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Review Of The Most Promising Young Officer: A Life Of Ranald Slidell Mackenzie By Michael D. Pierce, Michael L. Tate

History Faculty Publications

Michael D. Pierce has produced a credible and nicely written interpretation of Ranald Mackenzie's life. By focusing on the frontier years and placing this officer's experiences within the broader context of military events, he provides the reader a good sense of time and place. Pierce also successfully utilizes the standard source materials and moves well beyond Robert G. Carter's somewhat unreliable On the Border with Mackenzie (1935). Unfortunately, the personal dimensions of Mackenzie's thoughts and deeds will never be fully known because he was an intensely private man who left little documentation about himself. Even his official reports tend to …