The Names of Local Heroes
This chapter emphasizes the significance of the war in rearranging relations between races at the local level. In a colonial spirit of “closing the frontier,” settlers living on or near Indian reservations appropriated Indian military participation. When raising funds for monuments or creating local heroes, whites invoked a brotherhood-in-arms and celebrated the true end of the Indian wars. Indians took advantage of their neighbors' willingness to include them in their celebrations and reactivated memories and heroes of the pre-reservation era. However, the war monuments that memorialized the dead Indian heroes on several reservations often did little else but list their names and dates of service. But their very existence resulted from a complex struggle in which tribes, bands, chiefs and chiefs' descendants, town notables, and white and Indian elites tried to appropriate for themselves the national legitimacy that military sacrifice carried.