An Army Doctor’s Frontier Revelations

Robert M. Utley, editor and annotator of An Army Doctor on the Western Frontier: Journals and Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, 1864-1890 (University of New Mexico Press, $29.95), has created a superb, primary resource on frontier life. For 25 years, Dr. Lauderdale kept a journal and wrote countless letters to his sister in upstate New York. His detailed notes emphasize life on officer’s row, and the daily events and discussions with the visitors to the Army post he served as medical doctor