Spring/Summer 1999

A highly readable account of this major turning point of the Civil War in the West.

A full, detailed, and accurate history of the struggle in the Glorieta valley. Includes organization, pproach to the battle, military units organized and where, all known participants' accounts.

John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory’s fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement at Glorieta Pass. After the war, as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court, he struggled to reform corrupt courts amid the territory’s corrosive Reconstruction politics. Slough was known to possess a volcanic temper and an easily wounded pride. These traits not only undermined a promising career but ultimately led to his death at the hands of an aggrieved political enemy who gunned him down in a Santa Fe saloon. Recounting Slough’s timeless story of rise and fall during America’s most tumultuous decades, historian Richard L. Miller brings to life this extraordinary figure.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).

Encompassing nearly seven thousand acres amid the woodlands of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, the land that is now Pecos National Historical Park has witnessed thousands of years of cultural history stretching back to the Native peoples who long ago inhabited the pueblos of Pecos, then known as Cicuye. Once a trading center where Pueblo Indians, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and Plains Indians encountered one another, not always peacefully, Pecos was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1800s and, later, on the first railroad in New Mexico. It was the site of a critical Civil War battle and in the twentieth century became a tourist destination. This book tells the story of how, over five centuries, cultures and peoples converged at Pecos and transformed its environment, ultimately shaping the landscape that greets park visitors today. Spanning the period from 1540, when Spaniards first arrived, into the twenty-first century, Crossroads of Change focuses on the history of the natural and historic resources Pecos National Historical Park now protects and interprets: the ruins of Pecos Pueblo and a Spanish mission church, a stage stop along the Santa Fe Trail, the Civil War battlefield of Glorieta Pass, a twentieth-century cattle ranch, and the national park itself. In an engaging style, authors Cori Knudten and Maren Bzdek detail the transformations of Pecos over time, often driven by the collision of different cultures, such as that between the Franciscan friars and Pecos Indians in the seventeenth century, and by the introduction of new animals, crops, and agricultural practices—but also by the natural forces of fire, drought, and erosion. Located on a natural trade route, Pecos has long served as a portal between different cultures and environments. Documenting this transformation over the ages, Crossroads of Change also, perhaps, shows us Pecos National Historical Park as a portal to the future.

During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains—and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the “fire brigade” of the Trans-Mississippi Theater—a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains’ history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains.