Review - "'When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten': The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis" by Jerry Thompson, ed.

["When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten": The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis edited by Jerry D. Thompson (University of New Mexico Press, 2026). Hardcover, 5 maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,194/336. ISBN:978-0-8263-6983-3. $34.95]

By his own estimate, Union Army captain George H. Pettis (First California Infantry regiment) marched 4,245 miles during a Civil War volunteer service that spanned the entire length of the war. There is no way to know which soldier, North or South, put in the most miles during the conflict, but Pettis's odyssey over parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas certainly ranked among the war's most arduous given the harsh conditions involved. A printer and publisher by trade, Pettis also frequently put pen to paper both during and after the war, his valuable body of writings collected together for the first time by leading Civil War in the Southwest historian Jerry Thompson and published under the title "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten": The Civil War Letters and Recollections of Captain George Henry Pettis.

Thompson begins the book with a thorough overview, roughly two-dozen pages in length, of Pettis's life (1834-1909), which began and ended in Rhode Island. This fine mini-biography adds essential context to Pettis's public and private lives outside the topics of his writings. It also gives readers solid background information in regard to the places and events associated with Pettis's Civil War military adventures across the far flung Southwest. Thompson's compilation of Pettis writings is divided into three parts: Pettis's narrative "recollections," his newspaper articles, and his wartime letters to his wife.

Of the three recollections reproduced in Part I, the first is a brief summary of the 1861-62 New Mexico Campaign that Thompson ranks among the best early accounts (though Pettis did not personally participate in those parts of the campaign operating out of Fort Craig and Fort Union). The next piece recounts Pettis's own experiences as a junior officer of the California Column. Though he joins many Union supporters in perhaps exaggerating the Confederate threat to California, his descriptions of the marshaling of the famed California Column and its long and dangerous march across the lower Southwest from southern California all the way to New Mexico and West Texas is wonderfully descriptive and highly valuable as a firsthand account. In addition to assessing the dangers, real and imagined, from Apache Indian and Confederate foes, the text details the environmental and logistical conditions that necessitated the column's 900-mile march be conducted in stages and in small groups. That measured pace meant that the main campaign in New Mexico was already essentially over by the time they arrived at the front. Thompson praises the third recollection, a striking account of the November 1864 Battle of Adobe Walls, as the best of the trio, and it is indeed another excellent firsthand source that significantly enhances our understanding of the event. Students of Kit Carson's campaign will greatly appreciate Pettis's insights, as he led the mountain howitzer section generally credited with playing a central role in keeping the enemy at bay and staving off defeat (and perhaps even annihilation) at the hands of the aggressive and much more numerous Comanche and Kiowa. These recollections, but the last two in particular, are vividly written, abundantly detailed, and well balanced. As an example of the last point, in covering his own efforts at Adobe Walls Pettis does not try to make himself the hero of the battle.

Most prominent in Parts I and II, Thompson's annotations primarily consist of biographical information (often quite extensive) about noteworthy persons mentioned in the text, though there is also some background and commentary associated with places and events. These editorial notes occasionally raise objections, one being Pettis's perpetuation of the claim that the New Mexico volunteers and militia performed very poorly in action during the 1862 New Mexico Campaign. Rehabilitating the reputation of these New Mexico units is a major theme of Thompson's most recent scholarship.

After the war, Pettis, like many of his California Column comrades, settled in New Mexico with his family and contributed to the postwar economic boom and political scene there. The nine newspaper articles collected in Part II address a variety of events and personal anecdotes from the wartime and postwar periods. Their themes are eclectic, among them an account of a wartime mutiny, a humorous but respectful story related to Kit Carson's illiteracy, and a personal confrontation with the region's long tradition of debt peonage that persisted into the post-emancipation period.

The wartime correspondence consisting of Pettis's letters to his wife Annie between September 1861 and March 1865 is collected in Part III. In some ways the content is standard fare, with Pettis complaining about infrequent communications, highly irregular pay, homesickness, and loneliness. One can sense marital tension in many Civil War correspondence collections, but the sources of strain are uncommonly direct in Pettis's replies. We only have his letters to go on, but he frequently chastises her word choices, overall tone, and seeming neglect. It is an uncomfortable situation, and, as Thompson explains in the introduction, the pair eventually divorced. Beyond domestic concerns, the letters do recount at some length military activities that included recruitment duty in northern California, the long march to New Mexico over the spring and summer of 1862, and a number of mid to late-war campaigns and operations based out of New Mexico forts that were directed against Indian foes. All of that is useful source material for interested military scholars and researchers.

In addition to arranging and annotating Pettis's writings, Thompson includes in the volume a number of period illustrations and photographs rarely encountered in other Civil War publications, and extensive captions are attached to them. The book's map coverage is helpful in following the course of the California Column's epic march while also orienting readers to the major geographical points of interest in New Mexico that are mentioned at various points in the text.

George Pettis remains a little-known figure to the general Civil War reader. Fortunately, Jerry Thompson's edited collection brings Pettis's significant military service out of the shadows while also highlighting in full the quality, depth, and usefulness of his writings. "When All Our Troubles Will Be Forgotten" is a wonderful resource for those craving firsthand accounts of the Civil War as played out along one of its most isolated and distant fronts.

Review - "Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign" by Kelly-Fischer & Greenwalt

[Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign by Patrick Kelly-Fischer and Phillip S. Greenwalt (Savas Beatie, 2026). Softcover, 5 maps, photos, illustrations, integrated driving tour, appendix section, orders of battle, reading list. Pages main/total:xxviii,131/191. ISBN:978-1-61121-775-9. $16.95]

The Confederacy's early-war New Mexico Campaign is one of those Civil War operations that seems foolhardy in retrospect, seemingly destined for failure if not complete disaster. On the other hand, world military history is replete with examples of campaigns and wars won against longer odds. From the Confederate government's perspective in faraway Richmond, the invasion of New Mexico Territory via the upper Rio Grande River Valley was a self-contained, low-risk gamble that placed a slate of grand rewards on the table. If successful in New Mexico and the declared territory of Arizona, Confederate forces would be well positioned to threaten U.S. overland communications in the West. Critically, they would also gain a pathway to the Pacific and vie for control of vital mineral resources in the Rockies and Desert Southwest. Happily for Confederate planners, the expedition would involve only local troops, local resources, and captured munitions, placing minimal demands upon a central government already overwhelmed by the process of funding, clothing, supplying, and arming the main Confederate armies then gathering in the war's main theaters. Of course, Richmond's rather detached 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' attitude toward the risks and challenges involved in the operation offered little comfort to those whose lives and reputations would be at stake in carrying it out.

The existing literature associated with the New Mexico Campaign is well developed. In addition to classic campaign overviews from pioneering Civil War in the Southwest scholar Martin Hall and, more recently, Donald Frazier, the combined efforts of Don Alberts, John Taylor, and Thomas Edrington have produced an excellent Valverde book and two fine Glorieta battle studies. The well-coordinated, multi-front Union response that first derailed then completely defeated the Confederate expedition has been thoroughly explored by Flint Whitlock and Andrew Masich. Jerry Thompson has also compiled an exhaustive record and study of the New Mexico territorial volunteers and militia. A number of very useful edited primary source materials have been published, too. Combining a strong synthesis of the secondary literature with fresh revisitation of the O.R. documents associated with the campaign (the footnotes are available here), Patrick Kelly-Fischer and Phillip Greenwalt serve up a fine new overview history of the campaign with their book Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign, the latest volume in the Emerging Civil War series of military overviews.

Co-authors Kelly-Fischer and Greenwalt work successfully within the established format of the series. In addition to providing a sound summary of the strategic picture in the Desert Southwest at the outbreak of the war, their narrative offers well-rounded operational and tactical-level summaries of the military events that unfolded across what is today's Arizona and New Mexico. The campaign's primary battles at Valverde and Glorieta are both well described and contextualized, the account of the multi-day fight for control of Glorieta Pass being the centerpiece of the study. Five maps and a multitude of period and modern photographs, along with many other illustrations, supplement the text. A driving tour, its components placed at the tail end of select chapters, is also incorporated into the study.

