Nebraska Book Award, Biography Honor
Most Americans familiar with General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing know
him as the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during
the latter days of World War I. But Pershing was in his late fifties by
then. Pershing's military career began in 1886, with his graduation from
West Point and his first assignments in the American West as a
horsebound cavalry officer during the final days of Apache resistance in
the Southwest, where Arizona and New Mexico still represented a frontier
of blue-clad soldiers, Native Americans, cowboys, rustlers, and miners.
But the Southwest was just the beginning of Pershing's West. He would
see assignments over the years in the Dakotas, during the Ghost Dance
uprising and the battle of Wounded Knee; a posting at Montana's Fort
Assiniboine; and, following his years in Asia, a return to the West with
a posting at the Presidio in San Francisco and a prolonged assignment on
the Mexican-American border in El Paso, which led to his command of the
Punitive Expedition, tasked with riding deep into Northern Mexico to
capture the pistolero Pancho Villa.
During those thirty years from West Point to the Western Front, Pershing
had a colorful and varied military career, including action during the
Spanish-American War and lengthy service in the Philippines. Both were
new versions of the American frontier abroad, even as the frontier days
of the American West were closing.
All of Pershing's experiences in the American West prepared him for his
ultimate assignment as the top American commander during the Great War.
If the American frontier and, more broadly, the American West provided a
cauldron in which Americans tested themselves during the nineteenth
century, they did the same for John Pershing. His story was a historical
Western.
