American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Among soldiers in America’s late-nineteenth-century frontier army there was virtually universal agreement that scouts were vital to the success of campaigns in Indian country. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, a veteran with thirty-three years’ experience on the frontier, publicly acknowledged the army’s dependence on reliable scouts. In his 1882 book Our Wild Indians, which General William T. Sherman recommended to the military student, Dodge expressed his representative views: The success of every expedition against Indians depends to a degree on the skill, fidelity and intelligence of the men employed as scouts for not only is the command habitually dependent on them for good routes and comfortable camps, but the officer in command must rely on them almost entirely for his knowledge of the position and movements of the enemy. These they learn by scouting far in advance or on the flanks of the column, and here the knowledge of trailing becomes of the utmost importance.