We are very happy the three cornered war of the union and confederacy and people for the fight for the west. This is an engrossing narrative account which shows how the civil war, the indian war and western expansion were all interconnected the 1860s were a time of national conflict, which involved not only the north and south poles of the american west. Her primary Source Research involved letters and diaries military records and oral histories and photographs and maps from that time and nelson writes specifically about nine individuals that work towards selfdetermination and fight for control of the region. Some of these people are fairly wellknown twell known to us lie frontiersmen kit carson, others like juanita that we get to know, their stories wersome of e lost in history until now. And nelson unearthed their story to show the importance of individual actions, even in the midst of a large military conflict. The book earned a star review and indeed its history that keeps turning the pages. Megan kate nelson is a writer and historian living in lincoln has written about the civil war, u. S. Western history and American Culture for several publications including the new york times, washing and post in smithsonian magazine. She earned her ba in history from Harvard University and phd in american studies from the university of iowa. She taught at texas tech university, cal state, harvard and brown and is also the author for un natioof four un nation ag earth. Tonight she will talk about the three cornered for, tell us how it came to be, maybe share some anecdotes and things sh the thie learned in the Research Process and read a passage or two and then we will to questions from the audience. Please help they give a warm welcome to megan kate nelson. [applause] thanks for coming out on this cold night. Before we begin, i would like to acknowledge that we need tonight on the traditional lands. The three cornered war. Fullstop story of the civil war in the far west. Most of the action takes place in new mexico and would become arizona during the war as well as texas and colorado and so at this point you may be asking your self i thought it was about gettysburg and basically virginia so i thought the same thing myself when i first started teaching and research in Civil War History. I grew up in colorado and i have never heard that there were civil war battles in mexico or that colorado soldiers were really important to the Union Victory in the theater, and i had no idea they were involved at all because in colorado we got the pioneer history, silver mining history, but they were kind of a little bit later and then it was the ski industry and the ball goes. So, i wanted to find out more about this theater of the war and about why i never heard of this conflict at all before. So some things i found out between 1861 and 1868, and that is a correct year usually we talk of 61 to 65 but in the Civil War History when you expand the geography, you expand the chronology so the war becomes broad and longer when you look at it from this place. Between 1861 and 1868, the union and confederacy and native people struggled to control this freedom. The union and confederacy wanted it to last for its goals into specific ports. Each of them also travel as part of this really important decision for their future so they were envisioning this inquiry and free labor, free of slavery from coast to coast and the west was pivotal to the project and the confederacy fought their future of an empire of slavery also from coast to coast and so they thought they could secure the west and they could kind of jump off from there and actually move south and invade mexico and create this sort of hemispheric empire including the caribbean and latin america. The model hose that had been living in the southwest for hundreds of years solve this as an invasion of the territory and both the union and confederacy e confederacy fought these Indigenous Roots as obstacles to their attempts to control the west and their vision of this national future. I also learned from the confederate invasion in the spring of 1862 they turned to these other enemies and to initiated hardware campaigns against them. At the same time that the union is fighting the war to emancipate men and women in the east it was to exterminate or remove peoples in the west. So. I figured out some things about why i never heard of this before. In the battlefields into the homefront and politics and of course the subjects are extraordinarily important. But what that means is rarely do we move outside of that kind of area. Also, there is a tradition in the Civil War History of returning to the trans mississippi west which is where we get the battle of shiloh and tennessee in general and all of this area kind of forgot the mississippi river, so that historians call the west. What can be west of the west . It seems impossible. Also if you dont have any kind of Civil War History and you find a map in thei it usually es around 100 meridian and in fact if you have the book, you can put the front where i have included a map that doesnt end the 100 meridian which is actually right at the middle of this twopage map in the book. If you end up in map youve are actively erasing 40 of the nations land masswill literally be raising it from the story of the civil war so it is important to me when i was talking to simon and schuster about the book production is what i want have this map first thing. Its the entire continent but you see all the territories as the western territories and states as they were organized at the beginning of the war and that you also see the mono and apache land with three different layers of the map and the continental map from the atlantic to the pacific. Also its interesting when i went from a Research Trip even though the site of the civil war in the southwest are really well preserved because if you go to virginia and you are trying to find battlefields in this area if they are not preserved they are usually under a parking lot for a strip mall and there thes not that kind of intensive kind of suburban