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Beyond the wide Missouri lay the prairie - "the biggest clearing on the Almighty's footstool." And every few hundred miles, holding to the rivers and wooded bottoms, were the outposts of the white civilization - the military forts of the U.S. Army. Father, mother and comforter to the settlers, trading points for the trappers and buffalo hunters, rallying points for the scouts. Awaiting the reader of this sentimental journey into the days of "Boots and Saddles," are the graphic stories of battles against Indians and boredom. A military man, author Hart has the feel of these men who did the fighting and their places of conflict and refuge. He recounts the Bloody Bozeman outrage, Red Cloud's War of 1866-68, and the pre-Civil War fights that seasoned lieutenants for the stars of Union and Confederate generals. It is a thrilling experience to read of the forts that opened the West for the stages, river boats and wagon trains . . . of those that protected the white man from the Indians and others that protected Indians from the whites . . . of those "hog and hominy" forts that gave solace to settlers who waited for the Indian attacks that never came . . . of the places called "Hog Ranches" that provided soldiers with entertainment lacking at Army posts . . . and of those forts George Armstrong Custer called home. With all this there are portraits, in both word and photograph, of the many famous generals who rode this frontier of history: Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Custer, Harney, Sully, Connor, Mackenzie, Howard, Miles, Terry, Carrington, de Trobriand, Gibbon and Canby.