Logistical considerations, and how well or how poorly each side met their challenges, are a major theme of the book. Headed by General Henry Hopkins Sibley, the Confederate "army" of some 3,000 men, all mounted, was supported by a logistical apparatus entirely inadequate for the requirements of a long campaign conducted over great distances. The Rio Grande could supply most of its water requirements, but food for the men and forage for the horses would be an almost entirely improvised affair, dependent on local sources (most of which would be unfriendly to their cause). On the other side, Union authorities managed their affairs remarkably well. Preparing for the arrival of Confederate forces in the region, they did a good job of spiriting away or hiding supplies previously stored along what would become the main path of invasion, largely denying them to the enemy. At the same time, resources and reinforcements were being concentrated in the northeast corner of the territory at Fort Union for the coming counteroffensive. Sibley's most direct opposition, the sizable Union garrison at Fort Craig led by Col. E.R.S. Canby, was able to husband supplies within the fort for an indefinite stay. However, the authors also note that Canby's own logistical situation, his command's Santa Fe Trail supply line cut off by Sibley's presence in the Union rear, was itself less than ideal. Far to the west, the famed "California Column"'s long advance from southern California to New Mexico across hundreds of miles of inhospitable desert, its own successful logistical support plan undoubtedly informed by the U.S. Army's antebellum experiences conducting desert operations, is recounted in a sparkling essay attached as an appendix. Another shorter appendix discusses the importance and role of Fort Union, as well as New Mexico volunteers at large, to the outcome of the campaign.

Union commanders, none of whom were experienced in managing large numbers of fighting men over vast distances, proved themselves well up to the task of blunting Sibley's offensive. Aggressive Col. John Slough, while suffering a tactical setback at Glorieta Pass, nevertheless blocked the Confederates from reaching Fort Union, and his subordinate officers are credited with destroying much of the Confederate supply and ammunition train during their surprise attack at Johnson's Ranch. While his forces based at Fort Craig could not halt the Confederate advance in its early stages and lost the battle at Valverde, Canby still successfully managed to keep the fort and its stockpiles out of Confederate hands and continued to be a thorn in Sibley's side for the duration of the campaign. The authors, citing Canby's own mounting logistical concerns, are only mildly critical of his unwillingness, or inability, to directly oppose Sibley's retreat during the latter stages of the campaign. How much of Canby's innate caution bled into overcaution and a great missed opportunity to destroy Sibley's crippled remaining forces is left to the reader to decide. Col. James Carleton's deft handling of the California Column is justly praised. Desert logistics and scarce water resources necessitated a journey conducted in stages and at a measured pace. Carleton's arrival on the scene, though it was too late to cut the retreating Confederates off before they reached safe haven, nevertheless completed the final link in Union forces fully re-securing New Mexico Territory and eliminating the Texas-based threat for the rest of the war.

By all accounts, including the one presented in this volume, Henry Sibley had no business being entrusted with an enterprise as complicated and difficult as an invasion of New Mexico Territory. His military judgment and leadership capacity severely compromised by chronic alcoholism, Sibley was ill for most of the campaign, leaving tactical direction to his principal subordinates. Even though those regimental officers—notably Col. Thomas Green, Lt. Col. William Scurry, and Majors Charles Pyron, Henry Raguet, and John Shropshire (the last two killed in action)—were able to produce impressive tactical successes at Valverde and Glorieta, the lack of firm overall direction and persistent logistical nightmares meant that Confederate forces were typically scattered as the campaign progressed and could not fully leverage their speed and maneuverability advantage in being fully mounted. The Confederate offensive effort also did not possess enough artillery firepower to threaten enhanced defenses such as those newly erected at Fort Craig and Fort Union. One interesting what-if to contemplate is if Slough had not disregarded orders to remain at Fort Union and instead drawn the Confederates deeper into the mountains, further isolating them and perhaps affording the California Column enough additional time to truly seal Sibley's fate.

Desert Empire skillfully delivers a comprehensive campaign history in a tight package capable of appealing to a wide range of readers. In all likelihood, the Confederate invasion of New Mexico Territory represents the Civil War's most extreme disparity between the scale of what was at stake (militarily, politically, and economically) and the numbers of fighting men involved on both sides, and Patrick Kelly-Fischer and Phillip Greenwalt's engaging new account of that unique campaign is highly recommended.

Review - "Treasure and Empire in the Civil War: The Panama Route, the West and the Campaigns to Control America's Mineral Wealth" by Neil Chatelain

[Treasure and Empire in the Civil War: The Panama Route, the West and the Campaigns to Control America's Mineral Wealth by Neil P. Chatelain (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,221/283. ISBN:978-1-4766-9381-1. $49.95]

The Far West's antebellum and Civil War period economic, military, political, and social history and development have received more frequent and in-depth investigation in recent years, with much of the focus on California (which achieved statehood in 1850). Hand in hand with every discussion of California's loyalty to the Union—and recognition of its essential military manpower contributions across the sparsely defended Pacific Northwest, Mountain West, and Desert Southwest regions—is some level of appreciation of California gold's role in financing the Civil War. However, the important in-between parts of that process, namely specifics regarding exactly what was involved in getting that newly extracted gold safely from California all the way to New York, have lacked cohesive study. Happily, that is no longer the case, with the California-New York gold route at the front and center of naval historian Neil Chatelain's new book Treasure and Empire in the Civil War: The Panama Route, the West and the Campaigns to Control America's Mineral Wealth. As the title indicates, the passage's fascinating history, though significant enough to merit standalone study, is also closely integrated into a wider discussion of Civil War-era economic resource competition in the West.

Upon successful conclusion of the War with Mexico, the United States clearly assumed the dominant role in the American West, and with that rapidly growing preeminence came prime positioning for highly lucrative exploitation of the western continent's vast mineral deposits. Among the principal challenges were the vast distances involved and uncertain communications between the western mines and the nation's government and financial centers. Setting up a safe and reliable means of getting California gold to New York was paramount, and Chatelain sets the stage with a detailed account of the establishment of what came to be known as the Panama Route. As finalized, the route stretched from San Francisco to Panama City (with a stop in Mazatlan, Mexico along the way) on the vessels of William Aspinwall's Pacific Mail Steamship Company. From there, a relatively brief Panama Railroad journey crossed the narrow isthmus to the Atlantic port of Colon. Finally, ships of Cornelius Vanderbilt's monopolistic Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company carried passengers and cargo between Colon and the port of New York. By the time of the outbreak of civil war, movement along the Panama Route was already a well-oiled machine.

In addition to tracing the historical development of the treasure route, Chatelain outlines its place in the wider expansionist context of the time. Concurrent with extracting wealth from its Mexican War conquests and forging political and economic ties with Isthmus authorities, the United States was extending its feelers into the Pacific with an eye toward possessing guano islands and future coaling stations. Early in the Civil War, taking its cue from long-held proslavery ambitions that extended into the southern hemisphere, the new Confederate government quickly attempted to stake its own territorial claims in the American Southwest, with the ultimate goal of opening pathways to both the Pacific Ocean and the gold fields of Colorado. Of course, in the way of some Union and Confederate plans were Mexican sovereignty and the interests of the native occupants of much of the western land mass.

As Chatelain outlines in the book, Confederate authorities were keen on intercepting U.S. treasure ships, which could carry up to $1.5M in gold during a single voyage. The Confederate Navy Department's three-headed plan encompassed the use of commerce raiders, privateers, and small clandestine groups who would book passage on enemy vessels and attempt to seize them from within. Prominent examples of each of those activities (none of which met expectations) are explored at length in the book, as are the coordinated Union responses to them. A potentially dangerous bottleneck in the Colon to New York route was the narrow "Windward Passage" between Cuba and the island of Haiti/Santo Domingo. In December 1862, the commerce raider CSS Alabama captured the Vanderbilt steamer Ariel. It wasn't a treasure ship, but the act, combined with the brief cruise of the privateer Retribution, helped prompt the U.S. Navy to finally adopt a formal convoy system. For all their multi-faceted efforts, the Confederates never captured a gold-laden prize ship. Chatelain does recount their largest bullion seizure, the CSS Florida's capture of some $500,000 in silver bars aboard the Benjamin F. Hoxie, but it proved to be a lost bonanza as both ship and cargo were owned by neutral Britain. On the Pacific side of the gold route, Confederate agents and sympathizers hoped to expand their privateering efforts in California. The most noteworthy episode, the failure of the Asbury Harpending-led mission to outfit the privateer J.M. Chapman for service in the Pacific, is detailed in the book (as is the piracy trial of its leaders and men). As Chatelain relates, fears of further attempts along those lines prompted both an expansion of the navy's Pacific Squadron (which included assembly of an ironclad warship) and a bolstering of Pacific Coast land defenses. Additionally, the failure of the plot by a small group of Confederates led by Thomas Hogg to seize control of the Salvador spurred U.S. authorities to apply even tighter strictures to its Pacific passport system in order to prevent further incidents.

