Booknotes: New Fields of Adventure

New Arrival:

• New Fields of Adventure: The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861–1865 edited by M. Jane Johansson (U Tenn Press, 2024).

From the description: "Lyman Gibson Bennett (1832–1904) had a curious mind and a keen sense of humor. He had an engineer’s mentality and a poet’s grasp of language, except for spelling. As a Union soldier, Bennett saw extensive service in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. A writer of considerable energy and intelligence, Bennett’s wartime diaries recount his diverse and wide-ranging military record, stretching geographically from the prairies of Illinois to the Rocky Mountains, while a postwar account details, among other things, his labors to recruit “Mountain Feds” in the Ozarks."

It's great to see another Voices series title that ventures into the war west of the Mississippi, and having Johansson involved as editor is an added bonus. A quick site search revealed why Bennett's name seemed so familiar to me. Back in 2009, OU Press imprint Arthur H. Clark published Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole's Western Campaign of 1865, the Journals of Lyman G. Bennett and Other Eyewitness Accounts, and Robert Schultz's The March to the River: From the Battle of Pea Ridge to Helena, Spring 1862 (Camp Pope, 2014) made use of Bennett's topographical work.

More from the description: M. Jane Johansson's New Fields of Adventure: The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861–1865 "provides the perspective of an individual who was both a topographical engineer—with extensive experience that spanned the country from Arkansas to the Overland Trail—and a common soldier. As a member of the Thirty-Sixth Illinois Infantry, Bennett provided one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the pivotal Battle of Pea Ridge, March 7–8, 1862. By December 1863, Bennett was promoted to first lieutenant in the newly formed Fourth Arkansas Cavalry (US) and wrote an invaluable first-person account of guerrilla fighting in the Ozark mountains."

The volume's twenty-two chapters span August 1861-April 1865 and take the reader across Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska Territory, Colorado Territory, and to Fort Laramie and back. The material is fully annotated, and each chapter begins with a few pages of editorial narrative that offer context for the historical writings that follow. A pair of chapters summarize aspects of Bennett's life and activities before and after the war. A selection of Bennett drawings and maps are also included. New Fields of Adventure "will prove useful to scholars of the Ozarks, landscape studies, and the Civil War in the West."