Search results for ""Author Shannon D. Smith""

The U.S. Army built Fort Phil Kearny in the foothills of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains in 1866 to protect travelers on the Bozeman Trail headed to Montana’s gold fields. The need for this protection arose because the Bozeman Trail cut through the heart of the last bountiful hunting grounds of the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and Northern Arapahos. The incursion by gold seekers led to direct competition with the allied tribes for food and supplies, and a series of violent encounters culminated in the Fetterman Fight on December 21, 1866, in which the army suffered its worst defeat on the northern plains until Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn ten years later. The battle became a cause célèbre and was the subject of a congressional investigation. Based on army records and firsthand reports, Dee Brown’s Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga was the first detailed account of the battle and the loss of Lieutenant Fetterman’s eighty men. Shannon D. Smith provides an introduction to this new edition.

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First published in 1910, Frances C. Carrington’s My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearney Massacre recounted the author’s adventures as an army wife on the Great Plains, but also sought to set the record straight on her second husband’s involvement in the Fetterman fight. Frances traveled with her first husband, Lt. George Washington Grummond, to Fort Phil Kearney in Wyoming in 1866 where he was killed in the Fetterman incident just a few months later. She eventually married the post commander, Col. Henry B. Carrington, after the death of his first wife, Margaret, who had befriended and cared for Frances during her brief, tragic episode at the frontier post.Frances’s narrative recalls the wonder and worries of a naive young bride during the fateful days of 1866. From her voyage to Wyoming to her encounters with unfamiliar peoples and strange landscapes, Frances’s vivid prose examines not only the everyday workings of a frontier army post but also the political and social intrigue behind one of the most controversial military defeats in Western history.

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Mari Sandoz, born on Mirage Flats, south of Hay Springs, Nebraska, on May 11, 1896, was the eldest daughter of Swiss immigrants. She experienced firsthand the difficulties and pleasures of the family’s remote plains existence and early on developed a strong desire to write. Her keen eye for detail combined with meticulous research enabled her to become one of the most valued authorities of her time on the history of the plains and the culture of Native Americans.Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz is the first volume of the Sandoz Studies series, a collection of thematically grouped essays that feature writing by and about Mari Sandoz and her work. When Sandoz wrote about the women she knew and studied, she did not shy away from drawing attention to the sacrifices, hardships, and disappointments they endured to forge a life in the harsh plains environment. But she also wrote about moments of joy, friendship, and—for some—a connection to the land that encouraged them to carry on. The scholarly essays and writings of Sandoz contained in this book help place her work into broader contexts, enriching our understanding of her as an author and as a woman deeply connected to the Sandhills of Nebraska.

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