Overall, the above events demonstrated the remarkable effectiveness of U.S. detective and diplomatic/naval intelligence networks in thwarting potentially dangerous Confederate plots and activities. The overseas capabilities and extent of those civilian, diplomatic, and military information and enforcement systems have been revealed again and again in the Civil War literature, and Chatelain's research represents a significant new contribution. The fact that no gold ship was lost to Confederate action during the length of the conflict might suggest a particularly effective convoy system (and perhaps also an indication that true threats were not as dangerous as they might have seemed at the time), but Chatelain points to several factors (including lack of strategic prioritization, assignment of unreliable ships to the West Indies Squadron, and inconsistent rotation) that seriously hindered the establishment, strength, and maintenance of consistent convoys. Even with those problems and shortcomings, though, the convoy system is nevertheless still hailed as having been a "cost-effective" measure that helped ensure that Panama Route ships safely completed their voyages. More widely, Chatelain persuasively suggests that just the mere presence of the convoys and their support facilities enhanced U.S.-Caribbean relations, helped enforce the Monroe Doctrine during a troubling period of international conflict, and raised the stature and visibility of the United States as a premier hemispheric power.

Significantly, Chatelain also points to the indispensable partnership formed between private business and federal government when it came to the custody, transport, and safety of the gold moved along the Panama Route. For a notion of scale, Chatelain notes that between April 1861 and June 1865 nearly $171M (almost $6B in today's dollars) in bullion was transported on the Pacific leg between San Francisco and Panama City by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. It's largely beyond the themes and scope of this particular study, but it would be interesting to extend that public-private partnership story into a branching exploration of how the West Coast's mineral bonanza was integrated into the national wartime economy after it reached the financial centers of the East. In contrast, as the book makes clear, none of the Confederate efforts explained in the book were able to obtain the coveted riches that might have helped address their own more dire economic challenges.

Neil Chatelain's Treasure and Empire in the Civil War offers a deep and fresh examination of one of the more neglected aspects of the naval war fought between the United States and the Confederacy while also extending its considerable reach into related issues of concurrent wartime continental expansion, economic resource competition, and transnational politics. That expansive perspective should make the volume attractive to a wide range of reader interests.

Review - " Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest during the Civil War " by James Robbins Jewell

[Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest during the Civil War by James Robbins Jewell (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Hardcover, 7 maps, photos, figures, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxvi,272/352. ISBN:978-1-4962-3303-5. $45]

For a very long time, the standard published account of the Civil War years in Oregon from a military participant's perspective has been Gunter Barth's All Quiet on the Yamhill: The Civil War in Oregon (1959), the edited diary of Corporal Royal A. Bensell of Co. H, 4th California Volunteer Infantry. Unfortunately, Bensell's experiences of garrison duty in the Willamette Valley from 1862 through 1864, during which no engagements were fought and bored frustration abounded, served to reinforce the false popular notion that little to nothing actually happened in the state during the Civil War (or perhaps even that Oregon produced no regiments of its own). Those seeking the rest of the story had to find it in bits and parts through unpublished academic monographs or within relatively obscure journal articles. Even Scott McArthur's 2012 book The Enemy Never Came: The Civil War in the Pacific Northwest did not venture much outside the Willamette Valley, where the vast majority of Oregon's settler population was concentrated but conflict was rare.

Historian James Robbins Jewell changed all that in 2018 with the publication of his groundbreaking book On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War: Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment (UT Press). In it, Jewell clearly demonstrated that the narrow personal perspectives of Bensell and others represented a very limited picture of a much larger wartime experience that encompassed long marches, extended campaigns, and sharp little skirmishes with native opponents. Happily, Jewell has now followed up that earlier effort with a full-length regimental history titled Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest during the Civil War.

With the outbreak of Civil War sparking the Regular Army's departure from Oregon, it was recognized by all that a state-raised mounted force (at least a regiment) was needed to fill the void and perform important tasks. Those troopers would be tasked with securing posts first established during the Indian troubles of the 1850s, suppressing any pro-Confederate plots that might emerge, and protecting citizens and emigrant trains from attacks by Northern Paiute, Bannock, and Shoshone tribes in the east and the Modocs and Klamath Indians to the south. However, raising that kind of force was easier said than done.

With an 1860 census figure below the 60,000 stipulated for statehood, Oregon, which joined the Union as the 33rd state in 1859, was sparsely populated for its size and as isolated as one could get from the seat of war, a challenging combination that Jewell cites as very problematic for recruiting. By contrast, with both native and Confederate threats closer and judged more real by its own leaders and residents, the Mountain West's Colorado Territory successfully raised multiple regiments in 1861-62 from a much smaller population. When it came to actually volunteering, Oregonians were apparently much tougher to convince, but reluctance to serve didn't stop their communities from demanding military protection.

As Jewell recounts, recruiting was slow from the start and did not much improve over time, the result being that the First Oregon Cavalry never came close to reaching a full complement of companies and men (though roughly 900 individuals in total served with the unit over the course of the conflict). The backgrounds and lives of many of these men before, during, and after the war, particularly the field grade and company officers, are explored in the text, though some readers will be disappointed that there is no roster appendix of the kind frequently attached to unit histories of this depth.

During the secession crisis and early stages of the war, Union supporters across the West were concerned with the presence and alleged strength, often vastly overstated, of pro-Confederate secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. It was widely believed that such groups might take advantage of the military vacuum created by the Regular Army's absence to disrupt or even overthrow loyal state and territorial governments. As the war progressed, "Copperhead" influences were added to the list of individuals and groups believed to be dangerous to Union authority. As mentioned before, the First Oregon Cavalry was tasked with suppressing such activities, though Jewell's research did not uncover the presence of any significant threats along those lines. Opposition that did prove to be real was from the native tribes of the area, particularly the Paiute, Bannock, and Shoshone bands that came to be collectively called "Snake" Indians by their settler foes. The wily Chief Paulina was regarded as particularly troublesome to those entering lands claimed by his band of Paiutes.

Several chapters recount in great detail the sequence of yearly 1862-64 summer campaigns conducted by the regiment east of the Cascades and along today's California, Nevada, and Idaho borders with Oregon. During those movements, especially when ground needed to be held for an extended period of time, the troopers of the First Oregon Cavalry received close support from the Washington Territory's own volunteer infantry regiment and later the First Oregon Infantry. Highlighting differences between how those military actions unfolded and how more typical Civil War mounted operations were performed, the unique character of the campaigns, which lasted for many hot and dry months and often crossed hundreds of miles of extremely rugged terrain, is very well expressed in the text. Hampered by home front pressures to hold entire companies back for community defense, advancing columns were small (mostly one or two companies with some additional allied Indian scouts and auxiliaries). Pack encumbrances often limited speed, and the Oregon troopers were only rarely able to bring strength to bear against sizable concentrations of warriors (the largest fight was the McCall engagement of May 18, 1864, an indecisive two-company affair). While the Oregon cavalry, in failing to crush the Snakes, did not achieve all they set out to do during the Civil War years, they did succeed to providing a measure of protection to emigrants and miners. They also managed, albeit only temporarily, to bring Paulina to the negotiating table. As the author suggests, the most that can be said is that the First Oregon played a major part in setting the stage for the ensuing Snake War of 1864-68, a very violent but mostly little-known conflict most extensively recounted in Gregory Michno's 2007 book The Deadliest Indian War in the West.

As Jewell maintains, perhaps the regiment's strongest record of success lay in its key contributions to the economic development of the state as well as that of surrounding areas. The literature exploring this larger western theme is strong, especially that tracing how California Column veterans enhanced the development of the Desert Southwest and accelerated the region's ties to the rest of the westward expanding country. As Jewell reveals, Oregon cavalry troopers, through shielding emigrants, mapping previously unexplored lands, protecting road surveying crews, and marking resources (such as water and minerals) for current use and future exploitation, had much the same impact. A very strong case is made that those achievements, on both state and national levels, represent the unit's most lasting legacy.

The memory of the men and military service of the First Oregon Cavalry languished over the decades following the war. Jewell posits persuasively that a major reason behind that suppression was that the regiment's veterans, proud though they may have been, were reluctant to publicize their own experiences after finding themselves in the midst of battle-hardened Civil War veterans who emigrated to the Far West in droves. Even an editor of the state's most prominent newspaper, the Oregonian, mocked the regiment and its veterans for contributing nothing to the war effort. Transcending such ignorance and correcting its influences, Jewell's pair of works succeed in ensuring that the historical legacy of the First Oregon Cavalry is both understood and appreciated.

