Scouting for the Bluecoats: Navajos, Apaches, and the U.S. Military, 1873–1911 by Robert S. McPherson (review)

Reviewed by: Scouting for the Bluecoats: Navajos, Apaches, and the U. S. Military, 1873–1911 by Robert S. McPherson Ryan W. Booth (bio) Scouting for the Bluecoats: Navajos, Apaches, and the U. S. Military, 1873–1911. By Robert S. McPherson. (Self-published, 2022. Reprint, Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2023. Pp. 248. Paper, 24. 99. ) Robert McPherson's self-published book proves an important point—it should be taken seriously by academics and anyone interested in Navajo history. Few scholars have taken the leap to explore the role that Navajo scouts played in the larger nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conflicts in the American Southwest. As the author points out, the World War II Navajo code talkers have stolen the show. Nineteenth-century End Page 403 scholars focus almost exclusively on the Apache scouts, but the Navajo scouts provided just as much support to the U. S. Army as it attempted to either assimilate or "pacify" Native people in the U. S. West. McPherson supports this contention with some compelling evidence. Navajos fought for a variety of reasons. Their service as scouts was only a small portion of their whole cosmology about warfare. The U. S. Army provided them an important lifeline in a time of constant upheavals. It did not hurt that the army paid them to locate and kill members of tribes toward which they had preexisting animosities. It was easy money in a boom-and-bust nineteenth-century economy with few opportunities for Native communities to thrive. The trouble came in the 1880s and afterward when Navajos began policing and scouting their own. As scouts slipped between acting as U. S. Army constables and Indian police forces, they began to experience more conflict within their own communities. By the late nineteenth century, the hour was too late for the Navajo scouts to extricate themselves from the federal government. This point is well worth more study by scholars of the Civil War era owing to the supposed Reconstruction constraints on the military brought by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits federal troops from serving as civil law enforcement. Tribal reservations seemed to be an exception to this rule, which the scouts exemplified repeatedly. Most authors also see the U. S. Indian Scouts and U. S. Indian Police as distinct units, but McPherson wisely sees them as intermixed and more complicated. McPherson orients his book toward telling the Navajo perspective of being a U. S. Indian Scout. He primarily does so by using long, block quotations to let Navajo voices tell their own stories. While I would never let an undergraduate do this, I think McPherson is skillfully engaging in Indigenous epistemology and methodology. He lets Native people speak for themselves and without much side commentary, which is a stroke of genius. Chapters 6 and 9 are the best examples of this approach and are a gold mine for scholars. McPherson uses block quotations in chapter 6 to let the scouts' oral histories unfold in their own time and manner. The reader can take what they want from these stories and leave the rest. Scholars who may be unfamiliar with Indigenous history may not realize how rare these texts are; by unearthing them, we can finally hear them. Many of the scouts struggled with English proficiency and left few records behind, so these early twentieth-century oral histories provide rich and important details about their service that have been missing. Chapter 9 delves into the other End Page 404 source for recording their voices: their testimonies to receive federal pensions for their military service. The trouble with these sources is often what they do not say. The sources present military service as only good and honorable. Few veterans want to discuss the boredom, drudgery, or the occasional despicable acts in war. McPherson probes the stories and does find some indications of acts beyond the heroic narratives. For example, he relates a story from Hosteen Cly about the killing of innocent women taken captive. While this is the most extreme example of violence, McPherson adds in other more mundane details. He notes that Navajo scouts often abandoned their uniforms when out in the field because they found the. . .