John Monnett

The native Kansan’s latest book, Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth, puts the December battle under the microscope and also examines the bigger picture—Red Cloud’s War. Monnett also wrote Tell Them We Are Going Home: The Odyssey of the Northern Cheyennes (2001), a moving account of that tribe’s flight from Indian Territory to their northern Plains homeland. His other works include Massacre at Cheyenne Hole: Lieutenant Austin Henely and the Sappa Creek Controversy (1999); Colorado Profiles: Men and Women Who Shaped the Centennial State (1996, with Michael McCarthy); The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867–1869 (1993); and A Rocky Mountain Christmas: Yuletide Stories of the West (1987). Monnett recently spoke with Wild West about his work.

‘Can Indian sources be biased? Of course. So can military records, in which some officers tried to put themselves and their commands in the best possible light in comparison to others’

Have you participated in excavations at Indian battle sites?
I am a historian by profession. I think it’s too strong to call myself even an amateur archaeologist. I have tagged along on several private property digs of stage stations on the Overland Trail that were important to the raiding years of the 1860s, as well as the site of Lieutenant Lyman Kidder’s demise in 1867 near Goodland, Kan., and the site of the Hungate Massacre, which caused some hysteria among Denver residents during the Indian war in Colorado in 1864. The only official state dig I have asked to participate in was years ago, when the state of Arizona archaeology department unearthed a grave alleged to be that of the outlaw John Ringo.

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How do you put together accounts of Indian war battles?
I am probably a bit unusual in the way I weave original source material into my writing. I write a lot on the military history of the resistance period, and I firmly believe that to do so properly a historian should not “choose sides,” or approach a body of research with preconceived sociopolitical conclusions. Certainly, Indian people have a responsibility to tell their side of American history and colonialism and even to decolonize their history, as many wish to do today. But virtually all antagonists in the Indian wars resided or intended to reside in the Americas. We are all Americans. Some of us simply have ancestors that were here long, long before others and suffered terribly at the hands of newcomers because of conflicting political and economic ambitions. Most of us, too, have at least some history or archaeological record of being “the invaders” at one time or another. Consequently, I feel all military history should be balanced, since military history usually involves two or more groups with different motives and ideologies that were at odds with one another to the point of war.

You often include Indian perspectives?
I feel it a must to include as many original Indian eyewitness testimonies as possible, and even a modicum of ethnohistory in a work to balance military and other Euro-American records. Of course, most original Indian testimony was given to white stenographers and interviewers, whose cultural lens filters may have overshadowed original intent at times. I am leery of secondary source Indian testimony, like latter-day oral traditions, that cannot be traced back to at least one or two original Indian sources.

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