Though Jewell does not fully engage with current popular debates over what degree, if any, military operations in the Great Plains, Mountain West, and Far West should be regarded as part of the same conflict fought by Union and Confederate armies far to the east, On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War and now Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest during the Civil War both enhance growing recognition of the American Civil War as continent-wide in breadth and scale. In that way, Jewell's scholarship also critically argues that fighting men who died in Oregon were just as much 'Civil War soldiers' as those celebrated for their battlefield heroics as members of the Union armies of the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Potomac. Civil War military history readers should always resolve to venture outside traditional comfort zones every once in a while, and they can certainly do that through the education lessons offered inside James Jewell's highly original and praiseworthy scholarship.

Review - "On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War: Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment" by James Jewell, ed.

[ON DUTY IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST DURING THE CIVIL WAR: Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment edited by James Robbins Jewell (University of Tennessee Press, 2018). Hardcover, maps, photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xlix,244/403. ISBN:978-1-62190-367-3. $45]

In January 1861, the prewar Oregon and California military departments were merged to form the U.S. Army's Department of the Pacific. The new administrative entity was a vast geographical expanse with initial boundaries encompassing, in part or in full, the modern states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, and Arizona. Though critical to the future plans of the country and prominent source of sectional antagonism, the Far West and its fast-growing population, burgeoning economic stature, and military contributions have until recently been largely neglected topics in the Civil War literature. In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable uptick in scholarly interest in the region's Civil War era history, with diverse studies and essay collections from authors and editors Andrew Masich, Glenna Matthews, Virginia Scharff, Tom Prezelski, Adam Arenson, Andrew Graybill, Richard Etulein, and others. On a related front, traditional resistance among scholars toward drawing significant connections between the distant Civil War and the many concurrent Indian conflicts of the frontier West has also lessened somewhat over this same period.

In terms of published books, Aurora Hunt's now quite dated The Army of the Pacific: Its Operations in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Plains Region, Mexico, etc., 1860-1866 (1951) remains perhaps the closest representation of a widely available Pacific Department history. A much greater influence upon modern scholars of the Civil War in the Far West has been Glenn Thomas Edwards's pioneering unpublished 1963 dissertation "The Department of the Pacific in the Civil War." Edwards's earlier University of Oregon Master's thesis "Oregon Regiments in the Civil War Years: Duty on the Indian Frontier" (1960) was similarly pathbreaking. One can certainly see parallel interests in the current scholarship of historian James Jewell, whose own doctoral work^* addressed the Department of the Pacific. A further outgrowth from Edwards, Jewell's newly released On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War: Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment is the only press published book of any kind that explores the soldiers, field service, and legacy of that regionally indispensable unit of volunteers.

With the departure en masse of frontier Regular Army officers and men to points east in 1861, state and territorial governments under the umbrella of the Pacific Department were largely left to their own devices when it came to self defense. To fill the vacuum, the states of California and Oregon and the territories of Washington and Nevada (the last achieving statehood in 1864) committed themselves to raising volunteer regiments. Generally speaking, the response from citizens and authorities was strong, if a bit slower in places where threats seemed most distant. California alone raised well over 15,000 troops for service throughout the West and more sparsely populated Oregon, Washington, and Nevada also contributed units of their own. Oregon's non-native population was concentrated in the Willamette Valley, where the absence of real local threats (Confederate, Indian, or otherwise) combined with, in Jewell's opinion, the foot dragging of the state's Democratic governor made recruitment a lengthy process. Nevertheless, by mid-1862 six mounted companies were organized for three-year service and attached to the First Oregon, with others to follow down the line.

Bands of Western Shoshoni, Northern Paiute, and Bannock (the last linguistically linked to the Northern Paiutes but more geographically and culturally associated with the Shoshoni) had been raiding emigrant trails, ranches, and mining camps beyond the Oregon Cascades and into Idaho throughout the 1850s, and it was these so-called "Snake Indian" enemies (a collective term for the tribal groups living in the Snake River Valley and surrounding areas) that comprised the First Oregon Cavalry's primary military target during the Civil War years. As was the case throughout the western states and territories, there were always rumors of pro-Confederate plots and potential uprisings in Oregon, but none of those threats proved credible. The primary hope of many Oregon enlistees was to fight Confederates, but most accepted that their lot would be the remain in the region and assume the military roles previously performed by the frontier Regulars. Most of the Oregon troopers were shipped to Fort Dalles (OR), Fort Klamath (OR), and Fort Walla Walla (WA) in 1862-63, where they would use those posts as bases of operation for Indian expeditions into the rugged river basins of eastern Oregon and across the border into Idaho.

As stated above, no full-length regimental history of the First Oregon Volunteer Cavalry has ever been published and On Duty does not aspire to fill that particular gap, but Jewell's highly informative general introduction (which delves significantly into unit organization, enlistment motivation factors, and select soldier backgrounds) and his incorporation throughout the volume of detailed operational summaries in support of the featured source correspondence mark the book as perhaps the next best thing. Most of the Oregon troopers did not reenlist in 1864, and Jewell also describes the efforts of the remaining few (with the help of the newly raised First Oregon Infantry) to cope with an expanding Snake War. Jewell's supporting text even extends far into the postwar period, where he recounts the impact of First Oregon Cavalry veterans on the region's political and economic development. As a limited unit study of a unique and little-known Civil War regiment, there is much to admire here.

Jewell's expansive introduction, excellent series of contextual mini-narratives, and full transcriptions of the newspaper correspondence of First Oregon soldiers (who wrote anonymously to a number of regionally prominent news outlets, including the Walla Walla Statesman, Jacksonville Oregon Sentinel, Portland Oregonian, and Salem Oregon Statesman) fill roughly the first half of the volume. For their greater historiographical value, the letter compilation will likely be of most interest to scholars and more general readers alike. Posterity is certainly fortunate in that all of the soldier-correspondents wrote vivid prose and were keen observers of both military operations and the natural world they encountered along the way.

The second half of the book is a collection of nine reminiscences, either full or fragmentary, written by ten First Oregon officers and enlisted men (one account is co-authored), all of whom were Midwestern emigrants to Oregon. Revisiting at length many of the events written about in the newspaper articles, they also offer (though colored by the passage of time) additional insights not previously addressed in the correspondence.

After a largely passive 1862, the six First Oregon companies would disperse in 1863 and attempt to coordinate a series of converging operations against the Snakes. But first the government tasked them with reestablishing official contact with the powerful Nez Perces and maintain friendly relations. That particular goal was achieved, but field operations against the Snakes using traditional enemies as scouts and guides still yielded little in the way of military success. In the end, as was the case in so many other frontier campaigns fought by U.S. forces against mobile Indian foes operating within their native lands, the Oregon troopers ended up riding vast distances for little gain.

Frustrated with the general failure to find let alone defeat the elusive Snakes, an even larger First Oregon campaign was planned for 1864. As before, that year's mixture of independent and combined operations met with no great success in engaging the enemy. A small clash on May 18 was notable for resulting in the death of Lt. Stephen Watson, the only officer the regiment would lose to enemy action during the Civil War years. As author Gregory Michno showed in his 2007 book The Deadliest Indian War in the West: The Snake Conflict, 1864-1868, the Snake War would go on to have a human cost far exceeding the tiny space it holds in the national consciousness. The letters and reminiscences collected and edited in this volume are invaluable resources for those wishing to research and study the early stages of that underappreciated conflict.

Oregon volunteers also had a very prominent non-military role to fulfill during the war. Many Civil War soldiers never saw their service as putting aside their rights and concerns as private citizens. In this way, Oregon troopers viewed wartime exploration of the countryside for potential resource development as going hand in hand with their military duties. Readers appreciated their keenly observed and highly detailed descriptions and assessments of the region's climate, flora, fauna, soil compositions, geology, and water resources. The First Oregon's mounted expeditions could last months and cover a thousand miles or more, and there is such an intense focus on the environment in their newspaper reports that Jewell is almost undoubtedly correct in his interpretation that the soldier-correspondents as a whole felt themselves obliged to inform the reading public about future development opportunities in those newly explored areas. While one might reasonably suppose the Civil War to have briefly postponed western consolidation and expansion, the book also makes clear that those processes were not slowed much by the conflict, if at all.

Complaints are very minor. There are a few too many typos in the book to escape notice. Also, the cartography, which consists primarily of sparsely featured area maps, is less helpful than it could have been. Maps tracing the pathways taken by the many eastern Oregon military expeditions recounted in the text (with notable dates and applicable skirmish locations labeled) would have significantly enhanced reader understanding of those events.

The first venture into the Far West by University of Tennessee Press's venerable Voices of the Civil War series, On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War is a unique contribution on a number of grounds. Together with James Jewell's expert editing, annotation, and historical commentary, the volume's extensive compilation of First Oregon letters and memoirs offers readers the best single resource available for learning about the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment. Like other frontier studies before it, particularly those examining the role of Union veterans in the evolution of the Desert Southwest, the book also very appropriately sees Oregon's Civil War volunteers as key forces in the drive to expand U.S. government control over the lands of the Pacific Northwest and further the development the region's abundant natural resources. Highly recommended.


