"Comprises an extensive group of reminiscences published by the St. Louis Missouri Republican between 1885 and 1887"--v. 1, p. xi.

Another Confederate cavalry raid impends. You hear the snort of an impatient horse, the leathery squeaking of saddles, the low-voiced commands of officers, the muffled cluck of guns cocked in preparation—then the sudden rush of motion, the din of another attack. This classic story seeks to illuminate a little-known theater of the Civil War—the cavalry battles of the Trans-Mississippi West, a region that included Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, the Indian Territory, and part of Louisiana. Stephen B. Oates traces the successes and defeats of the cavalry; its brief reinvigoration under John S. "Rip" Ford, who fought and won the last battle of the war at Palmetto Ranch; and finally, the disintegration of this once-proud fighting force.

The Battle of Carthage, Missouri, was the first full-scale land battle of the Civil War. Governor Claiborne Jackson's rebel Missouri State Guard made its way toward southwest Missouri near where Confederate volunteers collected in Arkansas, while Colonel Franz Sigel's Union force occupied Springfield with orders to intercept and block the rebels from reaching the Confederates. The two armies collided near Carthage on July 5, 1861. The battle lasted for ten hours, spread over several miles, and included six separate engagements before the Union army withdrew under the cover of darkness. The New York Times called it "the first serious conflict between the United States troops and the rebels." This book describes the events leading up to the battle, the battle itself, and the aftermath.

If the Civil War had a "forgotten theater," it was the Trans-Mississippi West. Starting in 1861 with the Lincoln administration's desire to maintain control of the far west, Jeffery Prushankin covers battles in New Mexico, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, including Pea Ridge in March 1862 and Pleasant Hill in April 1864. The Red River Expedition and Price's Raid are also described. The narrative places these campaigns and battles in their strategic context to show how they contributed to the outcome of the war.

During the American Civil War, the western Trans-Mississippi frontier was host to harsh environmental conditions, irregular warfare, and intense racial tensions that created extraordinarily difficult conditions for both combatants and civilians. Matthew M. Stith's Extreme Civil War focuses on Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory to examine the physical and cultural frontiers that challenged Confederate and Union forces alike. A disturbing narrative emerges where conflict indiscriminately beset troops and families in a region that continually verged on social and political anarchy. With hundreds of small fights disbursed over the expansive borderland, fought by civilians— even some women and children—as much as by soldiers and guerrillas, this theater of war was especially savage. Despite connections to the political issues and military campaigns that drove the larger war, the irregular conflict in this border region represented a truly disparate war within a war. The blend of violence, racial unrest, and frontier culture presented distinct challenges to combatants, far from the aid of governmental services. Stith shows how white Confederate and Union civilians faced forces of warfare and the bleak environmental realities east of the Great Plains while barely coexisting with a number of other ethnicities and races, including Native Americans and African Americans. In addition to the brutal fighting and lack of basic infrastructure, the inherent mistrust among these communities intensified the suffering of all citizens on America's frontier. Extreme Civil War reveals the complex racial, environmental, and military dimensions that fueled the brutal guerrilla warfare and made the Trans-Mississippi frontier one of the most difficult and diverse pockets of violence during the Civil War.

The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole during America s Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature. From 1861-1865, the Indians fought their own bloody civil war on lands surrounded by the Kansas Territory, Arkansas, and Texas. Clint Crowe s magisterial Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War reveals the complexity and the importance of this war within a war, and explains how it affected the surrounding states in the Trans-Mississippi West and the course of the broader war engulfing the country. The onset of the Civil War exacerbated the divergent politics of the five tribes and resulted in the Choctaw and Chickasaw contributing men for the Confederacy and the Seminoles contributing men for the Union. The Creeks were divided between the Union and the Confederacy, while the internal war split apart the Cherokee nation mostly between those who followed Stand Watie, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, and John Ross, who threw his majority support behind the Union cause. Throughout, Union and Confederate authorities played on divisions within the tribes to further their own strategic goals by enlisting men, signing treaties, encouraging bloodshed, and even using the hard hand of war to turn a profit. Crowe s well-written study is grounded upon a plethora of archival resources, newspapers, diaries, letter collections, and other accounts. Caught in the Maelstrom examines every facet of this complex and fascinating story in a manner sure to please the most demanding reader."