Baxoje in Blue

At the start of the American Civil War, a small Indigenous nation on the Kansas-Nebraska border did what today seems almost unthinkable. After six decades of contentious relations with a country that had yet to grant them citizenship, they chose to send two-thirds of their able-bodied men to fight for the federal government. Fifty-one of seventy-eight eligible Ioway men enlisted and fought for the Union cause, seeing action in Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, and Indian Territory. Greg Olson pieces together the history of these Ioway, or Baxoje (pronounced Bah Kho-je), veterans in Baxoje in Blue, the first book to examine the Ioways' contribution to the Civil War. Drawing on a handful of letters by Ioway soldiers as well as numerous documents written by those who served alongside them, newspaper accounts, and military records, Olson follows the Ioways from their reservation to bloody battlefields. He argues that the circumstances of their enlistment and their experiences in uniform underscored the challenges of serving in integrated military units. All but a handful fought alongside white soldiers in the Fourteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry and the Thirteenth Kansas Volunteer Infantry. While, like many Native soldiers, Ioways hoped to gain honor and prestige through military service, their primary reason for enlistment was to curry favor with the US government. By the 1860s, white settlers had been streaming into Kansas and were clamoring to settle on Ioway land. Worried about losing their reservation, the Ioways turned to military service as a means of saving their land. By volunteering to help vanquish the rebellion, Ioways hoped to show the government that they were true patriots and should be allowed to live where they were. In this, Olson shows, they were ultimately successful. Baxoje in Blue follows individual Ioway men as they navigated the hardships and danger shared with all Civil War soldiers, as well as those unique to being Indigenous in a mostly white army. Short biographies of each of the Ioway men who served round out the volume, including James Whitecloud, later famous as the last living Indigenous veteran of the Civil War.