Daily Inspiration Quote by George Crook

Crook’s sentence reads like a resignation letter written with a soldier’s politeness and a bureaucrat’s knife. The surface is deferential - “it may be,” “respectfully request” - but the structure is doing something tougher: he’s documenting fatigue, staking a claim to authority, and preemptively defending himself against the inevitable accusation that stepping away equals failure.

The key move is “too much wedded to my own views.” That’s not a confession of stubbornness so much as a tactical translation of principle into an acceptable administrative weakness. In a military hierarchy, you can’t easily say, “My superiors won’t let me do this right,” or “policy is immoral and counterproductive.” You can say you’ve become “wedded” to a method after eight years in the trench of a single assignment. He frames commitment as a conflict-of-interest problem, the language of professionalism masking dissent.

Context matters: Crook spent much of his career in the Indian Wars, operating inside a federal apparatus that oscillated between annihilation, forced removal, and uneasy “peace” through reservations and assimilation. Command in that arena meant not just tactics, but managing politics, public scrutiny, and policy whiplash from Washington. “Nearly eight years of the hardest work of my life” is a quiet indictment of the assignment itself - a prolonged moral and logistical grind that consumed credibility and nerves.

The intent, then, is exit with honor: he reminds leadership of his labor, hints that his judgment is being sidelined, and asks to be relieved without inviting a public fight. It’s resignation as self-preservation - and as a carefully worded critique of a system that makes “command” feel like captivity.