Douglas McChristian's Regular Army O! represents what must be a labor of love. As the bibliography indicates, nobody has sought out the tales of enlisted men serving in the trans-Mississippi West with such vigor, and nobody has sought to provide such a comprehensive overview of service in the army during the post-Civil War era. Those unfamiliar with the U.S. Army during the Indian Wars will find much here surprising, not least of which is McChristian's success at finding the veritable subaltern voice. While it is often assumed that ordinary soldiers in the late nineteenth century left behind few traces of their lives or service, the hundreds of soldier accounts found by McChristian and listed in Appendix D puncture that belief (615–24). This proves to be both a blessing and a curse: a primary source base so expansive presents a number of challenges for any author as the evidence contained within covers disparate units, regions, and years. Sometimes, McChristian overcomes these difficulties; at other times, the narrative challenge proves too much, leaving readers anxious for relief.

The intellectual genesis of Regular Army O! can be traced to Don Rickey, Jr.’s innovative and influential Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, first published in 1963.Footnote ¹ Like's Rickey's volume, Regular Army O! derives its chapter organization from the basic elements of military service, from first enlistment to enlistment's end, though McChristian's seventeen chapters do not line up precisely with Rickey's fifteen. If one has both volumes at hand, a central issue can be readily discerned: Why spend nearly 600 pages to recapitulate the parameters of Rickey's 350-page project? McChristian can rely on more and better primary and secondary sources, but the overlap between the two studies regularly proves frustrating. One wonders what the book would have looked like had the author built off the foundation laid by Rickey and expanded by scholars who have followed in his wake, only developing new and significant findings. As it is, the narrative is overwhelmed by the repetition of material—often not just between Regular Army O! and Forty Miles a Day, but also between chapters in the former—familiar to those who study this particular army. Here, the lack of analytical topic sentences in many paragraphs is a giveaway. Not only does this tendency lend a list-like quality to Regular Army O!, but it also does little to advance the scholarly conversation.

The author's quest to reprise Rickey's study, moreover, is defined in a somewhat jarring manner: “I have consciously strived to avoid imposing myself or modern societal norms on the treatment of these men,” McChristian writes. “To judge them by any measure other than the conditions and standards of their own time would be an injustice” (xvi). Leaving aside the larger methodological points—that fully absorbing the conditions and standards of the late nineteenth century is impossible; that the objective historian, a simple chronicler of the times, is a chimera; and that we are innately influenced by our times in a way that creates irrevocable distance between ourselves and our subjects—there is much to critique here from the particular perspective of the nineteenth century. First, “the treatment of these men” occasioned vigorous debate not only within the period army but without. Finding civilians and soldiers who regarded the army's system of, say, feeding its soldiers, disciplining them, or training them as ill-considered, out-of-step with the times, or ineffective is not difficult, something demonstrated long ago by Jack Foner and Charles Kemble, whose studies on Gilded Age army life and reforms and the image of the army officer in American history came out in the early 1970s, shortly after the publication of Rickey's book. McChristian's judgement that “Many deserted, yet the good ones stayed,” perhaps reveals his own biases toward the subject of army life (597). Second, the emphasis on contemporary “conditions and standards” is, in this volume, a strawman, as McChristian has done little to situate his research within the vibrant social, cultural, and political histories that comprise the scholarly conversations about Gilded Age America, the trans-Mississippi West, or the study of War and Society in American history writ large. (To give but one example, the discussion of civilian perceptions of the army on page 71 would have been improved had the author integrated the recent work of Ricardo Herrera and Andrew Lang.) It also ignores several important studies of the frontier army and its (internal and external) conflicts—Elliott West's The Last Indian War, Thomas Dunlay's Wolves for the Blue Soldiers, Robert Wooster's American Military Frontiers, Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn, James Leiker's Racial Borders, Charles Kenner's Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry: Black and White Together, Charles Robinson's The Fall of a Black Army Officer, Janne Lahti's Cultural Constructions of Empire, and Jeffrey Ostler's The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism do not appear in the bibliography, for example.Footnote ²

In terms of McChristian's specific analysis, a few notes of caution might be sounded. This reviewer found the amount of information concerning military training and combat to be excessive in a treatment of an institution that had no equivalent of basic training, paid little attention to marksmanship until the 1880s, did not engage in regimental maneuvers until the end of the period, and suffered no combat losses in many years. When it comes to the soldiers themselves, by merging white and black enlistments, McChristian produces the misleading impression that foreign-born soldiers were less important in the army than they actually were. It is not entirely clear why McChristian does this, just as it is not entirely clear why his reading of the Army and Navy Journal did not make him more wary about a cavalry captain's claim that most of the men recruited in New York City in 1883 were native born. The week after that captain's claim appeared in the Army and Navy Journal, that same publication published official statistics concerning 1883 cavalry recruitment in New York City that showed that only about 40 percent of said recruits were native born.Footnote ³ At other points, the citations are problematic, as lengthy paragraphs about army policies and practice appear without footnotes. In other instances, McChristian relies upon a single example to make a broad claim about army life (see, for example, the lack of citations regarding drill norms (198), as well as for the claim that “a high percentage” of enlistees immediately after the Civil War “specifically requested assignment to the cavalry, thereby obtaining free transportation to the frontier” (403)).

By the end of the book, readers may well have the odd sense that there is both too much and too little here. McChristian is well aware that the tradition-bound post-Civil War army was not a static institution, but the focus on the minutiae of the army's internal workings means that its external connections and importance are obscured. Thus, one's reaction to Regular Army O! is likely to hew to one's interest in the topic. Educated lay readers will receive detailed introductions to the U.S. Army as an institution and the personalities, particularly from the enlisted ranks, who peopled it. Graduate students interested in working on the nineteenth-century army, or Western history more broadly, will find its comprehensive overview and wonderful bibliography useful. Historians seeking to integrate the post-Civil War army into a larger research project will probably find it difficult to use, as its length does not permit a quick reading, and one can drown in details. Finally, the relative handful of scholars devoted to the professional study of the U.S. Army in the West will find some topics presented in a new and clearer light, and they will encounter some new voices but may well have a lot to quibble with concerning the book's analytical approach and specific arguments.