* - Jewell, James Robbins. "Left Arm of the Republic: The Department of the Pacific During the Civil War." Ph.D. diss., West Virginia Univ., 2006. It is currently under development for publication.

Review - "Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands" by William Kiser

[Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xi,184/284. ISBN:978-0-8061-6026-9. $32.95]

Though many nineteenth-century Americans viewed the Desert Southwest as a danger-filled wasteland unworthy of national possession and development, William Kiser's Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands argues strongly that New Mexico eventually proved to be a vital cog in the process of westward expansion, one that the U.S. government invested a tremendous amount of manpower and national treasure in managing. While it's stating the obvious that incorporating all territory lying between California and Texas would be an essential step in the United States becoming a truly continental nation, Kiser's study, which is heavily informed by his previous book-length examinations of Mesilla Valley territorial history, regional Apache resistance, and the Southwest's peonage and captive-taking traditions, richly illustrates a host of unique factors that together demonstrate the exceptional nature of New Mexico's place in Manifest Destiny.

Missouri is popularly known as the stepping off point for the famous continental emigrant trails that tens of thousands of Americans used to cross the vast central plains and mountains of the West to the Pacific, but the book effectively reminds us that Missouri and its own enterprising citizens also played an equally important role in the commercial development of New Mexico. With the town of Independence marking the beginning of the Santa Fe trail, Missourians took advantage of this hugely profitable economic pipeline to become prominent New Mexican businessmen and land owners, aided along the way by newly independent Mexico's desires to cast aside the draconian Imperial Spanish trade restrictions that retarded progress and then attract American entrepreneurs to the area with promises of easy citizenship, generous land grants, and low taxes. Even when corrupt Mexican governors levied exorbitant (and illegal) import fees on American merchants, the foreign goods were in such high demand locally that profits were high. New Mexico was thus transformed into a significant center of regional trade. As was the case with Texas and other borderlands characterized by elastic allegiances and hybridized citizenship, it was hoped that these measures would bind the newcomers to Mexico, but it quickly came to be more the case that they inadvertently accelerated the Americanization of the Desert Southwest. When tensions between the U.S. and Mexico boiled over into war in 1846, previously respected and highly successful American immigrants (even those who had married into local families and had to some degree assimilated into local culture) became targeted, often violently, as unwanted outsiders.

From the late Imperial Spanish period onward, military conflict and occupation were mainstays of the New Mexican experience, and this is one of the chief themes of the book. Early in the nineteenth century, army-sponsored exploration teams such as those led by Zebulon Pike mapped and marked southwestern trails. In 1846, New Mexico was conquered by General Stephen W. Kearny's small American army. In an example of the military's tendency to involve itself in civilian affairs in New Mexico, often without official approval, Kearny's proclamations regarding citizenship for the inhabitants got him into hot water with government authorities back home. As the book shows, naive U.S. expectations that New Mexicans would readily embrace the nationality change and its promises of newfound freedom, prosperity, and protection from hostile Indians were quickly dashed, particularly after the shocking brutality of the Taos Rebellion (the story of which, along with its suppression, is recounted well in the volume). Even so, by the end of the U.S. war with Mexico a growing number of residents became reconciled to becoming Americans, especially if the U.S. Army could physically protect them better than the neglectful Imperial Spanish and Mexican militaries.

However, shielding residents from hostile Ute, Navajo, Mescalero Apache, and Comanche raiders would require a huge proportion of the U.S. Army's manpower and budget, and the book covers in some detail the country's efforts, at exorbitant cost, to overcome this huge obstacle to New Mexican settlement and development. Kiser ably traces how conflicts over civilian vs. military oversight of the "Indian problem," an often wasteful army strategy on the ground that swung inconsistently between limited and total warfare, and the failed assumptions of the reservation system together meant that promises of protection could not be met during the decade following the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexican War. An early understanding was achieved with the Utes, but the Navajos were not broken as a regional power until the end of the Civil War and the Comanche and Apache conflicts would endure for far longer (into the 1870s and 1880s respectively). Stabilizing New Mexico and assimilating its population would prove to be a much longer and far more difficult and expensive process than most had anticipated.

In the 1850s, New Mexico also became a key component of national debates over slavery and popular sovereignty. While there were never more than a few dozen blacks (free or slave) residing in the territory during the decade and neither section believed the Desert Southwest conducive to any kind of large-scale slave labor economy, the book shows how the issue of a proslavery New Mexico was largely an ideological and political one (with two future Senate votes as a prize) rather than a practical consideration. Most interestingly, and perhaps uniquely, Kiser meaningfully integrates the centuries-old New Mexican traditions of debt peonage and captive labor into the national slavery debates, and he clearly demonstrates that New Mexico weighed heavily on the minds of faraway northern politicians and abolitionists throughout this period. The most conspiracy-minded among them feared that proslavery advocates would use those long-standing examples of enforced servitude as stepping stones for the introduction and acceptance of racial slavery, a form of bondage that held little to no favor among the locals. As the book demonstrates, there was some justification for these fears, as proponents of black slavery often justified the institution's placement in New Mexico as simply a reasonable extension of the established labor culture of the region. Indeed, Kiser's book performs an important service in highlighting popular action against Southwest peonage (which was finally formally abolished in 1868 but lasted even longer in extralegal form) as an underappreciated corollary to the abolitionist movement.

Like it did with the national slavery debates, New Mexico also figured prominently in the sectional contest over the building of a transcontinental railroad. Kiser offers a good short summary of the various northern, central, and southern surveys conducted, and shows that a pair of routes through New Mexico were objectively advantageous for railroad construction. However, the radical nature of sectional politics made it a certainty that no consensus agreement on a transcontinental route could be reached during the late antebellum period. Though contemporary commentators viewed the railroad almost entirely in economic terms, Kiser sees as equally important the ideological victory (in terms of the spread of people and ideas) that would be gained by whichever section won the transcontinental railroad race. While this is a valid point to some degree, and the author also concedes the oddness of the assumption at the time that there might be only one railroad spanning the vast American West, Kiser perhaps overestimates the material and ideological threat of southern expansion given that proslavery forces couldn't even succeed in next-door Kansas.

The final section of the book covers the Civil War years in New Mexico, when both sides determined that the territory was vital to their competing continental aspirations and worthy of significant military investment. The early-war Confederate invasion of New Mexico, and the Union Army's success in repelling it, have already been expansively documented in numerous fine works, and Kiser offers readers a sound summary of those events and synthesis of the existing scholarship. Solid overviews of the wartime campaigns against remaining Indian threats and Union measures aimed at thwarting any possible Confederate offensive renewal are also included. Along the way, Kiser cites Hispano recruitment of New Mexico volunteer units and pro-Union militias in large numbers [for a truly exhaustive examination of this topic see Jerry Thompson's A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers and Militia (2015)] as evidence of an increasing success in Americanization, but it's also very likely that hatred of Texans was a motivating factor at least as important.

In all of the above-mentioned ways, Coast-to-Coast Empire very effectively situates New Mexico as key nineteenth-century battleground and conduit of American capitalism, culture, politics, and ideas. As the book argues, between Mexican independence in 1821 and the end of the American Civil War, New Mexico became a nexus to a host of issues related to the idea of Manifest Destiny, including domestic and international trade, military conquest and occupation, Indian wars, slavery debates, and the transcontinental railroad. William Kiser is rapidly becoming a leading authority on many aspects of Desert Southwest history, and this study represents another meaningful contribution on his part to that growing body of borderlands literature.  Recommended.

Review - "'An Arch Rebel Like Myself': Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas" by Armistead & Arconti

["An Arch Rebel Like Myself": Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas
by Gene C. Armistead and Robert D. Arconti (McFarland, 2018). Softcover, maps, photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,181/246. ISBN:978-1-4766-7461-2. $39.95]

Like many of his fellow opportunity-seeking countrymen, Pennsylvania's Daniel Showalter undertook the arduous journey to California in 1852 with hopes of striking it rich in the gold fields. He settled in Mariposa County, and eight years later was elected to represent his fellow citizens in the State Assembly. Despite his northern birth, Showalter aligned himself politically with Southern Democrats and played an active role in the intensely partisan three-party legislative debates that occurred during the weeks leading up to the outbreak of Civil War. He also holds the historical distinction, if you can call it that, of fighting California's last political duel, when on May 25, 1861 he shot and killed fellow Democrat Charles Piercy. When it became clear that California would remain solidly pro-Union, Showalter determined to leave the state for Confederate territory. However, his traveling party was intercepted at the state border, and Showalter would be incarcerated for five months. Upon release he once again set out for Texas, where he finally obtained a field grade officer commission in the Confederate Army's 4th Cavalry Regiment of the Arizona Brigade. His 1863-65 Civil War service consisted mostly of protecting the northern frontier in 1863 and repelling various Union incursions along the state's Gulf and international borders during the balance of the conflict. While his military career was rather distinguished, Showalter's life ended in 1866 in ignominious fashion, when he died from tetanus after being seriously wounded in a drunken confrontation in a Mexican bar. His historically significant and largely untold life story is examined for the first time in comprehensive fashion in Gene Armistead and Robert Arconti's "An Arch Rebel Like Myself": Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas.

