Review - "They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory" by Michael Manning

[They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory by Michael J. Manning (Prairie Star Music & Pub, 2025). Hardcover, maps, photos, chapter notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:564/586. ISBN:979-8-9997957-1-7. $49.95]

When addressing a reading audience interested in the lesser-known parts of the Civil War fought west of the Mississippi River, it is worthwhile to never lose an opportunity to sing the praises of Mary Jane Warde's award-winning When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (2013) and recommend it as the best single-volume treatment of its subject. Nevertheless, with her book's broad approach directing roughly equal focus and attention toward the conflict's political, social, and military aspects, Warde's campaign and battle coverage necessarily lacks the depth of detail that a more specialized study can offer. Providing just that is Michael Manning's They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory, which documents the area's collection of 1861-65 skirmishes, battles, and campaigns in a comprehensive fashion not found anywhere else in the literature. Readers might recall Manning's earlier exploration of this topic in two issues of Blue & Gray Magazine published in 2011 and 2015, the limitations of the periodical format in terms of available examination space being obvious. While some of that previously published material makes its way into this work, the new approach to the subject found in They Fought Like Veterans exhibits a marked overall increase in depth and breadth. Indeed, the volume's double-column narrative, numerous accompanying maps, and front/back matter together fill nearly six hundred 8.5"x11" pages.

While military events tower above all other topics of discussion in the book, there is ample social and political background history explaining the forces that drove the many internecine tribal conflicts that emerged in Indian Territory during the secession period and Civil War years. It has been well established in the literature that the bitterest internal divisions within the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Creek/Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole) of Indian Territory were rooted decades earlier in unresolved animosities that developed between pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions (i.e. those who adamantly opposed removal during the 1820s and 1830s and those who reluctantly adopted the path of pragmatic acceptance). Especially among the Cherokees and Creeks, those differences directly impacted the ways in which the various tribes responded to southern secession. Heavily lobbied by Confederate representatives wielding big promises of support, each tribe had to decided for itself whether to maintain treaty ties with the U.S. (which created widespread mistrust by evacuating all of its military posts in the territory) or forge new ones with the nascent Confederacy. All of that background is explored at some length in the book's first three chapters. At the opposite end of the volume, a final chapter summarizes the Reconstruction-era struggles experienced by all the tribes, regardless of wartime loyalties, who had to both rebuild after the war's mass destruction and negotiate new treaties with the restored United States.

In terms of presentation style, the text melds author narrative with extensive block quotes from O.R. reports and a host of other government documents and firsthand accounts. In addition to referencing those government sources, chapter notes and bibliography cite Oklahoma and Kansas manuscript collections, published primary sources of various types, newspaper articles, and the secondary literature. Often full-page in size, military maps number in the many dozens and feature tactical and operational-scale movements and unit positions superimposed upon modern topographical maps. The breadth of map coverage is atlas level in scope. This is a big deal due to map numbers and quality being persistent weaknesses across the Civil War in Indian Territory literature. In many cases, the maps created by Manning are notable improvements upon the best examples found in other publications or are the first of their kind. The most sparsely detailed ones are likely the consequence of inescapable source limitations. Photographs are similarly plentiful in number and feature both archival images and the author's own battlefield photography. On the less positive front, the finished manuscript does exhibit a number of drawbacks common to self-publishing, among them frequent name misspellings and inconsistent rank designations.

In addition to covering many smaller-scale skirmishes and raids, the book offers detailed accounts of all of the major military campaigns fought inside the borders of Indian Territory, among them the battles associated with Opothleyahola's flight to Kansas, the Union Army's First and Second Indian Expeditions, the Battle of Old Fort Wayne, First and Second Cabin Creek, the Battle of Honey Springs, and the 1864 Phillips Expedition and its Battle of Middle Boggy. With Indian Territory situated as a strategic buffer between Union Kansas and Confederate Texas as well as being in close proximity to the Missouri-Kansas border war and the fighting in NW Arkansas, Indians units and other forces stationed in the territory were heavily involved in major and minor campaigns conducted along the periphery. With emphasis on Indian unit participation, Manning also covers those campaigns—which include Pea Ridge, Cane Hill/Prairie Grove, the 1863 Union capture of Fort Smith, and the 1864 Camden Expedition—at appropriate depth.

