Tim McNeese - Time in the Wilderness: The Formative Years of John Black Jack Pershing in the American West

Tim McNeese is a fine storyteller. He describes and effectively integrates in detail the environments, conditions, and people who populate this book. The depth and breadth of Pershings experiences are truly monumental in American history. McNeeses book brings many of these significant events and details to life.

Bernard R. McCoy, writer and producer of the award-winning documentary Black Jack Pershing: Love and War

Tim McNeese has done a superb job synthesizing secondary books and articles on Pershing, as well as published primary sources. His writing is gripping, with great descriptions of people and places. McNeese has written a very readable and well-constructed book on an important... figure in military history.

Mitchell Yockelson, author of Forty-Seven Days: How Pershings Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I

Tim McNeese

Potomac Books

An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press

2021 by Tim McNeese

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC , LC-USZ 62-17939.

Portions of the book previously appeared in Tim McNeese, John J. Pershing, 2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, an imprint of Infobase; and Tim McNeese, The Gilded Age and Progressivism, 18911913, 2010 by Chelsea House Publishers, an imprint of Infobase. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

All rights reserved. Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McNeese, Tim, author.

Title: Time in the wilderness: the formative years of John Black Jack Pershing in the American West / Tim McNeese.

Other titles: Formative years of John Black Jack Pershing in the American West

Description: Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021009497

ISBN 9781640124066 (hardback)

ISBN 9781640124950 (epub)

ISBN 9781640124967 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Pershing, John J. (John Joseph), 18601948. | Indians of North AmericaWars18661895. | Spanish-American War, 1898CampaignsCuba. | PhilippinesHistory18981946. | United States. ArmyHistoryPunitive Expedition into Mexico, 1916. | GeneralsUnited StatesBiography. | United States. ArmyBiography. | BISAC : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Southwest ( AZ , NM , OK , TX )

Classification: LCC E 181. P 495 M 36 2021 | DDC 355.0092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009497

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Beverly, who read every word

and whose opinion matters most

Accessing its rims is elementary, the challenge nonexistent. Today, millions of Americans and tourists from around the world visit Arizonas Grand Canyon, the geological jewel of the American Southwest. Modern highways and airports provide easy, comfortable access to the various rims of the vast chasm. But during the late nineteenth century, more than twenty years before President Theodore Roosevelt declared this leg of the rock-red Colorado River and the deep sandstone mega cut it carved over eons of time a national monument, a stalwart, if naive, pair of young U.S. cavalrymen attempted a visit that nearly ended in tragedy. Save for the kindness of strangers and a large dose of luck, this pair of blue-clad second lieutenants might have perished, their lives cut short and their bones left to bleach anonymously on some lonesome malpais outcropping in a desert they had misjudged. And the implications could have had a profound effect on U.S. history.

In June 1889 twenty-eight-year-old John Joseph Pershing and his comrade in arms John Miller Stotsenburg, age thirty, set out on a journey across the high Great Basin Desert fraught with peril they did not foresee. Pershing, born in Missouri, had called the American Southwest his professional home following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1886. Stotsenburg, an Indiana Hoosier, had graduated five years earlier from the military academy and had seen service at remote fort assignments in both New Mexico and Arizona. The two junior officers were not new to the frontier realities of the Southwest that summer when they finally decided to take the trip they had talked about for some timea visit to one of the most exotic, sublime, and remote places on Earth. But they soon discovered the desert logistics involved in crossing this particular bit of frontier backcountry were much more complex than they thought.

They did not head off into the wilderness without some element of planning, however. Having spent a handful of years stationed at a string of federal army posts planted in this barren land as monitoring stations to keep watch on the regions various Indian nations, Pershing and Stotsenburg had a grudging respect for the desert and its challenges. They began their five-hundred-mile trip at Arizonas Fort Defiance, located on the southern perimeter of the Navajo Indian Reservation, a desert outpost that hugged the Arizona side of the border it shared with New Mexico. From there, with compasses in hand and a rudimentary knowledge of how to identify trails in remote places, the mens journey represented largely a straight arrow shot westward to a destination along the south rim of the canyona lonely log cabin occupied by the first Anglo-American to make his home on the edges of the Grand Canyon, a muleteer and part-time asbestos miner named John Hance.

From the relative safety of Fort Defiance, the second lieutenants charted a path that would leapfrog them through Keams Canyon to a pair of Indian settlementsthe Hopi villages of Walpi and Oraibi, both on the Moqui Indian Reservationand to the Mormon community of Tuba City. Then, if their plan went smoothly, they would find themselves standing in awe on some remote precipice of the greatest of American canyons.

But maps can be deceiving. Sometimes it is what one doesnt see in two dimensions that really matters. Between Tuba City and the Grand Canyon, only one known water hole awaited them, and it would prove easy to miss.

Of course, Pershing and Stotsenburg did not plan on failing, and their preliminary arrangements seemed, to them, quite reasonable. They purchased mountain ponies from the local Indians. They arranged for three, seemingly sturdy mules to carry their supplies and hired as a scout a local Navajo named Sam, a graduate of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania who had served the U.S. Army for years. He knew a portion of the region through which they intended to pass. They took on another Native American, a veteran packer everyone referred to as Minus, a name that, in time, would seem perfectly appropriate, for he ultimately detracted more than he contributed to the expedition. They loaded their mules lightly to avoid undo strain on their pack animals and were careful to bring along enough rations for themselves and grain for their four-footed comrades. They even packed a single extra blanket just on the off chance they might need it. The American soldiers could only imagine the adventure of a lifetime ahead of them. But as Stotsenburg would later write, We were not after all the adventures that we found before we reached home. He would add to his analysis: The plans that we made were perhaps not very well matured.