As is often the case when researching Civil War figures, the authors weren't gifted with a biographical subject who left behind an abundance of primary source material. Showalter died fairly young at the age of 35 and little in the way of his personal papers have been discovered beyond a few letters. Most of the available documentation is related to his official duties as California State Assemblyman and as a Confederate officer during the last half of the war. Therefore, it's not too surprising that the bulk of Armistead and Arconti's narrative concentrates on those two facets of Showalter's life. The authors do a fine job of filling in gaps with information gleaned from other sources, offering reasoned speculation on Showalter's likely activities during the frustratingly frequent periods of time when primary evidence is almost entirely absent (ex. during much of Showalter's 1863 military service in North Texas and Indian Territory).

The 1861 session of the State Assembly would not be remembered fondly in the annals of California legislative history. Partisan rancor meant that it would take well over 100 ballots just to chose a Speaker, and party wrangling between Republicans, Douglas Democrats, and Breckinridge Democrats over issues as small as the staffing of the state asylum meant that little was accomplished. In mid-April, Showalter was selected Speaker pro tem. Amid the heated atmosphere following the firing on Fort Sumter, Douglas Democrat Charles W. Piercy objected to Showalter's attempt to explain a vote before the assembly and, taking offense to Showalter's response, challenged the Breckinridge Democrat to a duel. Even the newspapers of the time noted the silliness of dueling over such an insignificant matter, but the event nevertheless took place and Showalter killed Piercy. With dueling illegal in the state, Showalter adopted a low profile to avoid prosecution. Both legislative session and duel are recounted at length in the book, with both sections constituting fresh contributions to the published record.

When the September 1861 election cycle went decisively for pro-Union candidates and his arrest as a duelist and prominent southern sympathizer seemed ever more likely, Showalter determined to flee the state. He joined a sizable band of like-minded individuals and set out to cross the southern deserts to Texas. Since Showalter was the group's most prominent member, he is often portrayed in the literature as the leader of the "Showalter Party," but the book persuasively argues that a man named Theodore Wilson was actually in charge. Richly detailed accounts of this and other Confederate odysseys from California that also meticulously reference the coordinated efforts by Union authorities to block their passage and arrest their members (a topic that very well might merit a book-length study of its own) are rarely found in the Civil War literature, so this section of the book constitutes a rather remarkable case study. Captured in November 1861, Showalter and the rest of the men were confined at Fort Yuma for several months (often at hard labor) before being released upon taking an oath of allegiance. In April 1862, Showalter was finally allowed to leave the state, and reached Texas by the end of the year after a long, arduous journey by land and sea.

Upon arrival in Texas, Showalter appears to have been attached to General John B. Magruder's staff as an aide, with a temporary rank of captain of artillery. Though official details are very sketchy, the book confirms that he played some role in the battles of Galveston and Sabine Pass in that provisional capacity. Showalter would eventually get a formal commission as Lieutenant Colonel of the aforementioned 4th Cavalry Regiment of the Arizona Brigade. With recruits coming from California, Missouri, and Texas and equipment in short supply, it took nearly a year for the unit to even approach a full complement of companies. However, circumstances would not wait, and Showalter was ordered to take a battalion of the 4th to North Texas in 1863, where they fought Union forces in Indian Territory and helped secure the border from Southern Plains Indian raids for the balance of that year. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, official documents and other sources associated with the 4th from this period are so scarce that only a vague outline of Showalter's activities can be pieced together, mostly by inference.

The source situation improves in 1864, when Showalter and his men were transferred to southern Texas to fight under Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford's command in the Rio Grande Valley. The book documents several small battles and skirmishes fought there, including actions at Rancho Las Rucias on June 25 and Brownsville on July 27. Showalter would become embroiled in controversy stemming from the September 6-7, 1864 fight at Palmito Ranch. According to some accounts, which often erroneously compressed the two days of fighting into a single day, Showalter was so incapacitated by drink that one of his subordinates, Lt. Col. George Giddings, was forced to relieve him of command and save the day. Though the authors find the drinking charges difficult to refute, the fact that Showalter was able to hold off a combined Union and Mexican Cortinista force that greatly outnumbered his own for most of two days seems to at least refute the notion that he was falling down drunk. According to the authors, claims from some writers that Giddings took over the battle are not credible. Unfortunately, no record has been left of the court-martial proceedings, or even the charges and specifications, just a vague statement from Ford's memoirs written decades after the war ended that Showalter was cleared. The 1865 Battle of Palmito Ranch greatly overshadows its predecessor, and this section of the book comprises a significant contribution to the historiography of the lesser-known first Battle of Palmito Ranch.

Though months passed with his official status in limbo, Showalter eventually returned to head the regiment once more and was with it when the 4th, like so many other Confederate Trans-Mississippi units, disbanded itself rather than formally surrender. Showalter chose exile in Mexico over returning to a California that very likely held no future for him. Settling in Mazatlan, he was mortally wounded in a hotel bar fracas in 1866.

In the end, Armistead and Arconti offer readers a judicious assessment of their subject's life and career. Evidence doesn't exist to paint a full portrait of Showalter's family life and personality, but the historical record uncovered by the authors seems to suggest that he was an able politician and competent military leader. While he was never really placed in a situation where he could shine as an independent commander, Showalter's abilities were respected by superiors and subordinates alike. On more than one occasion, commanders praised his regiment for its exceptional dependability (and similarly lamented its transfer elsewhere). Given the unit's overall effectiveness, it's also more than likely that Showalter was a proficient organizer and administrator amid the trying logistical conditions of the Trans-Mississippi West. It's also clear that he was a binge drinker. Though a bout of heavy drinking directly contributed to Showalter's death, the authors are of the opinion that alcohol use did not significantly impair his military judgment at any point during the war, with the 1864 incident at Palmito Ranch more likely occurring after the battle than during it (though we will perhaps never know the truth). The book builds a reasonable case that much of the existing historiography related to Showalter's alleged alcoholism is based on writers' uncritical acceptance of thin, secondhand evidence.

An issue that will undoubtedly figure prominently in the minds of readers is why did Showalter, a native Pennsylvanian who never resided in the South, support the Southern Democrat wing of the party and later join the Confederate Army. The authors raise a good point that his native Greene County, PA bordered Virginia (now West Virginia) on two sides and was heavily influenced by southern demographics and political culture. It was also one of the small minority of Pennsylvania Counties that went for McClellan in the 1864 presidential election. This environmental upbringing, combined with likely significant California associations with southern miners in Mariposa County, makes Showalter's ideological outlook, if still unusual, at least more understandable. What was behind his desire to actively serve in the Confederate Army, as opposed to just sitting out the conflict, can only be a topic of speculation.

With previous treatments of Showalter's life limited to a dated journal article and scattered published materials frequently rife with inaccuracies, Armistead and Arconti's modern book-length biography marks a vast improvement of affairs. Showalter was an important actor in California politics during the secession crisis and a significant military figure in Confederate Texas over the last half of the war, so his life certainly merits a deeper study of this kind. "An Arch Rebel Like Myself" effectively navigates the serious source constraints imposed upon its authors to become what might very well be the final word on the military and political careers of Daniel Showalter. Anyone interested in Civil War era California and Texas will greatly benefit from reading this fine biography.

Review of Alford, ed. - "UTAH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: The Written Record"

[Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record edited by Kenneth L. Alford (Arthur H. Clark, 2017). Cloth, map, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. 864 pp. ISBN:978-0-87062-441-4. $60]

When it comes to Civil War-era Utah Territory, undoubtedly the event foremost in the minds of readers is the 1857-58 Utah (or Mormon) War, a conflict that also reinforces the popular view today of the incompetency of the Buchanan administration. However, a handful of studies have specifically examined the 1861-65 years in Utah in a fruitful manner and are deserving of wider recognition. The one that stands out most as the classic scholarly account is E.B. Long's The Saints and the Union (1981). Another noteworthy title is the essay anthology Civil War Saints, edited by Kenneth Alford, from 2013. The most recent full-length historical study, John Gary Maxwell's The Civil War Years in Utah, offers perhaps the most critical assessment of Utah's wartime loyalty to the U.S.^*

Kenneth Alford's latest project is a massive documentary history titled Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record. Alford begins with an event timeline, one helpfully arranged in two parallel columns so that readers can readily match in time Utah news with political and military happenings elsewhere in the country. The timeline takes the long view, starting with the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846 and concluding in 1870 with the ratification of the 15th Amendment.

