Booknotes: "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten"

New Arrival:

• "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten": The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis edited by Jerry D. Thompson (UNM Press, 2026).

University of New Mexico Press doesn't publish Civil War-related books very often, but when they do the release is always worthy of close attention. The essential library of the Civil War in the Desert Southwest contains many of their titles, and the latest candidate for consideration is "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten": The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis.

Though an obscure figure to Civil War readers at large, Pettis is well known to those steeped in the study of the conflict in this particular region. His writings are an important resource for modern researchers and historians. From the description: "As the unofficial historian of the California Column, George Henry Pettis was a firsthand witness to a series of important historic events, including the march of Californians to New Mexico, the Confederate invasion of New Mexico, and the Indian Wars in the region."

A major part of the far-flung coordinated Union response to the 1861-62 Confederate invasion of New Mexico and Arizona was the organization of a large body of troops in southern California. While the Confederate incursion had already been defeated and expelled by the time these Union reinforcements arrived at their destination, the war was far from over for the men of the famed California Column.

More from the description: "By the time Pettis arrived on the Rio Grande, the Civil War in the Southwest had evolved into a radically different conflict from what he envisioned when he enlisted in the Union Army in 1861. Over the course of five years and fifteen days in the California and New Mexico infantry, Pettis marched an astonishing 4,245 miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas while suffering through sweltering summer heat and frigid winter cold—likely a greater distance than any soldier in the entire Union Army. The climax of Pettis’s career came at the Battle of Adobe Walls when he found himself in command of two small artillery pieces in Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson’s vain, ill-advised, and far-reaching punitive expedition on the Texas plains against the Comanche and Kiowa." In between that action was the crushing boredom of garrison duty, and Pettis also "adeptly records the monotony of garrison life at remote military posts in the desert of West Texas as well as the army headquarters at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Union fortresses of Fort Craig and Fort Union."

The preeminent historian of the Civil War in the Southwest, Jerry Thompson organizes Pettis's writings into three parts: memoirs (Pettis's recollections of the Confederate invasion, frontier duty, and the Battle of Adobe Walls), newspaper articles, and letters. Thompson's introduction, around two-dozen pages in length, serves as a background resource and mini-biography of Pettis. Extensive explanatory endnotes also accompany Thompson's editing of Pettis's prolific body of writings.