For General William Sherman, much of the appeal of receiving command of the army of the West in 1865 was that it took him out of Washington. Sherman loathed politics, instead preferring the straightforward life of a soldier. But as he quickly discovered, politics persisted on the frontier, where settlers were agitating for a military campaign against the American Indians.
During a tour of Wyoming and Colorado in the autumn of 1866, Sherman met a settler named Craig, who owned a commercial farm on a tributary of the Arkansas River. “He has thoroughly proven the ability to produce,” Sherman wrote to future president Ulysses Grant, his superior in Washington. “But then comes the more difficult problem of consumption. Who is to buy his corn?”
