Border Command: General Phil Sheridan in the West. By Carl
Coke Rister. Norman (University of Oklahoma Press),
1944. Pp. 244. Illustrations, bibliography, and index, $2.75.

The use by the University of Oklahoma Press of twelve
point type with two points between lines makes for easy reading
and Carl Coke Rister's account of Sheridan's border command
makes for interesting reading in this new treatment of the
opening of the border country for the pioneers. As the title
indicates, the book is not so much a biography as a study of
Sheridan in relation to his military assignments between 1865
and 1885.

Sheridan, "after a rapid climb up the military ladder," was
to witness Lee's surrender and be sent almost immediately
to the Southwest. With what Rister calls "the keen edge of
the sword," he impressed the French in northern Mexico by
talk of United States aid to Mexican Nationalists and slowed
to a drip the flow of Southern emigres to Mexico. The "Flat
of the Sword" deals with the assignment as governor
of the Fifth Military District. Sheridan's feeling that Texas
had not yet suffered from the war resulted in the policy for
which President Johnson denounced him as an absolute tyrant.
The account of his mistakes in this role which resulted in his
being moved on to be guardian of the border is remarkable
for its omission of the oft-quoted preference of Sheridan for
places other than Texas.

Rister may well be called the historian of the border as
evidenced by the titles of all his books. Though some of the
accounts of Indian relations are his own thrice-told tales,
the present treatise contains fresh delineations of frontier
characters and rare word pictures of frontier scenes and topog-
raphy with a felicitous choice of chapter titles.

After attempts at "Peace by Bribery" with the wild Indians
of the Plains, "whose problem towered as a mountain over the
molehills of frontier rudeness, undisciplined troops, and petty
problems of administration," one chief opined that the olive
branch turned into a prickly pear. Sheridan solved the frontier
crisis by resort to winter campaigning despite Jim Bridger's
gloomy predictions.

The success of the campaigns which ended in the Fort Cobb
and Fort Sill powwows meant Sheridan's promotion to Lieu-
tenant-General in 1869. In the summer of 1870 he hobnobbed
with royalty in the person of King William I as he visited the
German armies during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1871 he
reversed the procedure to be host to the Grand Duke Alexis of
Russia on a buffalo hunt on the plains.

In Texas the summer of 1871 saw the Satanta and Big Tree
trials with the application of white man's law to Indian crim-
inals. After the Red River War cleared the Texas Panhandle
of Indians, Sheridan's sphere was enlarged to cover the North-
ern Plains, where, after Ouster's disaster, the Sioux country
was also opened for settlement. Now the white man's culture
had transformed "the great American desert."

While supervising the border from Washington, the general,
in June, 1874, married Miss Irene Rucker. They were to have
a happy home and four children. Sheridan died of a heart
ailment in 1888 just after his rank of full general was confirmed.

According to Rister, Sheridan's service during the army's
"dark ages" to bring it to the status of a well disciplined and
ambitious body of officers and men and his establishment of an
officers' training school at Fort Leavenworth to inculcate his
own principles were to be factors when a civilian army had to
be trained in 1917. It may carry over until today.

The University of Texas

Llerena Friend

How to cite:
"Border Command", Volume 48, Number 1, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v048/n1/review_DIVL2125.html
[Accessed Mon Nov 23 7:55:21 CST 2009]