American Rifle - Alexander Rose [256]
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55. Utley, Frontier Regulars, pp. 19–22; E. M. Coffman, “Army Life on the Frontier, 1865–1898,” Military Affairs 20, no. 4 (1956), p. 200n42. “Unless there should be a war,” mourned one young lieutenant, “I could not possibly be promoted to a Captaincy under 15 to 20 years from now.” Quoted in P. Karsten, “Armed Progressives: The Military Reorganizes for the American Century,” in Karsten, ed., The Military in America: From the Colonial Era to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 259.
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56. Rickey, Forty Miles a Day, pp. 51, 61.
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57. Ibid., pp. 67–68.
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58. E. A. Bode, A Dose of Frontier Soldiering: The Memoirs of Corporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877–1882, ed. T. T. Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 19, 197n4, 123–24.
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59. Utley, Frontier Regulars, pp. 23, 16; Rickey, Forty Miles a Day, pp. 143–47.
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60. King, Campaigning with Crook, pp. 154–55. Custer, as always, had an innovative solution to curbing the problem. Imprisonment with hard labor and tattooing a large D on the left hip was the regulation punishment for captured deserters, but when thirty-five of his men deserted on a single day in 1867, he sent troopers after them with orders to bring back as many corpses—not prisoners—as possible. The bullet-holed dead were strung up prominently in the center of the camp. Waverers subsequently decided to stick with Custer rather than take their chances against him. M. Merington, ed., The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife (New York, 1950), p. 205, quoted in Coffman, “Army Life,” p. 199. On punishment, see Rickey, Forty Miles a Day, pp. 153–55.
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61. Coffman, “Army Life,” pp. 198–99.
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62. Rickey, Forty Miles a Day, pp. 156–65. For more on army life by a contemporary, see J. S. Brisbin, ed., Belden, the White Chief; or, Twelve Years . . . (Cincinnati and New York: C. F. Vent, 1874), pp. 408–20.
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63. Bode, A Dose of Frontier Soldiering, pp. 40–41.
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64. For these quotes, see J. Pettegrew, “‘The Soldier’s Faith’: Turn-of-the-Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 1 (1996), pp. 49–73.
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65. See “The Soldier’s Faith,” in Karsten, Military in America, pp. 203–7. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage appeared the same year. Please don’t be so silly, thought Walt Whitman, who remarked that the Civil War was “about nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory.” Quoted in V. J. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli: The Spanish-American War and Military Medicine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 33.
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66. King, Campaigning with Crook, p. 39. “Yellow Hair” is often mistranslated as “Yellow Hand.” See L. McMurtry, “Inventing the West,” in Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), p. 24.
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67. W. B. Skelton, “Army Officers’ Attitudes Toward Indians, 1830–1860,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 67, no.3 (1976), pp. 113–24;T. C. Leonard, “Red, White and the Army Blue: Empathy and Anger in the American West,” American Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1974), pp. 178ff.
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68. King, Campaigning with Crook, p. 30.
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69. Quoted in Rickey, Forty Miles a Day, p. 317.
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70. Quoted in Leonard, “Red, White and the Army Blue,” p. 186.
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71. N. A. Miles, Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles (1896; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), p.346. On Miles’s politics, see W.B. Skelton’s review of R. Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), in American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994), pp. 1393–94.
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