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 When U.S. regular troops were withdrawn in 1861 to fight in the East, the resulting power vacuum led to unprecedented violence in the West.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.
"This volume unifies the concerns of Civil War and western history, revealing how Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands.
Jennings explained to a curious Goodnight that he had purchased them from Comancheros. One of the leaders was nearby Chaperito resident José Piedad Tafoya. As noted, Goodnight's lawyers brought Tafoya to Las Vegas to bolster the ...
... 2011), 1–38; Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (Albuquerque: University of New ... and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); William H. Goetzmann, ...
Cpl. Winfield S. Pearson originally enlisted as a private in Company F, Third California Infantry but transferred to Company 1, Fourth California Infantry when Col. P. E. Connor's Third Infantry marched for Utah in 1862. Pearson's wife ...
Berry, Thelma Caine. “The Life of Edmund Winston Pettus.” Master's thesis, Auburn University, 1944. Bessel, Richard. Germany 1945: From War to Peace. London: Simon and Schuster UK, 2009. Black, Robert C. Railroads of the Confederacy.
At Summit Springs, Colorado on July 11, 1869, Maj Eugene A. Carr led the Fifth United States Cavalry and a force of Pawnee scouts in an attack on Chief Tall...
2 (quotation); Thompson, Mexican Texans in the Union Army, vii,38; Thompson, Vaqueros in Blue and Gray, 10, 55–56. “Not only did Mexican Texans cross the physical international border to escape conscription but they also intentionally ...
The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War assembles the contributions of thirty-nine leading scholars of the Civil War, each chapter advancing the central thesis that operational military history is decisively linked to the social and ...
Fighting Means Killing explores the spectrum of soldiers' attitudes toward and experiences of killing, arguing that ultimately most Union and Confederate soldiers accepted and affirmed the necessity of killing in combat.
New Mexico: A History. ... “Succession of Pinyon-Juniper Communities after Mechanical Disturbance in Southcentral New Mexico. ... Thompson, Jerry D. A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers & Militia.