Incorporating current scholarship, the next chapter is devoted to an introductory narrative history of the Civil War years in Utah. The text captures well the main themes of Utah's Civil War experience, explaining its geographical significance astride continental lines of communication, the antagonism between church officials on one side and federal appointees and the army on the other, tribal conflicts, and territorial frustrations over the continual reshaping of Utah's borders and consistent congressional denial of its bid for statehood. Alford's account of Utah's relationship with the U.S. during the Civil War is much more church-friendly (for lack of a better word) than Maxwell's, for instance. While Maxwell believes that the LDS leadership demonstrated clear pro-Confederate sympathies, Alford adamantly maintains that no such evidence exists to support such a broad accusation and confidently asserts that Utah was heavily invested in Union victory. A healthy debate of their opposing views would make for interesting reading.

The majority of the text (Chapter 4's nearly 500 pages) is comprised of fully transcribed Official Records documents pertaining to Utah. Most can be found in O.R. Series 1 and are concentrated in Volumes 48 and 50, with a relative handful taken from Series 2 and 3. The total record count is 504, and the book adopts its own convenient numbering system (OR-1 through OR-504) for use of the volume's cross-referencing features and tools. As one would expect, the O.R. documents included in the book consist of orders, reports, post returns, organizational and command assignments, and correspondence of all kinds. In the book, each record is listed in chronological order and all are properly cited. Clarifying editor's notes also occasionally appear.

The next largest section of the book (Chapter 5) is devoted to records of types similar to those above but not found in the O.R. Instead these documents reside in the National Archives, Utah state archives, newspaper archives, and various published works. There are 155 of these included in the book, organized as UT-1 through UT-155. Their "(g)eneral themes include security on the Overland Trail, Utah's relationship to the rest of the nation, military affairs at Camp Douglas [the army post established by California volunteer colonel Patrick E. Connor and situated a short distance outside Salt Lake City] or within the Department or District of Utah, and Indian relations [many documents address the controversial Bear River battle and alleged massacre]." As many of the records in this chapter are handwritten documents, three sets of eyes were employed to ensure the transcriptions were accurate as possible.

Numerous appendices contribute even more useful features to the volume. The following is a brief rundown of all of them. Appendix A is a glossary of nineteenth-century terms and abbreviations. The Chronological Records List contained in Appendix B takes the OR-# and UT-# series of records and arranges them in four vertical columns organized by date. Appendix C addresses documents contained in the O.R. Supplement (100 volumes) published by Broadfoot, which have not been digitized yet. Presumably due to copyright concerns, only citations are present here (with some fair use sampling). Appendix D contains more O.R. records that are Utah-related but not found using the same keyword searches used in Chapter 4. The federally legislated border adjustments to Utah Territory, specifically the four that occurred during the war in the years 1861-62, are discussed in Appendix E, and F lists and describes Utah's assignments to various military departments, divisions, and districts. Appendix G provides a list of military units assigned to Utah Territory or Overland Trail patrol during the Civil War, and, finally, Appendix H lists OR-# and UT-# by sender and receiver name.

The bibliography shows the extensive range of primary and secondary research that went into the volume's creation by Alford and his team of assistants. The index also appears to be of the more helpful variety (i.e. wide topical coverage and many subheadings). With its single-volume assemblage of a mountain of diverse source material (some of it never before published), Utah and the American Civil War will be an invaluable reference tool for future researchers to use.



* - Links to Civil War Utah titles referenced in the first paragraph above: The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War by E.B. Long (Illinois, 1981), Civil War Saints by Kenneth L. Alford (BYU, 2013), and The Civil War Years in Utah: The Kingdom of God and the Territory That Did Not Fight by John Gary Maxwell (Oklahoma, 2016).

Click here to view more CWBA reviews of OUP titles

Review of Hurley - "CALIFORNIA AND THE CIVIL WAR"

[California and the Civil War by Richard Hurley (Arcadia Publishing & The History Press, 2017). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:144/176. ISBN:978-1-62585-824-5. $21.99]

Many books and articles have examined important aspects of California's Civil War, but the literature has yet to produce a full-length and truly comprehensive study of the state's role in the conflict. There's little doubt that today's Californians as a whole are largely unaware of just how deeply and directly the 1861-65 war affected the Golden State, and Richard Hurley's California and the Civil War gamely attempts to inform the modern public about a significant moment in their history. A sweeping overview intended for a popular audience, the book is a more than solid introduction to the topic.

In the beginning, Hurley provides readers with a brief synopsis of California politics and society during the years leading up to the war. Throughout the antebellum decade of statehood, Southern Democrats (the "Chivalry") enjoyed an outsized influence in elected state positions and congressional representation, though the infamous Broderick-Terry duel and other events eroded their support. Abraham Lincoln won California with only 32% of the vote in 1860, but, as was the case in many other closely divided states, the outbreak of Civil War dramatically realigned political power in California. The combination of a fusion of War Democrats with surging Republicans, meant that Southern Democrat influence declined steadily in 1862 and accelerated drastically during the 1863-64 war years. By the end of the 1864 national election, political realignment was convincingly solidified. Lincoln easily captured the state with over 58% of the vote, and the Union Party had an overwhelmingly secure hold on the California legislature.

The activities of several prominent individuals are profiled by Hurley. For example, the book traces the career of Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King and shows how King became perhaps the greatest evangelist for the Union cause in the state, his tireless efforts even credited for causing his early death. Apocryphal or not, an admiring Lincoln is said to have deemed King "the man who saved California for the Union." On the other side, Hurley praises Albert Sidney Johnston (soon to be the Confederacy's second-ranking general) for not actively working toward creating another bloody front of the war inside California's borders. While others have noted Johnston's unwillingness to promote the secessionist cause while still in the uniform of the United States, it does seem to be a considerable exaggeration to personally credit Johnston with the lack of robust guerrilla action in the state. Civil War guerrilla conflicts were not typically associated with West Point trained officers, who generally denounced the practice and its tendency to sow domestic chaos and detract from the conventional war effort. It's much more likely the case that Johnston never even considered the guerrilla option before leaving California, let alone rejected it upon sober reflection.

California and the Civil War perceptively notes the greatly disproportionate financial influence of California and Californians. A steady stream of wartime bullion shipments to the east fed a voracious federal treasury and helped stabilize U.S. paper currency. Partly through the fundraising efforts of the aforementioned Starr King, individual Californians donated vast sums to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, eventually reaching one quarter of the total raised during the war. As an example of California's patriotic generosity, the book highlights the story of the repeated auctioning of 'Gridley's flour sack' (an event made famous in Mark Twain's Roughing It, enhanced as it probably was in the telling).

When the Regular Army abandoned forts and posts throughout the vast West in the opening moments of the war, it was left to California volunteers to fill the void. Hurley clearly appreciates the magnitude of this important military contribution, and his book includes numerous accounts of California's new role as protector of the western trails and settlements as well as a potent fighting force in its own right. Chapters cover the march of the famed California Column across the Desert Southwest to New Mexico and the critical role of California regiments in the conduct of punitive campaigns against the Apache, Navajo, Comanche, Kiowa and Shoshone. The Union officers that led these operations (ex. James Carleton, Patrick Connor, Christopher "Kit" Carson, and others) are profiled in the book. Hurley also spotlights the noteworthy eastern theater involvement of Californians, which started with the famous "California Hundred" and was eventually expanded into a full battalion.

As mentioned above, the book is interested in exploring the question of why California, with its Border State demographics, was able to avoid the ugly brand of all-out inner civil war that devastated Missouri and Kentucky. There is no clear answer to this in the book, but the author persuasively suggests that the state's extreme isolation, with its inherent lack of cross-border safe harbors and nearby supporting conventional forces, effectively dampened the prospects of pro-Confederate bushwhacking. Other factors undoubtedly contributed, as well. Repressive wartime measures (e.g. newspaper suppression and arbitrary incarceration of civilians) were applied to California by military authorities, but they lacked the broad extremity of those practiced in the Border States far off to the east. Also, many men went to California in the first place to escape the nation's domestic troubles and were not keen on introducing then anew into their adopted homes. That said, the book does cover some isolated pro-Confederate irregular actions that did occur in the state. The most well known of these is the failed plot to seize the schooner J.M. Chapman in San Francisco and convert it into a Confederate privateer. Some tiny partisan groups did form in California (with the Santa Cruz Mountains being a popular refuge), but, in common with guerrilla colleagues elsewhere, it's unclear if their self-proclaimed Confederate ties were simply an excuse to perpetrate criminal acts. One of these bands, Captain Ingram's Partisan Rangers, perpetrated a lucrative stagecoach heist in June 1864, but the robbers were quickly tracked down by local law enforcement and dispersed.