court urbanization and large areas of the southwest so what has happened is a lot of the sites that weve all read about in the three cornered war are actually there. Its just they are very far apart. They are run by all different kind of scum of th is, the fede. They are not particularly well and most good southwest for indigenous cultures and for its adobe architecture. They are not going for Civil War History. There is a great example of this but in santa fe if any of you have ever been there. And its a memorial to the Union Soldiers who fought in the war against both the confederates and the savages. And theres a little protest around back monument. I went for research one day i went around and talk to people like do you know what it is and they are all just like no. Kind of walking the path and going to the shops but they had no real idea. Theres nothing calling our attention to that history and you will likely read about it. One of the protagonists in the book talks about the fund raising for that memorial in 1866 into th1866 and the plaza s actually created if they civil war site because it was built by Union Soldiers when the officers were likel like we need to put o work otherwise they will start carousing around and look at the officers have them do is build the plaza that you would never know that because it is not noted. For various reasons and through the various mechanisms this history of the war has been sometimes erased, sometimes forgotten, sometimes not even mentioned. So during all this research i also discovered how complicated it was and how many different groups of people were involved and how the fight took place over hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. Theres this enormous region and groups of people to march sometimes 400 miles at a time, the largest stretch was 800 miles. My challenge was how do i tell this story. I didnt really want to tell it in a traditionally academic way in an argument driven so i started thinking about the different ways i could possibly tell the story and that the time i was reading a lot of models and one of those was a game of thrones. This is very surprising, right. [laughter] that i would be reading this because im usually down with the misogynist and excessively violent novels. But martin was making me turn the pages. I was just devouring this book and i tried to figure out why so i went around and looked at it and kind of mapped it out a started taking notes on what he was doing and what he was using was a form thats quite common in literature which is multiperspective narrative. So if you go into the buck and even loobook andeven look at thf contents you will see each of these chapters is named after a person. Person. Theres only three that are not and those are the names of battles in which multiple people come together so in each of these chapters you will follow that person through space and time. Each person has to take a chapters. Some stayed the entire time, one of them dies. I wont tell you who so that you can save that for later and be in trade. [laughter] i decided to try this approach to bring the reader at the three cornered war into the civil war wescivil warwest through the exf nine different people, so these are all kind of representing the movement of nine different communities and different actions so im not going to introduce them all to you because that would be a little overwhelming and probably take too long but i am just going to talk about three of them in particular to give you a sense of the books brain and if you do have the book with you there is a insert in the middle if you would like to look at it. The second image, and i can hold this up on the left, this is John Robert Baylor iceberg is affectionately started referring to as crazy eyes. [laughter] its kind of washes out his eyes as he looks particularly crazed in this picture. He is holding a sword but it looks like hes holding a knife or some thing in this picture but when i started into this, i knew i wanted to start with dealer because i wanted to start with the confederate invasion of new mexico territory in the summer of 1861, and he was at the head of that invasion. Born in kentucky along with several of the people here born in kentucky so that is an interesting sort of connection. So he moved to texas in the 1840s, he and his family members were lured in by the coffin land and try to own slaves and he actually is the one after whom Baylor University is named so this is a family with a long history. He got married and started a family and over the next 15 years, he worked as a farmer and a rancher and enslaved men and women in both of those ventures. He read the law was admitted to the bar and then elected to texas state legislature. He also became the editor of a newspaper called the white man. This is the sort of thing i appreciate they are very open about it like we are going to start a paper and it will be called the white man so in 1860 he began editing this newspaper with a lot of pieces about comanche attacks on anglos in texas and they use this to bring up fear about comanche is and e was kind of a proto texas ranger. He was wearing a belt buckle that said csa is made out of silver he melted down from a comanche warrior. By the spring of 1861 as you can imagine you can sort of get the flavor of this, he was primed to join the Confederate Army in texas and in defense of slavery and secession and the right of white men to wrestle the land away from native people. By all accounts he was extremely charismatic and a capable commander of the 6foot three which is super tall for someone in this period that he was impetuous and ambitious and resentful and all of those characters that shape all of his actions in the civil war west in 1861 at 62 so you will meet him in chapter one. Hes quite a character and to bring you into this kind of context the next person here, funnwanita was a teenager when e was married to a powerful navajo babe powerful history managing spanish and mexican and american incursions in their homeland. Pretty soon after their wedding the civil war