Booknotes: Mollie Brumley's Civil War

New Arrival:

• Mollie Brumley's Civil War: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas by Theodore Catton (OU Press, 2026).

From the description: "Mollie Brumley, a thirteen-year-old orphan, was living on a farm in the mountainous Ozarks of northwest Arkansas when the Civil War broke out. In a borderland region on the northern periphery of slavery and the western edge of white settlement, her corner of Arkansas saw terrible destruction―but not primarily from fighting between opposing armies. Mollie Brumley's Civil War was one of guerrilla warfare and outlawry, shifting loyalties, betrayals real and imagined, and, for some, death by starvation." This personal and regional story is recounted in Theodore Catton's Mollie Brumley's Civil War: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas.

Mollie Brumley was born in Mississippi, losing her mother at an early age and her father also died soon after he sent his daughter to live with his sister's already large family in NW Arkansas. The geography of Mollie's narrative is the Richland area straddling the shared border of Searcy and Marion counties in the Boston Mountains, a region of mostly subsistence farming. Utilizing Mollie's 1902 autobiography (titled A Thrilling Romance of the Civil War) as the basic framework of his study, "Catton offers a rare, intimate look at the heroism and desperation of war conducted on the home front―all amidst the anything-but-ordinary romantic adventures of an adolescent who lived during an extraordinary time." Amid the chaos and danger that the guerrilla war inflicted upon the Richland area, Mollie herself left home to work as an army laundress down the White River at Batesville.

Catton weaves other area residents into the narrative, notably the Cole family, Mollie's love interests (including husband Henry Cole, and, after Cole's death, Valentine Williams, whom she married in 1867), and Parthenia Hensley (a teenage slave girl three years older than Mollie and the only black resident of Richland).

More from the description: "An unprecedented picture of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West, Mollie Brumley's Civil War is also a remarkable coming-of-age story shaped by the fight against slavery―a fight that Mollie didn't choose but that finally influenced the person she became and the outcome of her life."