Typical with books of this type, the research approach employed by the author is one of synthesis, and those sources used in the book are indeed primarily informed selections from the published literature. The text is annotated, and Hurley's bibliography also usefully provides brief critical commentary on every source listed there.

California and the Civil War is definitely worthy of recommendation as a highly accessible introduction to the topic. One hopes that the book will achieve some measure of success in raising awareness of the state's many important contributions to Union victory.

Review of Masich - "CIVIL WAR IN THE SOUTHWEST BORDERLANDS, 1861-1867"

[Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). Hardcover, 2 maps, photos, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:305/464. ISBN:978-0-8061-5572-2. $34.95]

Before the outbreak of the American Civil War, a delicate international and multiethnic balance of power existed in North America's Desert Southwest, a vast area that encompassed Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas, as well as the northern Mexican border states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Andrew Masich's Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 makes a strong case that the Civil War time period in the region is better understood as a multitude of concurrent 'civil wars' fought among and between numerous indigenous groups, U.S. Hispanos, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans. While the 1861-65 conflict between Union and Confederate forces did not cause these wars, it did create the necessary conditions for the outbreak of unprecedented scales of violent interaction and a drastic reordering of power. By 1867, the previous social, political, and economic order was largely swept away, and the United States was able to establish clear hegemony over the Southwest lands north of the border.

As most Civil War readers are aware, when a shooting war between the United States and newly formed Confederate States of America loomed, the Regular Army was forced to abandon many of its most isolated Southwest outposts. Before U.S. volunteer units could arrive to take their places, a significant power vacuum existed, one that was eagerly exploited by powerful native groups like the Apache and Navajo. The Confederacy also had its eyes on expansion. Already abundantly documented elsewhere, events related to the 1861-62 Confederate invasion of the Southwest and the convergence of Union columns from California and Colorado to oppose it are briefly but quite adequately recounted in the book. Assisted by Hispano and Indian allies, these federal troops were able to repel the Confederates and greatly curtail, but not eliminate, hostile indigenous threats. While hopes of establishing shortened supply lines using Mexican ports proved politically impossible, Union authorities were able to forge relatively friendly and cooperative relations with Juarista forces in northern Mexico. By 1867, the international border was a much more regulated boundary than ever before. Another major Anglo-American theme in the book is the Union triumph of logistics, which enabled their military forces to defeat the Confederate invaders (whose own practically non-existent support network proved disastrous) and operate against indigenous enemies year round (which often proved decisive during the winter months). In terms of recognizing the instrumental part U.S. volunteers, particularly California Column veterans, had in developing the infrastructure, mineral wealth, and economies of the Southwest territories during and after the war, Masich has already made important contributions to this well-established literature, and these findings are summarized in the book, as well.

In 1860, Mexico was emerging from its own Civil War, which resulted in the formation of a liberal government under Benito Juarez. Peace would prove elusive, however, as European powers intervened to collected repudiated debts. Even worse, the French committed large military forces to invade the interior. These captured Mexico City in 1863 and installed puppet emperor Maximilian I the following year. During this dangerous time of renewed civil war, northern Mexico was a Republican Juarista stronghold, and, as Masich shows in the book, even limited Mexican cooperation with Union forces across the border significantly hampered the mobility of the hostile tribes of the Southwest, who commonly used the international boundary for temporary shelter from pursuit. There was also another important connection. With the end of the American Civil War, a massive U.S. military buildup along the international boundary helped convince Napoleon III to withdraw his forces, and surplus arms and supplies smuggled across the border to Republican armies loyal to Juarez hastened Imperial defeat by 1867.

Hispanos also played a major role in the civil wars of the Southwest. According to Masich's research, while U.S. Hispanos comprised 60% of the population of Arizona and New Mexico, they suffered over 80% of civilian deaths at the hands of hostile tribal raiders during the 1861-67 period and were the primary victims of property and livestock loss. Having no input to their recent change in nationality, the Hispano population possessed no real ideological loyalty to the United States but nevertheless welcomed the increased civil order and protection that U.S. volunteers brought to the region. The book examines at suitable length the integration of New Mexico volunteers into Union forces and their contributions to the war; however, little mention is made of the extensive militia system created by territorial officials for local defense. Studied at great depth in border historian Jerry Thompson's recently published magisterial history of New Mexico's Civil War volunteers and militia, the organization had many problems, but it did free up large numbers of more active soldiers for service in the field against Indian and Confederate enemies.

Among the indigenous populations of New Mexico and Arizona, centuries-old rivalries meant that few bands actively sought alliances to combat the increasing strength of their Anglo, Hispano, and Mexican enemies. These divisions between, and even within, various tribal groups were eagerly exploited by their opponents, who frequently employed highly motivated Indians as auxiliaries and scouts. The more agriculturally-based and less mobile tribes that lived along the Gila and lower Colorado rivers were the frequent victims of fast-moving Apache and Navajo raiders, and they developed a mutually beneficial relationship with Union forces during the Civil War that is well described in the book. Federal troops aided these more sedentary tribes by attacking and rounding up their most dangerous enemies for confinement on far away reservation lands. In return, the Pima, Maricopa, and other Gila River tribes were able to sell to the army vast quantities of food and fodder sorely needed by troops like the California Column for use while trekking across the vast deserts of the Southwest.

All of the above mentioned interrelationships and civil wars are described and analyzed at great length in the book. As Masich also shows, the massive regional disruption that occurred during 1861-65 also led to the introduction of new forces into the region. The Anglo-Hispano-Indian alliance that greatly weakened the previously dominant Navajo and Apache raiding groups in the Southwest during the Civil War years also directly led to opportunities for further expansion by the Southern Plains tribes, who swept deeper into West Texas and eastern parts of New Mexico. This growing threat led authorities to order Kit Carson to lead a large military expedition against them in 1864, one that nearly led to disaster for the U.S. volunteers and their Indian auxiliaries at Adobe Walls.

The differing martial cultures of the study's competing ethnic and national groups have been well documented over the years, so there aren't any particularly surprising discoveries or interpretations on that score. The primary contrast in the book is between the generations-old cycle of violence consisting of raids (for livestock, tools, captives, and slaves), reprisals, and revenge-seeking between Indians and Hispanos in the Southwest and the arrival of Anglo-American armies that conducted sustained campaigns aimed at total subjugation. Though Masich often uses terms like "total war" and "extermination" as elements of warfare against the Apache and Navajo, he does clearly acknowledge (though only near the end of the book) that extermination was never U.S. or Confederate policy and that appalling public exterminationist rhetoric was primarily attention-seeking in nature, only rarely paired with actual deeds. It was also most typically the case that individual officers who espoused such extreme views, few as they were, were quickly overruled by superiors or removed entirely from their leadership posts.

Masich's research effort is impressive. Along the way, he scoured archives in both the U.S. and Mexico, and also delved deeply into the rarely used Indian Depredation Records. According to the author, these records (filed between 1796 and 1920) remain very poorly organized. Though clearly only a small percentage of violent acts were actually documented on paper, much information [ex. casualties, property losses by value and type, raiding patterns, tactics and frequencies by group, and much more] useful to scholars can be gleaned from the depredation files. The author found almost 700 records directly related to the time period and region under consideration in the book and, in addition to incorporating much of this information into the main narrative, was able to compile the data into some useful charts and tables. These and others collected from additional sources are placed in the book's appendix. Among other things they clearly illustrate the enormous uptick in violence during the 1860s and the groups most responsible for it.

Borderland studies are very popular at the moment. Many of the military and cultural interactions described in this book have been discussed and analyzed at length elsewhere in the literature, but Andrew Masich is the first scholar to create a powerful synthesis that meaningfully integrates all of these conflicts and relationships together in a single volume. His work in Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 freshly defines the American Civil War period as a uniquely critical moment of social, political, and economic transformation in the Southwest region of North America. The author's deft use of interconnected civil wars as a framework for understanding these changes also ensures that the important parts played by each group in the reordered ethnic hierarchy are appropriately recognized.

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