Cavalry Heroes or Villains?
Military perceptions of the Cavalry, Sheridan, and the Indians
As the last sections have shown the conversation in the military about the Cavalry, Sheridan, and the Indians changed from 1863 to 1876. In the ANJ from 1863 to 1865 the Cavalry and Sheridan were being discussed frequently, often telling stories of their successes on the field and what changes need to be made to the Army and its use of cavalry. During this period the officers were recognizing that the cavalry of the West prior to the War and the Union cavalry of the Civil War needed to be improved and as they began to succeed, the work of Sheridan was associated with this as their commander. In the years following the war the ANJ articles focused on the Indians and showed how officer’s conversations shifted to the Native Americans. Sheridan and the cavalry were included in these conversations as Sheridan propelled to power during this time and the cavalry were deployed to the West to combat the Native Americans. By 1871 the articles and the works of Trobraind and Custer showed a shift in the conversation pertaining to the Indians. New perspectives and views began to immerge in the officer corps during this shift in the discussion of the Native Americans. The tools examine these changes in more detail and just how much these topics changed during this time.
In the tools below it is important to note that Trobraind's and Custer's works are much larger than the articles examined from the ANJ. The details for these documents can be seen in Figure 11: All Army Documents Summary which was first shown at the top of the Army Navy Journal 1863-1865 page. Trobraind's work contains over fifty thousand words and Custer's has over one hundred and sixty thousand words compared to the average twelve hundred words in the thirty three collective ANJ articles from 1863-1876. As such the data for most frequently used words will be skewed and reflective of Custer's and Trobraind's works with slight influences based on the ANJ articles. Keep this in mind when examining the tools below and how the results differ from the previous sections of analysis.
If any of the Voyant Tools below do not load, please click on the tool title to see an image file of the results, or go to the Sources page where all the visuals for this project are listed on the left hand side of your screen. Please take note that images of the Voyant tools are not interactive like the imbedded web tools.
Figure 28 shows how using this TermsBerry tool for all the Army documents examined in these sections creates a visual that not only shows the most frequently used terms but also how many documents these terms are used in. This is important because as previously stated the conversation in the military about these topics changed over time. While Indians and cavalry are the most frequently used word in this set of data, they don’t appear in all the documents. The term cavalry only appears in twenty six of the thirty five documents. Similarly the Indians appear over 1000 times total in the thirty five documents but are only in twenty one of them. The number of documents that these words don’t appear in shows how the conversation shifted from the cavalry to the Indians during this period of time. The Indians were not the focus of conversation during the Civil War years while the Cavalry was experiencing numerous changes and improvements throughout the war. Despite this shift in the conversation each of these terms still appear in the majority of the documents which shows how important they were in the military at this time. It is interesting to see in this tool how frequently other terms were used in these documents. While Custer and Trobraind increase the number of times a word is used in total, the TermsBerry shows how many documents that these other words are beng used in. Words that would be associated with a location like village, camp, and fort are not only used often but appear in the majority of documents. Where exactly these terms are appearing in this variety of documents is examined in the tool below.
Voyant describes how the Bubblelines tool works by saying: "Each document in the corpus is represented as a horizontal line and divided into segments of equal length (50 segments by default). Each selected word is represented as a bubble with the size of the bubble indicating the word’s frequency in the corresponding segment of text. The larger the bubble the more frequently the word occurs"(Voyant Guide Bubblelines).
Using the Bubblelines tool in Figure 29 allows the frequency of specific terms used in a variety of documents to be visualized. This tool uses the terms "Time", "Cavalry", "War", "Sheridan", and "Indians" appears in these documents. This visual shows where in each of these documents these terms appear via the line next to each document and at the end summarizes how many times each of these words are used. This shows if these terms are the focused of the discussion and used throughout these articles, or if they are just used in one instance, or if they are used sporadically. The documents are listed with the ANJ articles first by year and the works of Custer and Trobraind are at the end. Moving across each documents line shows which of the terms listed were used at various points in the article. Seeing the different colors on the lines also shows the relationship between these words. This shows how in the early documents when Sheridan is used the cavalry are used also. This changed over time in these articles as Sheridan began to appear less. This aspect of the Bubblelines tool shows the association between words and how that association changed over time. This tool compliments the data shown in the Termsberry above by showing where the frequently used words appear in these sources spatially and chronologically while including some of their relationship to each other. The next section shows how the cavalry were examining in more detail.
The Context tool for this set of data is shown in Figure 30 where the term "cavalry" is used shows in detail how the conversation about the cavalry changes over time in the U.S. Army officers corps. The term cavalry appears in twenty six of these thirty five documents a total of 516 times. Below all of these uses are listed in order of appearance and document title. The ANJ articles are organized by year to further show how this conversation was changing over time. Thematically there are years that focus on cavalry tactics and changes that are taking place or being recommended and there are periods where the cavalry actions in the field are the primary focus. In this shift can be seen that the officers are not focused on the way they should change the cavalry but how they are being used in the field. The way to care for these horses, train these soldiers, and who is leading them are common topics in the late 60s and early 70s. By the 70s the officer’s publications were showing how cavalry had become the tool to combat the Native Americans in the West and were crucial to military success. But in this change, the Indians began to become more prevalent in officers' discussions and began to replace cavalry as the focus of these articles.
Conclusion:
Officers and the Peaceful mission in the West
The changing view of the cavalry at this time is reflective of changes in the US military and the tactics used by them in the West. The discussion of the Indians amongst these officers is interesting because over time the conversation became more diverse than the discussion in newspapers. By the 1870s articles and books written by these officers show evidence that corroborates the work of Sherry Smith and further shows how the officers did not have constant negative interactions with and views of the Native Americans as is popularly believed. In reality officers did not have engrained hatred or actual desire to destroy the Native Americans but actually sought ways to find peaceful solutions to their conflict. The Army saw their mission in the West and that of the cavalry to be a peaceful one and recognized the danger that the plains presented to these men. Problems with the Native Americans were not black and white and a variety of efforts were made to communicate with them and resolve these problems in the forms of peace policies and the creation of reservations. While these were not always successful, and certainly did not take the desires of the various Native American populations into account, these efforts depict a different story of the Army's interactions with the Native Americans than that shown in the newspapers. The next section of the analysis focuses on how the Native Americans were depicted in the Newspapers.