Journal of the Southwest

Black Jack Davidson: A Cavalry Commander on the Western Frontier; The Life of GeneralJohn W. Davidson by Homer K. DavidsonReview by: Gordon ChappellArizona and the West, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1975), pp. 173-174Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168437 .

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REVIEWS 173

BLACK JACK DAVIDSON: A Cavalry Commander on the Western Frontier; The Life of General John W. Davidson. By Homer K. David- son. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1974. 273 pp. $15.50.

John Wynn Davidson was one of the bright young army officers who served in the Mexican and Civil wars and the western Indian campaigns. He graduated from West Point in 1845, marched to California with Stephen Kearny, served

against Indians in New Mexico during the 1850s, and was a Union general during the Civil War. While campaigning with the black Tenth Cavalry between 1 866 and 1 879 against Comanches and other tribes, he acquired his nickname of "Black Jack." Davidson was colonel of the Second Cavalry when he died at the

age of fifty-eight in 1881. The publishing of biographies of obscure but significant frontier military

commanders has much merit. While Custer lies buried beneath a mountainous

bibliography, and there are biographies or autobiographies of Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Crook and others, many important contemporaries have been over- looked. John Davidson is one of them.

Unfortunately, Homer K. Davidson's biography of his grandfather is very badly flawed. It is saturated with major errors in fact. Symptomatic of the trouble is the author's failure to comprehend the differences between regular, volunteer, and brevet rank. As a consequence, he gives Davidson a Civil War rank he never held, claiming that he was "promoted" to the rank of brevet brigadier general on February 3, 1862. Brevet rank is an award, not a promotion, besides which on that date Davidson was appointed to the very real rank of brigadier general of volunteers, no mere brevet. A more important failing is the author's uncritical

approach to his subject. The reader is led to believe that John Davidson was

constantly slighted, passed over, and discriminated against by superiors. On the

contrary, the evidence in this book indicates that Davidson was at times tempera- mental, a martinet, and difficult to deal with. Elsewhere, the author completely misunderstands the course of the Battle of the Washita, erring both in his facts and in his implications in his haste to criticize Custer. In discussing the New Mexican Indian campaigns of the 1850s, the author reveals a lack of understand-

ing of the topography and geography involved, confusing the locations of Taos, Don Fernando de Taos and Cantonment Burgwin.

Equally frustrating, Davidson shows that he performed little research regard- ing the army's camel experiment. He claims that "Lieutenant Colonel Beale [at Fort Tejon, California] and others in Washington, conceived the idea of

using camels as beast of burden in that section of California." It was Senator

Jefferson Davis who in Congress proposed the use of camels in 1851 (not 1857), and who later as Secretary of War authorized the army's experiment using camels to test their utility on the deserts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The author

hopelessly confuses Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Lloyd Beall, post commander at Fort Tejon, with a former U.S. Navy lieutenant, Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who, as a civilian government employee, headed the expedition along the 35th Parallel in 1857 which employed the camels. Both Beale and Beall were at Fort

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174 ARIZONA and the WEST

Tejon that year, but neither had anything to do with originating the camel

experiment. Much of the blame for the failings of this book rests with the publisher,

who accepted uncritically an error-filled manuscript. If the Clark firm had enlisted the assistance of knowledgeable historians to edit and identify the failings of the work, the manuscript might have been salvaged and turned into a valuable con- tribution to the shelves of frontier and Civil War history, which in its present form it is not.

Gordon Chappell

Mr. Chappell, Historian, National Park Service, Western Region, San Francisco, is a

specialist in Western military history, and has published extensively in that field.

THE SCULPTED SAINTS OF A BORDERLAND MISSION: Los Bultos de San Xavier del Bac. By Richard E. Ahlborn. Tucson : South- western Mission Research Center, 1974. 124 pp. $6.50.

SANTOS AND SAINTS. By Thomas J. Steele, S. J. Albuquerque: Calvin Horn, Publisher, 1974. 220 pp. $10.00.

With the death of E. Boyd and the publication of her magnum Ofus some months ago, a few words regarding the status of studies of santero art are in order. The recent publication of significant works by Ahlborn and Steele provide a

fitting opportunity. Santero art and the images of the saints Qsantos) may be studied from three aspects: 1) as a product of the socio-cultural background of the santero, 2) his manipulation of the medium, and 3) audience appreciation of his work. To date, studies of santero art in the Southwest have concentrated mainly on the second aspect of the process, with secondary emphasis being given to the link between the first two aspects - iconography. Mill's People of the Saints is perhaps the only work which squarely addresses the first aspect, while thus far the final phase has not been explored to any depth.

Ahlborn's study focuses on iconography, the link between the first two aspects. Although his subject matter is traditional in this sense, the volume is of great interest because much of the substantive work in this area has yet to be done. Ahlborn's analysis is of major importance in the iconography of New Spain, and his identification of techniques used in producing the images is enlightening. The graphics and editorial work are superb; perhaps the best feature is that the photographs are used as documentation instead of just illustration. This work will surely serve as a model for future studies. Unfortunately, Ahlborn devotes little attention to the first aspect of the artistic process, and almost completely neglects the third aspect (the audience of the saints). Not all books can do everything, and these areas are not Ahlborn's focus. But if the San Xavier Mis-

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