The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

A dramatic, riveting, and deeply researched narrative account of the epic battle for the West all through the Civil Conflict, revealing slightly-identified, massively vital episode in American historical past.

In The 3-Cornered Conflict Megan Kate Nelson finds the attention-grabbing historical past of the Civil Conflict within the American West. Exploring the connections some of the Civil Conflict, the Indian wars, and western enlargement, Nelson reframes the technology as one in all nationwide struggle—related to no longer simply the North and South, but additionally the West.

Against the backdrop of this better collection of battles, Nelson introduces 9 folks: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who dependent the Accomplice Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Military spouse who nursed Accomplice infantrymen again to well being in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a qualified soldier who engineered campaigns in opposition to Navajos and Apaches; Package Carson, a well-known frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers in opposition to the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns in opposition to her other folks; Invoice Davidson, a soldier who fought in all the Confederacy’s leading battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought at the aspect of the Union; John Clark, a family member of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican imaginative and prescient for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-basic; and Mangas Coloradas, a respected Chiricahua Apache leader who labored to enlarge Apache territory in Arizona.

As we learn the way those 9 charismatic folks fought for self-decision and keep an eye on of the area, we additionally see the significance of particular person movements in the course of a bigger army struggle. The 3-Cornered Conflict is an interesting historical past—in line with letters and diaries, army information and oral histories, and pictures and maps from the time—that sheds gentle on a forgotten bankruptcy of American historical past.