Short Synopsis
A compelling new biography of General Philip H. Sheridan, whoseleadership and aggressive tactics helped win the Civil War, crush the Plains Indians, and save Yellowstone National Park.

Full Synopsis
Alongside Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan is the least known of the triumvirate of generals most responsible for winning the Civil War. Yet, before Sherman's famous march through Georgia, it was General Sheridan who introduced scorched-earth warfare to the South, and it was his Cavalry Corps that compelled Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Sheridan's innovative cavalry tactics and "total war" strategy became staples of twentieth-century warfare.

After the war, Sheridan ruthlessly suppressed the raiding Plains Indians much as he had the Confederates—by killing warriors and burning villages—but he also defended reservation Indians from corrupt agents and contractors. Sheridan, an enthusiastic hunter and conservationist, later ordered the U.S. cavalry to occupy and operate Yellowstone National Park to safeguard it from commercial exploitation.

"Wheelan has delivered an exciting and crisply written biography that, especially in his accounts of battles, fairly gallops across the page in the company of a personality who seemed to his own contemporaries like a god of war incarnated in the body of a pint-size Irish immigrant." ---Wall Street Journal

"Battle by battle, Wheelan charts the swift rise of the relentlessly aggressive Sheridan. Modest, energetic and brave, Sheridan was an innovator, using mounted troops both as an independent strike force and in support of infantry operations.…A sympathetic portrait of 'Grant's most dependable troubleshooter." ---Kirkus