Don Rickey, Jr. Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. xiv + 382 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95. ISBN: 0-8061-1113-5.
Few works have paid much attention to the enlisted men of the western frontier, mostly because the enlisted soldiers have left few records. Many of the books written regarding the Frontier Army have dealt with the army’s relationship with the region’s Indians, such as Robert Utley’s classics, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1890 (1984) and Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (1991). Others, as in the case of Francis Paul Paucha’s The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 (1969) and Michael Tate’s The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West (1995), have dealt with the army’s policies and role in the settlement and development of the West. Don Rickey, Jr. offers one of the few written accounts of the common soldier in the Frontier Army with his book, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars.
Contrary to the title, which happens to come from a popular song of the soldiers (p. 189), Rickey’s monograph is not a history of the Indian Wars but a study of the rank and file who served through the Indian campaigns in the West. He writes of how through “their labors, endurance, and combats the western regular created the framework of law and order that made settlement and social development possible” (p. v). It was these enlisted soldiers who were given the arduous task of removing any Indian barriers from western lands for development and economic exploitation “without receiving even crumbs of recognition or appreciation in the doing” (p. 351). Rickey brings to light the often forgotten efforts of the enlisted men of the regular army during the Indian Wars from 1865 to the 1890s....