Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2002
Abstract
Most students of Western history know something about the Bozeman Trail, the 1860s-era cut-off from the Platte River trails bisecting the Powder River Basin before heading toward the Montana goldfields. Usually the Bozeman's story enters our consciousness in the context of the Northern Plains Indian Wars-Red's Cloud's War and the Sioux War of 1876. This outstanding two-volume collection of diaries and memoirs reminds us, however, that the Bozeman was an emigrant pathway before it became a hotly contested military road. Susan Badger Doyle's painstaking efforts to locate, research, and edit these documents reasserts the role played by the ambitions of civilians to travel across and exploit every patch of the West, Indian interests and federal treaties be damned. That this trail represented trespass, from the point of view of Indian occupants and the Treaty of 1851, mattered not at all. Eventually that trespass sparked war and ended emigrant travel after 1866.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.