Peacekeeping on the Plains: Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas

Historians have written on “Bleeding Kansas” and on the frontier army as a constabulary force, but little scholarship exists on how the army performed its peacekeeping operations in the 1850s. In Peacekeeping on the Plains, Tony R. Mullis is one of the first scholars to detail the military concerns associated with peace enforcement in Kansas and the trans-Missouri West.

Between 1854 and 1856, the Franklin Pierce administration called upon the U.S. Army to conduct a series of peac…