Andrew E. Masich

Still the least-understood theater of the Civil War, the Southwest Borderlands saw not only Union and Confederate forces clashing but Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos struggling for survival, power, and dominance on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. While other scholars have examined individual battles, Andrew E. Masich is the first to analyze these conflicts as interconnected civil wars. Based on previously overlooked Indian Depredation Claim records and a wealth of other sources, this book is both a close-up history of the Civil War in the region and an examination of the war-making traditions of its diverse peoples. Along the border, Masich argues, the Civil War played out as a collision between three warrior cultures. Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos brought their own weapons and tactics to the struggle, but they also shared many traditions. Before the war, the three groups engaged one another in cycles of raid and reprisal involving the taking of livestock and human captives, reflecting a peculiar mixture of conflict and interdependence. When U.S. regular troops were withdrawn in 1861 to fight in the East, the resulting power vacuum led to unprecedented violence in the West. Indians fought Indians, Hispanos battled Hispanos, and Anglos vied for control of the Southwest, while each group sought allies in conflicts related only indirectly to the secession crisis. When Union and Confederate forces invaded the Southwest, Anglo soldiers, Hispanos, and sedentary Indian tribes forged alliances that allowed them to collectively wage a relentless war on Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos. Mexico's civil war and European intervention served only to enlarge the conflict in the borderlands. When the fighting subsided, a new power hierarchy had emerged and relations between the region's inhabitants, and their nations, forever changed. Masich's perspective on borderlands history offers a single, cohesive framework for understanding this power shift while demonstrating the importance of transnational and multicultural views of the American Civil War and the Southwest Borderlands.

Bull Run, Gettysburg, Appomattox. For Americans, these battlegrounds, all located in the eastern United States, will forever be associated with the Civil War. But few realize that the Civil War was also fought far to the west of these sites. The westernmost battle of the war took place in the remote deserts of the future state of Arizona.In this first book-length account of the Civil War in Arizona, Andrew E. Masich offers both a lively narrative history of the all-but-forgotten California Column in wartime Arizona and a rare compilation of letters written by the volunteer soldiers who served in the U.S. Army from 1861 to 1866. Enriched by Masich's meticulous annotation, these letters provide firsthand testimony of the grueling desert conditions the soldiers endured as they fought on many fronts.Southwest Book AwardBorder Regional Library AssociationSouthwest Book of the YearPima County Public LibraryNYMAS Civil War Book AwardNew York Military Affairs Symposium

Never before have scholars attempted to match Plains ledgerbook drawings with specific events. But in Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, the earliest of the extant Cheyenne ledgerbooks, the authors have painstakingly matched many of the drawings with known events, such as the 1865 sack of Julesburg, Colorado, and the 1865 battles of Rush Creek, Platte River Bridge, and Tongue River in the Dakota and Montana territories. Also identified are such noted Dog Soliders as Tall Bull, Big Crow, Chirlwind, Feathered Bear, White Horse, Lean Bear and Wolf with Plenty of Hair. Using Cheyenne sources -- both past and present -- as well as US military records, legal depositions, diaries, and contemporary newspaper accounts, the author analyse each drawing, identifying the warriors and describing the actions depicted. With more than 100 beautifully reproduced colour drawings, this volume presents not only a groundbreaking departure from standard ledgerbook interpretation but also a riveting story of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers making a last stand for their existence as free people.