began. They will follow as she and the band negotiates with cumin and he laid and eve ate the sources and the homeland and then are forced b by an impending starvation to the u. S. Army in the fall of 1866. The story of the long walk and incarceration acts as a reservation we can think of is a prison camp. The wartime experience was one of suffering but also one of t persistency and survival. Her story reveals the extent to which the civil war and the west was a three cornered war. John clark this picture is on the righthand side of the page. You have not heard of john clark in your life as a surveyor, lawyer, land owner in illinois when the war began. He really hoped to serve the union and other ways so lincoln who was a friend of his playpen surveyor general of the new mexico territory in the summer of 1861 and clark left his large family in illinois until 1868. He took a couple of furloughs and went home. At one point, he went as he kind of led to santa fe when the confederates were marching upon the city and went to go reports to lincoln and Edward Stanton and the General Office to whom he reported so there was a sort of dc vacation in the midst of the most intense part of the new mexico conflict. But he was the voice of the Lincoln Administration in new mexico territory. A dedicated republican who believed in the party vision free of secessionists and native people. Clark was responsible he not only surveyed the reservation but also did a survey of the country in 1863 near where the town of prescott is north of phoenix, so h they went out to confirm it was legit mining that was going on and came back and reported to the santa fe citizens and also to the union army that there was gold and more than a thousand minors already in the mountains so they needed protection and also needed to clear the navajos because the road from albuquerque to the gold mines are what drew the territory in. The letters also helped the Lincoln Administration and Republican Party and the conquest of the west. I would say clark was my Biggest Surprise because i found his diaries. They were not hitting or anything. I knew he was a surveyor general and had been in santa fe for this period of time and when i called the items and you do these Research Trips, you never know what you are going to get or what that means. Sometimes it has a couple pencilincoolpenciling of what it what i got was this enormous box with 27 million diaries meticulously written talking about the weather and about what he did every day int in talking about going to seances of night after dinner parties. Just this amazing content for the entirety of the war. Then all of the letters he wrote were also in the super huge box because he wrote very regularly from new mexico some of his original maps were there and i truly believed i was maybe the second person to open those letters ever. They were in pristine condition with all of the full store perfectly fair and crisp, no stains or marks of wear and tear and often with the wax sealed and stole their see thi was kinf this amazing person. You would think the surveyor general would be an important person war but you would be intrigued to get to know him so i think overall looking at the civil war from this unexpected place shows a couple of important things that the civil war was a three cornered war in a couple of different ways so the conflict took place in the north, south and west. And these conflicts involve anglos and native soldiers so those are sort of my three by three elements that was pleasing to me three cornered war complicates the notion as a just war. Its a national war that involves all regions and all People Living within the borders. I will stop there so we have more time for questions should you have any about the topic or the Research Process or the writing process. [applause] clark and am i tempted to pursue him a little bit more and write the biography i know more about him and kind of where he went he actually lived in mexico and was a surveyor general very briefly he was in salt lake when the transcontinental flight was hammered in. I cant document that he was actually there at the ceremony and he was obsessed with railroads, so i wouldnt be surprised that he went as a Land Surveyor and unfortunately died of cancer and had a long and fulfilling career. I think ive done enough of the biographical work to kind of scratch that itch and get you to know him. Those biographies are a little hard and he obviously does have a lot of different points when he leaves to go back to dc he was going to attend the impeachment trial so i dont think that i will write a different book about him but there is certainly more to learn than other writers and historians can do that you think of as a kind of government functionary. There are different words to play. Hell did you select the characters in the narrative, you must have had a large group of people chosen so im curious how you made that. I did. Some i knew from the beginning because he basically singlehandedly decides to invade new mexico territory without orders so hes the one who gets it done and occupies it forces the surrender and sits down and creates the confederate territory. So that is in the space of three or four days. Once they read his letters that are at the university of texas, i knew i had to write about him. Unfortunately i didnt find. I really wish i had. I knew that i needed people that were at really important elements when i started to read his account of the war he was in every single moment of the campaign and marched from san antonio to el paso and was at the head of the troops. He was then albuquerque when he took it. He came back to santa fe and was another one of the protagonists. She was a fascinating viewpoint on the civilian experience of the war so i thought about was athat was aninteresting thing be went with her husband to almost every single posting server 20 years she was with him and that enabled me to give the back story of what the army was actually like because she was in california in the 1850s when it came in as a state and she was in utah during the