Told here for the first time is the story of some 6,000 Americans who served as outpost guardians for the nation that they each had sought to destroy. This is the story of the Galvanized Yankees, as these United States Volunteers came to be called. They were soldiers of the Confederate United States of America who were recruited from Union prison camps in the North to fight the Indians of the West. They exchanged their Confederate and butternut for the blue uniforms of the United States Army on the condition that they would not be sent South to fight their former comrades. This is the story of their adventures from September 1864 to November 1866 as they soldiered in the American West. The six regiments of Galvanized Yankees wrote a proud record as they fought Indians, guarded surveying parties for the Union Pacific Railroad, escorted supply trains along the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, rebuilt hundreds of miles of telegraph lines destroyed by Indians, accompanied expeditions, protected stage coach routes, and manned lonely frontier forts and outposts. Across the vast American frontier they served -- from Fort Kearney to Julesburg, from Julesburg to Laramie and along the Sweetwater through South Pass to Utah, from Julesburg up the South Platte to Denver, by Cache La Poudre to the Laramie Plains and Fort Bridger, from Fort Randall up past Sully to Rice, Berthold and union, from Fort Ellsworth to Dodge and Fort Lyon to Santa Fe. They made themselves a part of all the raw and racy names in that wild land of buffalo and Indians -- Cottonwood Springs and Three Crossings, Lodgepole and Alkali Station, Medicine Creek and Sleeping Water, Fort Zarah and White Earth River, St. Mary's, Fort Wicked, Laughing Wood, Soldier Creek, Rabbit Ear Mound, Dead Man's Ranche, and the Lightning's Nest. They knew Jim Bridger, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Spotted Tail and Red Cloud before the outside world had even heard these now celebrated names. This is the story of exciting Indian fights and tedious garrison duty at lonely frontier outposts, of winter hardships and summer heat, of white women freed from Indian captors and Mormon maids captivated by U.S. soldiers. This is the story of men like the incredible John T. Shanks, Confederated soldier, prisoner of war, spy for the Union, and captain of the United States Volunteers; Colonel Charles Dimon and his ill-timed howitzer salute at a peace council; Henry M. Stanley, an Englishman who served in the Confederate Army, Union Army, and Union Navy before he managed to find Dr. David Livingston in Africa; the half-breed Bent brothers out to avenge the Sand Creek massacre; General Alfred Sully; Colonel Henry E. Maynadier; Spotted Tail and his daughter Fleet Foot; and others. After a century the Galvanized Yankees have been almost forgotten. Many of them died wearing their adopted blue uniforms -- killed by Indians, scurvy, epidemic disease, wintry blizzards. Some of them deserted, although their rate of desertion was only slightly higher than that in the Union's state volunteer regiments. At the end of their service they were discharged at Forts Leavenworth and Kearney. The scattered with the winds, some choosing new names and new homes. They were a lost legion, unhonored, unsung. No southern state would claim them, the Grand Army of the Republic forgot them. This is their fascinating and long-overdue story -- told by a well-known writer on the American West and Civil War -- From the book jacket.

Bloody year on the plains" -- Oaths and allegiances -- Soldiering on the wide Missouri -- "Give it back to the Indians" -- From the Cimarron to the Powder -- From Camp Douglas to Camp Douglas -- The incredible Captain Shanks -- Ohioans from Dixie : the Powder River expedition -- Blizzard march -- Last man out -- A note on the Galvanized Confederates.