Autumn of the Black Snake
The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
The Forgotten Story of the Crucial Indian War That Led to the Creation of the U.S. Army
In Autumn of the Black Snake, William Hogeland presents the overlooked tale of how the newly independent United States found itself losing a military conflict on its borderlands in the years following the Revolutionary War. In 1791, a confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians inflicted the worst defeat the nation would ever suffer at native hands. With nearly one thousand U.S. casualties, this grisly event shocked Americans and convinced George Washington that the United States needed a standing army.
Hogeland conjures up the woodland battles and hardball politics that formed the Legion of the United States in evocative and absorbing prose. His memorable portraits of leaders on both sides, from the daring war chiefs Blue Jacket and Little Turtle to the doomed commander Richard Butler and a steely, even ruthless Washington, drive a tale of horrific violence, brilliant strategizing, stupendous blunders, and valorous deeds. Washington and Alexander Hamilton outmaneuver Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other skeptics of standing armies, appointing Anthony Wayne, known as Mad Anthony, to lead the legion. Wayne marches into the forests of the Old Northwest, where the Indians he is charged with defeating will bestow on him, with grudging admiration, a new name: the Black Snake.
Autumn of the Black Snake is a dramatic work of military and political history that offers an original interpretation of how greed, honor, political beliefs, and vivid personalities converged on the Ohio valley killing fields. There, the U.S. Army won its first victory, destroying the Indian coalition that came closer than any, before or since, to halting the nation's westward expansion.
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Writing with dual purposes in mind, historian Hogeland (Founding Finance) grippingly relates the battles over the Ohio Valley between the fledgling U.S. and a coalition of the Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware nations. Hogeland's principal aim is to relate the circumstances under which the fledging U.S. created a national army after the American Revolution in the face of deep apprehension about a standing military force. Well-known Revolutionary characters (Washington and Hamilton, for instance) fill Hogeland's pages; so too do colorful, little-known, and impressively skilled British military figures and Native Americans. Hogeland's second aim is to rescue an American general, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and his Native American adversaries from undeserved obscurity. In this he succeeds fully, though Wayne, Blue Jacket, and Little Turtle are unlikely to become household names. The story's outcome, ending in a treaty after the Army's victory in the critical 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers in Ohio, secured the Old Northwest for American settlers and accelerated the epochal, tragic eviction of native tribes from their original lands across the continent. Stuffed with detail, Hogeland's solid and distinctive book fills a significant gap in the narrative history of the United States. Maps.
