This study of 364 Hill Country men is modeled after "Webster's New Biographical Dictionary." Some of the entries are short, such as Frank Murara who appears only on the 1890 Veterans Schedule as a Union veteran, possibly an itinerant railroad worker staying at a hotel in Comfort. Some entries are longer, such as Thomas Ingenhuett who served in both Confederate and Union units and whose pension application describes the 1864 Battle of Las Rucias and his subsequent escape through Mexico. Some entries contain unexpected information, such as J. W. Manning whose 1926 burial ceremony included a cross of red roses--a gift of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Kendall County, in south-central Texas, has 59 men who died in wartime, in action, of wounds, of disease, and by accident. Commemoration locally is by stone memorials, eponymic organizations and places, a tree, and a philanthropic foundation. Overseas commemoration is by French battlefield steles, American cemeteries, a Red Cross tower, and a British Commonwealth monument.

Research on Civil War Soldiers and their wives.

Names listed in alphabetical order.

In the nineteenth century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between white settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slaveholding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence, as one set of peoples, states, and systems eventually displaced others. In this painstakingly researched book, Roland analyzes patterns of violence in the Texas Hill Country to examine the cultural and political priorities of white settlers and their interaction with the century-defining process of national integration and state-building in the Civil War era. He traces the role of violence in the region from the eve of the Civil War, through secession and the Indian wars, and into Reconstruction. Revealing a bitter history of warfare, criminality, divided communities, political violence, vengeance killings, and economic struggle, Roland positions the Texas Hill Country as emblematic of the Southwest of its time.

A volunteer officer with the 9th Texas Cavalry Regiment from 1861 to 1865, James Campbell Bates saw some of the most important and dramatic clashes in the Civil War's western and trans-Mississippi theaters. Bates rode thousands of miles, fighting in the Indian Territory; at Elkhorn Tavern in Arkansas; at Corinth, Holly Springs, and Jackson, Mississippi; at Thompson's Station, Tennessee; and at the crossing of the Etowah River during Sherman's Atlanta campaign. In a detailed diary and dozens of long letters to his family, he recorded his impressions, confirming the image of the Texas cavalrymen as a hard-riding bunch -- long on aggression and short on discipline. Bates's writings, which remain in the possession of his descendants, treat scholars to a documentary treasure trove and all readers to an enthralling, first-person dose of American history.