Sioux War Dispatches
Other than Mark Kellogg at the Little Big Horn, no newspaper correspondents lost their lives during the Great Sioux War, and his loss failed to stem the flow of words to the nation’s many newspapers.
Marc H. Abrams, in Sioux War Dispatches , has pulled together a volume of hard-to-find writings from an army of scribblers. Abrams overlays the key events—from Custer’s 1874 Black Hills exploration to his 1876 debacle to Crazy Horse’s death in 1877—with the necessary set-up and annotation that only an expert editor does. What fascinated me most about this book were the occasional soldier-correspondents of this “Indian-writing” Army, maybe our best chroniclers, who portrayed the Sioux war through a lens framed by hard frontier experience.
—R. Eli Paul, author of Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854-1856
Related Articles
-
In his Great Sioux War Orders of Battle, Paul Hedren closely examines the Army’s 28…
-
When he appears in history, William Temple Hornaday almost always shows up in sentences that…
-
Hatred, especially racial hatred, was, like greed, a powerful force in the West of 1871.…
