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| Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth | 
 enlarge | Author: John H. Monnett
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $18.78
You Save: $11.17 (37%)
Buy New/Used from $18.78
Avg. Customer Rating:  (3 reviews)
Sales Rank: 254616
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 350
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1
ISBN: 0826345034
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.81
EAN: 9780826345035
ASIN: 0826345034
Publication Date: October 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The Powder River country of what is now north central Wyoming was one of the most resource-rich regions of the northern plains in the nineteenth century. As U.S. mining interests and white settlement to the north in Montana Territory increased, conflict arose between the United States and the Lakota and Cheyenne nations. On December 21, 1866, the struggle climaxed when a well-organized force of Lakota, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos attacked and destroyed a detachment of forty-nine infantrymen and three officers of the 18th Infantry, twenty-seven troopers of the 2nd Cavalry, and two civilians under the command of Captain William Judd Fetterman near Fort Phil Kearny. The Battle of Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed or Hundred in the Hand, as the event is still called, was the worst defeat the U.S. Army had suffered in the Great Plains, only to be exceeded by the Battle of Little Big Horn a decade later.Because none of the soldiers lived to tell what happened, the Fetterman fight has fostered a body of myth and speculation. In this study, John H. Monnett provides a groundbreaking examination of the conflicts that ensued in the Powder River Country during the nineteenth century and clarifies events and personalities that have become distorted in the annals of Western history. Monnett examines military interests as well as the geopolitical importance of the area and takes into account the environmental history of the conflict as it relates to hunting ranges, vital wood and water resources, and access to trade avenues.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Interesting, PC, Full of Errors and Repetitious December 17, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
The author is a PC "ethnohistorian" who acknowledges that this work is revisionist. However, he points to blaming Lt Grummond instead of Capt. Fetterman for the defeat (assisted by Col. Carrington), as his revisionist theory. Okay, that would be a magazine article, not a 241 page book.
The author makes so many erroneous statements, it is difficult to know where to start. He gives his anti-war credentials early, stating "... a majority of serious (military history) scholars of this subfield, and I definitely include myself in the mix, are among the most vocal antiwar activists in Western Civilization." He recognized that Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" exhibited marginal historical methodology, factual errors and serious omissions, but then lauds the book as revolutionary and inspiring. I guess if the book had been entirely fiction, it would have been even more important.
He states that the Euro-American exploitation of American Indians was "the greatest depopulation and sometimes outright genocide in the history of the world." Gee, and here I thought World War II, the campaigns of the Mongols, or the Taiping Rebellion took top honors in those categories. The author notes the "geophysical changes" on the Great Plains in the two decades before 1866 and their importance. Okay, there was a widespread drought for ten years, but the not "geophysical changes." An 80 man unit (company sized) becomes a "battalion" and he mentions the Power River area multiple times as having "a rich history of cultural interaction." Huh? Before the acquisition of the horse, the Plains Indians were a hunter-gatherer culture in the Late Stone Age. "Rich" is definitely an overblown adjective. The horse was only the Indians' second domestic animal after the dog. The use of overblown adjectives is one of the many problems in this work, for example the hanging of a Cheyenne warrior at Fort Laramie was described as "ghastly" and "part of a violent breakdown of civilization." More humorously, the author says, "Today the Powder River Basin looks much the same as it did in 1865." No doubt he has photographic evidence for that contention.
The calculation of 6.5 bison per person per year needed for Indian subsistance and the author's discussion is almost identical to the same presentation in "Comanche Empire." This seems rather high in both accounts assuming the average bison weighed 2,000 pounds and gave a dressed weight of 800 pounds of meat. That would mean each Indian man, woman and child needed 5,200 pounds of meat per year or 14 pounds per day to survive. Another calculation in question was the consumption of wood for firewood. The author states the Indians needed 3,000 pounds of wood per year for 100 people and that this represented 15 acres of woodland. As every woodcutter knows, 3,000 pounds is somewhere around a half cord of wood (depending on the type of wood) and represents 3-4 full grown trees. Doesn't sound like 15 acres of woodland to me.
The author repeats himself over and over again to make his points which are not very important to begin with. He seems to view the women of the time through modern ideas using such terms as "gender-role prescription" and such academic speak, and bases much (if not all) of his work on the Indian side on oral accounts passed down through the generations. Author Monnett states that oral accounts are useful and must be taken into consideration -- after all, the Indians know their history better than anyone else. Maybe, but in any other historical context, non-contemporaneous oral accounts would be largely ignored. There is a great deal of research concerning oral accounts being passed down disproving their accuracy. So why are the Indians an exception?
At any rate, I found this book to be light, fleshed out with very doubtful "facts" and testimonials, and overall with a great amount of repetition. That being said, there is some good here, although the reader will have to wade through a lot of extra wordiness to extract it. The author may very well be correct that the blame for the loss of Fetterman's command should rest on shoulders other that his, but why do we need to know what happened in Minnesota in 1862 (in a very quick overview) to understand this? Revisionism is not always done well, and is not always an improvement on earlier scholarship. In this case the author is clearly on the side of the Indians, and tends to treat all the Army officers and other white men with a level of distrust and condemnation. The best parts were the maps and diagrams.
 Fetterman redeemed? December 16, 2008
This is the second book in the last year (see also Give Me Eighty Men by Shannan Smith) that attempts to clear Captain William J. Fetterman of foolishly leading his men into an ambush where all were killed by an overwhelming number of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on December 21, 1866. In my opinion, on that score, they succeed. It appears that the rash actions of Lt. George W. Grummond are responsible for the disaster.
While I enjoyed the book and know the ending (same as with Custer's defeat), I do wish the author had written the book by allowing the events to unfold before my eyes rather than constantly reminding me that Fetterman gets killed, therefore including information throughout the text that would have been better suited to its own chapter at the end.
There are some typos/errors but I didn't take notes as I usually do (to include them here) and some parts I felt could have been better presented. However, overall, I do recommend the book.
 Stunning, elegant epistle! Well written and comprehensive October 30, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was somewhat leery of this book, after reading that the author was a prof of NA history,... fearing it would be an PC apologist for the NA viewpoint. It is not. I am no stranger to the Fetterman fight, having read Dee Brown's "the Fetterman Massacre", Shannon Smith's "Give me 80 Men", "The Bloody Bozeman" by Johnson, etc. I found this book to be a highly readable, interesting account, which summerizes and dissects many other earlier accounts of the Fetterman disaster. Monnett does a wonderful job, carefully, delicately dissecting the battle and participants with a sharp scalpel...and reveals the truths of what actually happened and did not happen. He also delves into the motives of the various participants who survived (just as Ms. Smith above). One of the great epic stories of annihilation of U.S. army troops, by indigenous peoples using little more than bow and arrows! (only 6 of the 81 found with gunshot wounds) This book presents both sides of the fight with neutrality/reality. Easy to read, hard to put down!
This is really the Rosetta stone of the Fetterman fight, which I feel sure will be in any serious library of western studies. I highly recommend this book!!
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