John Gregory Bourke

Military career

John G. Bourke enlisted in the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry in 1862, claiming to be nineteen years old when he was only sixteen. He fought at the Battle of Stones River (December 31–January 2) near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a bloody engagement where he received a Medal of Honor for his 'gallantry in action.' Months later, he fought at the Battle of Chickamauga (September 18–20, 1863) in northwest Georgia. After the Civil War, Major General H. Thomas, his commander in the Army of the Cumberland, nominated him to be a cadet at West Point.

He entered on October 17, 1865, and graduated on June 15, 1869, achieving the rank of second lieutenant. On September 1, 1871, Bourke was assigned as aide-de-camp for Brevet Major General George Crook at Fort Whipple in Prescott, Arizona Territory. He traveled extensively across the Arizona Territory, visiting stations including Fort Whipple, Camp Lincoln (Fort Verde), Apache Camp, San Carlos Camp, Fort Grant, and Camp McDowell, crossing the rugged Superstition and Mazatzal Mountains.

In 1875 he followed Crook to the Department of the Platte at Fort Omaha, Nebraska, and engaged in battles at Rosebud Creek and Slim Buttes, enduring fierce fighting and horrendous winter conditions in the Wyoming and Dakota territories. He accompanied Crook back to Arizona in 1883 and participated in the second (1883) and third (1886) captures of Geronimo in Mexico.

Ethnologist and Author

As Crook's aide-de-camp, Bourke had the opportunity to witness every facet of life in the Old West—military battles, settlers, Native Americans, geography, flora and fauna, internal military and government politics, and Indian Agency issues. In November 1872 he began keeping daily journals, which he maintained for the rest of his life. These 124 manuscript volumes, held at the United States Military Academy Library at West Point, are considered invaluable original sources by Western historians.

Granted time off from military duties at the convenience of the Army, Bourke lived among and studied Native American cultures of the Apache, Navajo, Zuni, and Plains tribes. His detailed documentation of customs, religious rites, spiritual ceremonies, languages, and vocabularies brought him to the attention of Professor E. S. Holden of the U.S. Naval Observatory and James O. Dorsey, who brought his research to John Wesley Powell, director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.

Powell mentored Bourke and encouraged his development as an ethnologist. Through the 1870s and 1880s Bourke maintained a public presence as both a writer of popular articles and books about frontier life and as a writer of scholarly books and monographs about Native American cultural rites. He was elected to the Association for the Advancement of Science and to the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1886–1887. His reputation led to his appointment as curator of an exhibit of 890 historical artifacts at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

In 1885 Bourke began a campaign for equitable treatment of Native Americans, publicly denouncing the U.S. Government’s Indian programs. He advocated keeping the Chiricahua Apache in Arizona rather than removing them to exile in Florida and opposed sending Native American children to off-reservation Indian schools. As his criticisms became more broadly known, his promotion stagnated at the rank of captain for the remainder of his career.