U.S. Government and the Plains Indian

After the American Civil War ended, the reorganized and vastly reduced United States Army was assigned the task of pacifying the Plains Indians west of the Mississippi. For much of the next quarter century, the army would be in constant movement westward establishing posts and forts throughout the great expanse of the American west. Dependents especially wives, but also children accompanied some of the more senior Army personnel. These dependents had to deal with primitive conditions and with the constant fear of attack. This paper will focus on how the wives of Frontier Army officers overcame the many hardships and obstacles they faced in fashioning a day to day existence.

Much has been written about the dangers and privations experienced by soldiers serving in the Frontier Army in the perilous American west during the last half of the nineteenth century. Relatively little attention has been paid to the experiences of the wives of the Army officers who accompanied their husbands to these desolate and inhospitable outposts. Despite this lack of recognition, however, these wives made important, positive, and yet usually unrecognized contributions to the success of the Frontier Army. Some of this lack of attention may be due to the unfortunate tendency of some historians to focus on the uninspired actions of some Frontier Army wives. Another cause may simply be that within the greater

narrative of the frontier wars, filled with rampaging Indians, sw

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this was exacerbated by the one overriding fact of Frontier Army life: while the officers and their wives were required to adhere to every regulation, to the elaborate system of social interaction governed by rank, and to the particular customs of the outpost or camp in which they resided, the Army never officially acknowledged the existence of officer's wives or the circumstances in which they lived. This sad reality led Libbie Custer to famously complain about the dichotomy between laundresses, whose titles were recognized by an 1802 Act of Congress and who were paid for their work as part of the unit, and Army wives who received no recognition: "The book of Army regulations enters into such minute detail in its instructions giving the number of hours that bean soup should boil, that it would be natural to suppose that a paragraph or two might be wasted on an officer's wife" (Nacy, 41). The Army considered officer's wives to be camp followers. Rank and Officer's Wives Rank was the glue that held the social networks of the Frontier Army together. Indeed, rank was the only structure that existed on the Western frontier. Not only was the Frontier Army isolated, it was confined to small and makeshift living areas th

Category: Government - U