ABSTRACT
Although they frequently found themselves at odds with the Indian policies of their governments, the officers and men of the Indian fighting armies of North America had little choice but to accept them as the parameters within which they operated in the field. In both Canada and the United States, civilian control of the military was never seriously contested during the nineteenth century, which meant that military conduct toward Indians was ultimately determined by lawmakers and administrators in the national capitals, not by the men on the spot. This relationship differed considerably from that which obtained between soldiers and their civilian masters in the European colonial wars, particularly those of France in West Africa. There, it was often the ‘man on the spot’, the colonial officer, who had the upper hand, employing a mixture of provocation and appeals to national pride to initiate wars of conquest. This should not be taken to mean that there were no great issues of disagreement between US army officers, for example, and officials in Washington. One such issue was the incessant demand of the soldiers for authority over the reservations on which they had placed the various Indian tribes. Officers such as generals Nelson Miles and George Crook – who could agree on nothing else – repeatedly complained that the Indian Bureau officials of the Department of the Interior were either too inept or corrupt to manage reservation Indians.
