The military history of the American West has captivated audiences ever since Lewis and Clark returned from the Pacific to publish their journals in 1810. The work of many professional scholars in the years since has covered conflict along the Missouri River in 1823, encounters along the trails west, and the Mexican and Civil Wars, but perhaps no two events have attracted more attention than the Great Sioux War of 1876 and the ensuing conflict with the Nez Perce the next year. The two books under consideration here add to that history in several different ways. Both books offer newcomers to the field of Western military history good reading and a mostly fair treatment of the individuals involved in these well-known stories while also providing historians with some new points to consider. Sharfstein is known as a master of biography, and his study of over six hundred pages proves this point. He focuses mainly on Oliver Otis Howard, a fascinating military figure of both the Civil War and the West, and on Chief Joseph, a Nez Perce political leader who helped engineer his people’s famous flight across the northwest. Often called the bible-thumping general, Howard lost an arm in the war and stuffed a bible under the stump as he paraded here and there. Howard is also considered a reformer who first worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau and later tried his best to bring peace to the west; he was a strong advocate of Grant’s Peace Policy, as Sharfstein points out on numerous occasions. Howard’s assignment to the Department of Columbia in the 1870s is where the story begins, with the general trying to sort out the confusing circumstances regarding the Nez Perce Treaty of 1863, which created a reservation but also left a large segment of the tribe (known as the non-Treaty

中文翻译：

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军事历史在“西方”中生机勃勃

自 1810 年刘易斯和克拉克从太平洋返回并出版他们的期刊以来，美国西部的军事历史一直吸引着观众。自那以后，许多专业学者的工作涵盖了 1823 年密苏里河沿岸的冲突，沿途的遭遇西部，以及墨西哥和内战，但也许没有哪两件事比 1876 年的苏族战争和随后发生的与内兹珀斯人的冲突更受关注。这里考虑的两本书以几种不同的方式增加了这段历史。这两本书都为西方军事史领域的新人提供了良好的阅读和对这些著名故事中涉及的个人的大致公平待遇，同时也为历史学家提供了一些新的考虑点。沙夫斯坦被誉为传记大师，他对六百多页的研究证明了这一点。他主要关注奥利弗·奥蒂斯·霍华德（Oliver Otis Howard），他是内战和西方的迷人军事人物，以及约瑟夫酋长，内兹珀斯人的政治领袖，帮助设计了他的人民著名的穿越西北的飞行。霍华德通常被称为“圣经重击将军”，他在战争中失去了一只手臂，并在到处游行时在树桩下塞了一本圣经。霍华德也被认为是一位改革者，他首先为自由民局工作，后来竭尽全力为西部带来和平；正如沙夫斯坦多次指出的那样，他是格兰特和平政策的坚定拥护者。霍华德在 1870 年代被分配到哥伦比亚部是故事的开始，将军试图理清有关 1863 年内兹珀斯条约的混乱情况，