Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay

2 Pages 496 Words

Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars is a book written by Don Rickey. It provides a detailed account of the US Army after the Civil War. The American Army was active and in force after the Civil War clearing the West of Native Americans.
It was a hard life, but one was hunted not only by people without hope, but also by educated people and sometimes the rich looking for adventure. The book is broken down into logical chapters, from a description of the Western troubles to the typical routines of the soldiers’ discharges. Readers are treated to what might be some of the last comprehensive interviews with Indian War veterans and, as has been pointed out, begin to get a feel of the frontier soldier’s daily life as 99 percent tedium and physical labor and 1 percent terror.
The attention has been turned on the enlisted man of the regular army during Indian Wars in the West from 1865 to the 1890s. In addition to examining manuscript and printed diaries, government records, and newspapers, the author was able to consult over 300 living veterans of the Indian Wars, and to obtain information from them by questionnaires and personal interviews. These unique sources have contributed to the compound view of the regular enlisted man who by securing the West during this frenzied period of expansion made a significant contribution to the development of the nation. The life of an average Army recruit has been very well studied and then portrayed in this book. The common soldier emerges as an individual and not a stereotype.
As a reader, I enjoyed this book for the wealth and detail of information it conveyed. However, the author’s writing style made this book very difficult to read and decipher. It was something of a labor to wade though the pages of extraordinarily excruciating details. An abridged version can be a better option. It picks up from the end of the Civil War and leads you straight i...