The Frontiersmen Who Couldn't Shoot Straight

The Army Vs. The Pioneers, 1815-1845

By Gregory Michno, and Reviewed by Alexander M. Humes

Article published on: February 3, 2025 in the Winter 2025 Edition of Army History

Read Time: < 8 mins

By Gregory Michno
Caxton Press, 2020
Pp. iv, 368. $18.95

In his work on American pioneers between 1815 and 1845, Gregory Michno examines myths, particularly those related to White settlers and the Army. A scholar on the American West and warfare in that region, Michno presents an Army led by officers who increasingly were devotees of the Enlightenment and its principles, as opposed to the frontiersmen, who existed to obtain as much personal wealth as possible.

Michno’s central focus is to change the popular perception of frontiersmen as self-sufficient, virtuous citizens who cleared a wilderness for civilization. He writes that “while historians may have seen behind Oz’s curtain, the majority of Americans still cherish the smoke and mirrors” when it comes to their memory of settlers (4). Michno acknowledges that it appears he “only focused on the negative” but argues that “to swing the pendulum back toward the middle, the unflattering and scandalous need exposure” (6). Rather than structure his argument chronologically, Michno arranges it by theme. He dedicates each chapter to an area of pioneers’ actions, often where they did whatever was necessary to obtain land and wealth, including lying, stealing, and resorting to violence. Michno uses examples from the South and the North to show that these actions were not limited to a particular region.

Fraud is one of the major tools Michno claims frontiersmen used. They lied to gain lands or money. They also used force to achieve their goals. A militia force’s massacre in 1818 of a Chehaw village (an event Michno compares to the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre) is one of many instances of violence chronicled in support of his argu-ment that White civilians were responsible for most of the violence on the American frontier.

Michno also targets the myth of self-sufficiency, arguing that pioneers received federal financial support. Among his examples, Michno points to postearthquake relief in the 1810s, militia members being reimbursed for expenses while in the service, and relief for those affected by the War of 1812 and the Seminole Wars as proof of a long history of the federal government providing aid.

When Michno examines the U.S. Army, it is often in the role of those who sought to keep the peace but ultimately were powerless against the pioneers’ political power. Rather than judging the regulars as “a legion of Indian-killers,” he presents them as more professional and better soldiers than militia and volunteer units (6). He also shows a philosophical difference between the two groups. Although the Army of the 1810s initially followed local passions, including espousing a hatred of American Indians and sympathy “toward the frontiersmen,” the Whig-influenced regular officer corps became “more tolerant of the Indians’ dilemma and less patient with the aggressive frontier whites” by the mid-1820s (86). Popu-larly elected militia and volunteer officers represented the Romantic era and populism, two of the movements Michno believes ended the progress of the Enlightenment.

Michno portrays the Army as a force attempting to restrain White settlers and enforce federal laws and regulations regarding land use and American Indians. For most of the book’s first half, the Army interacted with the pioneers while trying to enforce federal laws, escorting American Indians during Indian removal, or during conflicts such as the Seminole Wars. As he writes about officer professionalization after the War of 1812, Michno touches on the same subject area as Samuel Watson, referencing his two-volume work on profes-sionalization. Michno traces the change in Army policy toward American Indians, but his focus remains on frontiersmen during this study.

Direct confrontation between the settlers and the Army occurs during the book’s second half. Officers and soldiers attempted to stop frontiersmen physically in some instances, often facing civil charges and lawsuits for their efforts. The largest example is late in the book when Michno chronicles filibustering (unauthorized military expedi-tions to seize territory) efforts in Canada and the Army’s efforts to stop cross-border movements.

Ultimately, as other works on Indian Removal and local-federal relations during Westward expansion argue, White settlers won because of their political power. In Michno’s argument, Army officers recog-nized they would receive no support from their superiors against criminal charges and lawsuits when they attempted to remove trespassers or forcibly stop pioneers who preyed on all persons in the area. Facing this lack of support, these officers made a conscious decision to stop enforcing federal rules. The influx of volunteer officers during the Mexican War and after led the Army to embody a racialized view of American Indians during the post–Civil War Indian Wars.

Michno concludes with an examination of how frontiersmen are remembered today. He points to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and instances within popular culture and the historical field in which such a point of view remained through the twentieth century to today. He examines whether the settlers’ violent nature continues to shape American society.

Michno joins other historians in tracing the development and changes to a profes-sional regular Army, though he focuses more on the pioneers’ actions, with the Army as a secondary character. The Frontiersmen Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight is best read alongside Samuel Watson, Robert Utley, Durwood Ball, Sherry Smith, and Robert Wooster, whose research on the military and the frontier analyzes military-settler relations in addition to military-Indian relations. The works of these historians address the Army’s attempts to control frontiersmen to varying degrees, with Wooster’s The American Military Frontiers and The United States Army and the Making of America having the greatest combination of timespan covered and focus on the Army as agents of federal power. Scholars have an opportunity to build on the work of Michno and these other historians with a monograph focused on the Army’s efforts to enforce federal laws on the White settler population between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Suggested readers for The Frontiersmen Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight include students of the development of the Army during west-ward expansion (especially between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War), officer inter-actions with and opinions of White pioneers and American Indians, Indian Removal, and the comparison between regular forces and militia and volunteers. As Michno’s primary focus in this work is addressing popular memory, The Frontiersmen Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight also would benefit those studying historical memory, why historical memories are formed collectively, and how they change over time.