The Indian Territory in the Civil War Message Board

Re: Historical Accuracy
In Response To: Re: Historical Accuracy ()

To you Ken and all the others who made posts on this particular topic my hat is off to all of you. I am jumping in on this topic a little late but I cannot help but add a word or two about what Ken said about Ramp and Ramp's work on the 'War in the Indian Territory.' When I first read this book I used it as a starting point for my research into many areas I was working on. I kept going off in wrong directions, mis-directed on locations, particularly the locations Ken mentioned in his critique and of certain events. After a time I simply threw this book aside as a lost cause in disgust, put it on a back shelf and have never looked at it since.

I am one who simply insists on finding original material to complement the work that has been done in the past. If a writer has written on a topic, I can understand his/her reaching their particular conclusions, still I want to see their research or source material. It has been rightly said,not only in the Indian Territory but many other areas of discipline in the Trans-Miss, that authors, Doctoral candidates and so forth are doing nothing more than repeating the same mistakes of those writers of the past. Hard line research of particular people such as William Phillips, Weer and others are very hard to find. Because the IHG were paid by the Indian Bureau through the War Department, their day books, order books and other material are not to be found unless one digs through the national arcives. This is where we will find many an answer. Mistakes are made and we have an obligation to set them aright as well as we might. War in and of itself is not easy to write about on the level of the fighting man, he only knows what he sees around him and the intensity of the moment often clouds his thinking. Still, taking everything possible into account and no single testimony we can come to some kind of idea as to what actually happened. It is the only way to get at the truth of an event. And that is my take on this most interesting topic.

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Historical Accuracy
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