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Following the Indian Wars, The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners. By Oliver Knight. (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1960, xv + 348 pp., $5.95) The definitive history of the period known in Western history as the Indian Wars, 1866-1891, is still unwritten, despite the valuable efforts of such scholars as Paul Welliman to give us surveys of the whole ground. Scattered in letters, journals, reminiscences, government documents, and newspaper files from New York to California, the data are immense and so overlaid with legend as to present extraordinarily complex problems to the conscientious scholar. Mr. Knight's book goes a long way toward a solution, for it really offers an objective analysis of one large segment of the evidence — the newspaper stories written by the reporters who rode along on many of the campaigns. In most instances these "war" correspondents were participants rather than eyewitnesses, and they were therefore at once more immediate and more restricted in their accounts than their modern descendants. Sometimes they shared the commander's inmost counsels; sometimes their coverage was so critical of his strategy that he would have nothing to do with them. Oddly, secrecy was so unimportant in this struggle with an enemy who cared little for such civilized fripperies as the printed page that the correspondents often commented on battle plans with impunity. Pens were laid aside for pistols and rifles when actual combat
