custer

Before Custer
Author: M. John Lubetkin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015-02-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806149191

Hoping to complete its transcontinental route, the Northern Pacific Railroad set out in 1872 to survey the Yellowstone Valley. An emissary from the Lakota chief Sitting Bull had warned the two surveying expeditions (eastern and western) not to enter the valley. But no one—certainly no Northern Pacific investor—was worried about taking the Indian threat seriously. As it turned out, the Indians were deadly serious—and successful. The firsthand accounts compiled here by M. John Lubetkin document the survey’s three-month struggle with the Lakotas and other Plains Indian people. Before Custer: Surveying the Yellowstone, 1872 tells the story of a military and public relations disaster. Much to the surprised dismay of U.S. Army strategists and railroad executives, the Indians repeatedly harrassed army forces of nearly a thousand men. One surveying party turned back, without meeting its objectives, after a determined attack led by Sitting Bull. The other also retreated, and one ambush it encountered resulted in the death of a member of President Ulysses S. Grant’s family and the narrow escape of the railroad’s lead engineer. The previously unpublished documents that Lubetkin has collected and annotated also tell a parallel story: that of the dire consequences of the railroad’s problems for the country. When the Northern Pacific’s expansion plans were thwarted, the nation’s largest private banking house failed, leading to the Panic of 1873. The fighting brought Sitting Bull to national attention and led directly to George Armstrong Custer’s transfer to the Department of Dakota. The vivid eyewitness accounts artfully assembled here reveal the failures of alcoholic army commanders and show personal encounters between soldiers and Indians, among them the formidable Lakota warrior known as Gall. Before Custer tells of a little-known but crucial episode in the history of westward expansion and Native peoples’ efforts to halt that expansion.

A Companion to Custer and the Little Bighorn Campaign

A Companion to Custer and the Little Bighorn Campaign
Author: Brad D. Lookingbill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2019-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1119129737

An accessible and authoritative overview of the scholarship that has shaped our understanding of one of the most iconic battles in the history of the American West Combines contributions from an array of respected scholars, historians, and battlefield scientists Outlines the political and cultural conditions that laid the foundation for the Centennial Campaign and examines how George Armstrong Custer became its figurehead Provides a detailed analysis of the battle maneuverings at Little Bighorn, paying special attention to Indian testimony from the battlefield Concludes with a section examining how the Battle of Little Bighorn has been mythologized and its pervading influence on American culture

Geronimo and Sitting Bull

Geronimo and Sitting Bull
Author: Bill Markley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1493048457

**2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award Silver Winner for Western Biographies and Memoirs** Two Native American leaders who left a lasting legacy, Geronimo and Sitting Bull. Most Americans and many people worldwide have heard these two famous names. Today, however, the general public knows little about the lives of these great leaders. During the second half of the nineteenth century when they opposed white intrusion and expansion into their territories, just the mention of their names could spark fear or anger. After they surrendered to the army and lived in captivity, they evoked curiosity and sympathy for the plight of the American Indian. Author Bill Markley offers a thoughtful and entertaining examination of these legendary lives in this new joint biography of these two great leaders. .

A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn

A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn
Author: Todd E. Harburn
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2023-02-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806192453

Of the three physicians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Doctor George Edwin Lord (1846–76) was the lone commissioned medical officer, an assistant surgeon with the United States Army’s 7th Cavalry—one more soldier caught up in the U.S. government’s efforts to fulfill what many people believed was the young country’s “Manifest Destiny.” A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn tells Lord’s story for the first time. Notable for its unique angle on Custer’s last stand and for its depiction of frontier-era medicine, the book is above all a compelling portrait of the making of an army medical professional in mid-nineteenth-century America. Drawing on newly discovered documents, Todd E. Harburn describes Lord’s education and training at Bowdoin College in Maine and the Chicago Medical College, detailing what the study of medicine entailed at the time for “a young man of promise . . . held in universal esteem.” Lord’s time as a contract physician with the army took him in 1874 to the U.S. Northern Boundary Survey. From there Harburn recounts how, after a failed romance and the rigors of the U.S. Army Medical Board examination, the young doctor proceeded to his first—and only—appointment as a post surgeon, at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory. What followed, of course, was Lord’s service, and his death, in the Little Big Horn campaign, which this book shows us for the first time from the unique perspective of the surgeon. A portrait of a singular figure in the milieu of the American military’s nineteenth-century medical elite, A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn offers a close look at a familiar chapter in U.S. history, and a reminder of the humanity lost in a battle that resonates to this day.

Jay Cooke's Gamble

Jay Cooke's Gamble
Author: M. John Lubetkin
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 080614503X

In 1869, Jay Cooke, the brilliant but idiosyncratic American banker, decided to finance the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental railroad planned from Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle. M. John Lubetkin tells how Cooke’s gamble reignited war with the Sioux, rescued George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, pushed frontier settlement four hundred miles westward, and triggered the Panic of 1873. Staking his reputation and wealth on the Northern Pacific, Cooke was soon whipsawed by the railroad’s mismanagement, questionable contracts, and construction problems. Financier J. P. Morgan undermined him, and the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended congressional support. When railroad surveyors and army escorts ignored Sioux chief Sitting Bull’s warning not to enter the Yellowstone Valley, Indian attacks—combined with alcoholic commanders—led to embarrassing setbacks on the field, in the nation’s press, and among investors. Lubetkin’s suspenseful narrative describes events played out from Wall Street to the Yellowstone and vividly portrays the soldiers, engineers, businessmen, politicians, and Native Americans who tried to build or block the Northern Pacific.

Road to War

Road to War
Author: Robert M. Senkewicz
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016
Genre: Geological surveys
ISBN: 0806156686

Pages:1 to 25 -- Pages:26 to 50 -- Pages:51 to 75 -- Pages:76 to 100 -- Pages:101 to 125 -- Pages:126 to 150 -- Pages:151 to 175 -- Pages:176 to 200 -- Pages:201 to 225 -- Pages:226 to 250 -- Pages:251 to 275 -- Pages:276 to 300 -- Pages:301 to 313

The Earth is Weeping

The Earth is Weeping
Author: Peter Cozzens
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307958043

"With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the encroachment experienced by the tribes and the tribal conflicts over whether to fight or make peace, and explores the squalid lives of soldiers posted to the frontier and the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies, "--Amazon.com.