Once posted to the frontier as a junior officer, Hugh Lennox Scott became the army's most accomplished practitioner of Plains Indian Sign Language, a skill that brought him many opportunities to interact with Native peoples. Scott consequently developed a level of empathy and respect for Indians that set him apart from his contemporaries. It is this experience that Scott himself was most passionate about in his 1928 autobiography, and it is that portion of Scott's autobiography that R. Eli Paul offers here with thorough biographical introduction and substantive annotation. The result is to focus on this soldier-diplomat's unique place in the story of Indian-white relations in the American West."" - James E. Potter, Senior Research Historian, Nebraska State Historical Society, and coeditor of August Scherneckau's Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary""This deftly edited rendering from Hugh Lenox Scott's 1928 memoir, long out-of-print and never widely distributed, shows how one officer held remarkably enlightened views of Indians at the turn of the twentieth century. Scott befriended Indians, respected their abilities, listened carefully to their needs, and negotiated on their behalf in times often fraught with resentment, repression, and sometimes violence. Through Scott, R. Eli Paul provides a more enlightened view of Indian positions and a greater understanding of the ideas, concerns, and cultural prohibitions that led to conflict."" - John D. McDermott, author of Red Cloud's War: The Bozeman Trail, 1866 - 1868
