Daily Inspiration Quote by George Crook

A battlefield apology dressed up as logistics: Crook’s sentence is built to sound like an engineer’s memo, not a confession about violence redirected. The diction is telling. “Tried to throw a strong force” makes troops feel like a projectile, a resource to be “thrown” down a map. “Through the canon” (almost certainly “canyon”) reduces a lived landscape to a tactical funnel. And the clincher - “supposed location of the village” - blurs responsibility with a fog of imperfect intelligence. If the village is only “supposed,” then any failure to strike it cleanly can be framed as uncertainty rather than error.

Crook is writing from the worldview of a 19th-century U.S. Army officer on campaigns where “village” often meant an Indigenous community and where targeting settlements was strategy, not accident. In that context, the sentence reads less like neutral reportage than a careful calibration of accountability: he signals intent to hit, then explains why he couldn’t, and finally offloads the miss onto time and terrain. The passive machinery of the phrasing (“was obliged to use it elsewhere”) is the moral sleight of hand. Someone obliged him; necessity compelled him; events dictated the outcome.

What makes it work, rhetorically, is how it turns aggression into administration. The emotional temperature is kept low so the reader focuses on the competence question (did the force arrive on time?) rather than the ethical one (what happens when it does?). It’s the language of consequence-stripping: a village becomes a coordinate, and the suffering becomes an operational delay.