Manning's comparison of Union and Confederate Indian regiments raised for service in the territory flatters the former far more than the latter. The three (First through Third) Indian Home Guard regiments raised for federal service were better armed, equipped, and clothed than their Confederate Indian counterparts, whose own military upkeep was routinely low priority, but factors behind their success went deeper than just material support. Confederate Indian units operating inside Indian Territory were frequently bolstered by Texas (and sometimes Arkansas) cavalry, but Manning's campaign accounts clearly show that the Indian Home Guard regiments consistently exhibited stronger unit cohesion, were better integrated in the order of battle, and enjoyed far stronger artillery support. On the Confederate side, too many Indian officers and men came and went as they pleased, leaving their forces chronically scattered and understrength when the critical moment of doing battle arose. Of course, some of that could be blamed on poor top leadership (ex. from generals Albert Pike and Douglas Cooper), but it does seem to be the case that the Union Indian regiments more successfully adapted their own martial cultures to what would have been to them alien structures of military organization and discipline.

In keeping with the July 17, 1863 Battle of Honey Springs being widely recognized as the most significant battle fought in Indian Territory during the war, the campaign and its aftermath are accorded extensive coverage. In describing the battle and explaining Confederate defeat, Manning addresses some of the same issues and concerns raised in William Lees's recently published archaeological study. Both authors note the imbalanced concentration of fighting in the center, but, while Lees suggests that Confederate commander Douglas Cooper's leadership deficiencies were primarily responsible for the Indian units on either flank not getting into the action in any meaningful way, Manning sees the problem as being with the poor fighting and leadership qualities of the Indian units themselves (much of the blame for that being due to unfulfilled promises and neglect from the Confederate government). Like Lees, Manning credits clear superiority in Union firepower and the possibility of poorly manufactured/weather ruined powder on the Confederate side as being major contributors to Union victory and Confederate defeat. Manning's analysis follows the established narrative of marking Honey Springs as a significant turning point in Confederate prospects for success in Indian Territory, but he also sees it as coinciding with downsized Union aims. After the demoralizing defeat, Confederate forces inside the territory assumed a largely defensive posture punctuated by occasional mounted raids against Union supply lines. On the other side, the Federals abandoned grandiose plans of using victories in Indian Territory as a springboard for launching offensives into North Texas. Instead, after the occupation of Fort Smith, Arkansas in September 1863 secured the eastern flank of Union occupation forces in Indian Territory, resettlement of tribal refugees to their formerly abandoned homes and maintaining supply and communications with key military posts such as Fort Gibson were prioritized.

Manning is not the only writer to characterize the guerrilla war in Indian Territory as being perhaps the most destructive produced during the war, rivaling the worse excesses in Missouri. The brunt of that mass-scale horse theft, crop losses, livestock rustling, and homestead destruction was concentrated in the northeastern corner of the territory, in the Cherokee and Creek domains. What isn't clearly documented is which bushwhacker-style guerrilla chieftains and bands operated in Indian Territory. Manning blames some of the chaos on Cherokee leader Stand Watie's raiding, but Watie and his men were not guerrillas. Perhaps the source material is too sparse to support such a project, but a truly full study of the guerrilla war in Indian Territory and its impact is sorely needed. What does seem clear is that the relative safety of the Choctaw and Chickasaw home fronts strongly contributed to those tribes maintaining consistent, and largely unified, popular support for the Confederate war effort up until the conflict's waning moments.

Throughout the book, Manning compares the quality of high command leadership demonstrated by both sides, mostly finding the administrative, planning, and fighting capacities of Union generals, particularly James G. Blunt and Samuel R. Curtis, far superior to the string of Confederate commanders that led combined white and Indian forces. The author maintains that Union commanders were generally better able to concentrate their forces at decisive moments, that contention supported by numerous examples of Confederate forces (even when possessing superior overall numbers in the territory) being caught scattered when forced to give battle. Manning is among those who hold General Blunt in high regard for his aggressiveness and military leadership. Unlike historian William Shea, a deep admirer and biographer of Curtis but who has also closely studied Blunt's career, Manning believes Blunt was destined for greater responsibilities (perhaps even departmental command) before his career was derailed (unfairly, in Manning's opinion) by the Baxter Springs debacle of October 1863. Manning's characterization of John Schofield as a petty schemer and intraservice squabbler will be familiar to most Trans-Mississippi Civil War readers but perhaps less so to those primarily acquainted with Schofield's later 1864-65 army command performances in Georgia and Tennessee.

Easily the most comprehensive military history and map study of the Civil War in Indian Territory, Michael Manning's They Fought Like Veterans successfully bridges a longstanding gap in the literature. Recommended.