Campaign Clothing: Field Uniforms of the Indian War Army 1866-1871 (Collector's Guide to Military Uniforms)

Hollywood has given us the image of the American soldier in the Western Plains from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the closing of the frontier at the turn of the century as a heroic figure clad in immaculately tailored blue trousers with a yellow stripe down the leg, a variety of lighter blue shirts, white hats and big yellow bandanas. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the years following the Civil War, rarely were more than half the 35,000 man Army stationed west of the Mississippi River at one time. And these few soldiers were scattered among a series of primitive forts and posts from Texas to California, from Montana to Arizona. They were ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-equipped and ill-clothed.

Millions of uniforms had been manufactured for use by Union troops between 1861 and 1865, all designed for the conditions of terrain, weather and climate found on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Troops sent to the Rocky mountain regions or the deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada wore these same uniforms, and suffered from heat in the summer and cold in the winter. Only gradually, as the nation recovered from the war and the series of devastating economic recessions and depressions that occurred in the latter half of the century, did equipment, housing and uniforms improve.

Lee A. Rutledge has done a masterful job in describing and illustrating the Army uniforms of the "Indian War" period. He compares what the regulations required to what the troops actually wore when in the field and not on garrison duty at some civilized Eastern post. He traces the evolution of the uniform from the Civil War to 1871, the point at which the Quartermaster Department began to realize that the previous uniform was unsuitable for use on the frontier. Rutledge shows how the infantry doughboy and cavalry trooper modified their "Eastern-style" uniforms with judicious changes and civilian clothing into something useful and useable.