William Hogeland's Autumn of the Black Snake presents forgotten
story of how the U.S. Army was created to fight a crucial Indian war.
When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the newly independent United
States savored its victory and hoped for a great future. And yet the
republic soon found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its
borderlands. In 1791, years of skirmishes, raids, and quagmire climaxed
in the grisly defeat of American militiamen by a brilliantly organized
confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians. With nearly one
thousand U.S. casualties, this was the worst defeat the nation would
ever suffer at native hands. Americans were shocked, perhaps none more
so than their commander in chief, George Washington, who saw in the
debacle an urgent lesson: the United States needed an army.
Autumn of the Black Snake tells the overlooked story of how Washington
achieved his aim. In evocative and absorbing prose, William Hogeland
conjures up the woodland battles and the hardball politics that formed
the Legion of the United States, our first true standing army. His
memorable portraits of leaders on both sides--from the daring war chiefs
Blue Jacket and Little Turtle to the doomed commander Richard Butler and
a steely, even ruthless Washington--drive a tale of horrific violence,
brilliant strategizing, stupendous blunders, and valorous deeds. This
sweeping account, at once exciting and dark, builds to a crescendo as
Washington and Alexander Hamilton, at enormous risk, outmaneuver Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, and other skeptics of standing armies--and
Washington appoints the seemingly disreputable Anthony Wayne, known as
Mad Anthony, to lead the legion. Wayne marches into the forests of the
Old Northwest, where the very Indians he is charged with defeating will
bestow on him, with grudging admiration, a new name: the Black Snake.
Autumn of the Black Snake is a dramatic work of military and political
history, told in a colorful, sometimes startling blow-by-blow narrative.
It is also an original interpretation of how greed, honor, political
beliefs, and vivid personalities converged on the killing fields of the
Ohio valley, where the United States Army would win its first victory,
and in so doing destroy the coalition of Indians who came closer than
any, before or since, to halting the nation's westward expansion.
