Book News: "They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory"

When it comes to titles covering Civil War in Indian Territory topics, it is rare enough to get one fresh release in any given month, but getting two puts us in a Halley's Comet realm of frequency. We've already mentioned William Lees's Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield on the site, but another intriguing September '25 study just turned up in Michael J. Manning's They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory.

A pair of survey histories of the Civil War in Indian Territory have been published fairly recently, Mary Jane Warde's When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (2013) and Clint Crowe's Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (2019), but neither of those fine books goes into much depth in their coverages of the various campaigns and battles fought within the borders of today's Oklahoma. It's too bad we can't get a good sample of the main text, but a look at Manning's table of contents (which can be found by clicking the "Read sample" box at the page linked above in bold) looks promising.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of what we do get with Civil War in Indian Territory book publishing has been, to put it kindly, amateurish in nature, but there are good reasons to place our trust in Manning. He spent over three decades with the National Park Service, retiring as chief ranger at Fort Donelson NB. Sharp readers might also recall that he's the author of the Blue & Gray magazine two-part series featuring the Civil War years in Indian Territory. Indeed, portions of this book were previously published in those 2011 and 2015 issues. The main narrative of this book is over 550 8.5"x11" pages, so it's pretty clear that this is not a rehash of the B&G material but something much more detailed in nature.