Transcripts For CSPAN2 Megan Kate Nelson The Three-Cornered

CSPAN2 Megan Kate Nelson The Three-Cornered War July 13, 2024

Cspan2 with top Nonfiction Book authors every weekend. Book tv, television for serious readers. Good evening, everyone, welcome to the bookshop, we are happy you are here tonight to we are happy to have Megan Kate Nelson with us with her new book, the threecornered war, the union, confederacy and native people and the site for the west. This is an engrossing narrative account which shows how the civil war, the indian wars in western expansion are all interconnected, the 1860s were a time of National Conflict which involved not only the north and south but also the mark in west. Her primary Source Research involves letters and diaries, military records and oral histories and photographs and maps from that time and nelson write specifically about nine individuals who worked toward Self Determination in the fight for the region. Some of these people are fairly known to us like frontiersmen, and wanita who we get to know their stories lost to history until now. And nelson unearth their stories to show the importance of actions even in the midst of a larger military conflict. The book earned a star review and Library Journal and indeed it is history that keeps the reader turning the pages. Megan kate nelson is a writer and historian living in lincoln, she has written about the civil war, u. S. Western history and American Culture for several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post and smithsonian magazine. She earned her ba in history and literature from Harvard University and her phd in american studies from the university of iowa. She taught at texas tech university, cal state, harvard and brown and is the author of ruination and troubling earth. Tonight she will talk to us about three cornered war, tell us how it came today, and sur se some antidotes during the Research Process and read a passage or two then well open it up to questions from audience. Please help me give a warm welcome to Megan Kate Nelson. [applause] thank you guys thank you everyone for coming out on this drizzly cold dreary night. Before we begin i would Like Technology that we meet her tonight on the traditional lands of the wampanoag people. So the threecornered war tells a story of the civil war and the far west, most of the action takes place in new mexico which would become arizona during the war as well as texas and colorado and california. At this point you may be asking yourself i have never heard this of the war, i thought it was about gettysburg and basically virginia. So i thought the same thing myself when i first started teaching and researching the Civil War History 15 years ago which seemed like a very long time i group in colorado, i had never heard that there were civil war battles in mexico or colorado soldiers were really important to the Union Victory in that theater and i had no idea Indigenous People were involved at all because in colorado we got history, silver mining history and indian wars but they were a little bit later and then the ski industry. In the denver broncos. So i wanted to find out more about the theater of the war and i wanted to find out why never heard of this conflict at all before. So some things i found out, between 1861 in 1868, that is the correct year, leisure tecra 61 65 but into the war history when you expand the geography you expand the chronology. It becomes flatter and longer when you look at it from this way. The union and the confederacy struggled to control the region they wanted the left for the gold and specific ports. Each of them also saw the west as part of a really important vision for the future. So the north was envisioning an empire of free labor, free of slavery from coast to coast. In the west was pivotal to the project. In the confederacy saw their future as an empire of slavery. Also from coast to coast. They thought if they could secure the west then they could jump off from there and move south and invade mexico and create a hemispheric empire of slavery including the caribbean and latin america. Apaches and navajo who had been living in the southwest for hundreds of years saw this as an invasion of their territory in both the union and confederacy saw the indigenous groups as obstacles. Obviously to their attempt to control the west in their vision of the national future. Soy also learned that after the union successfully defended new mexico territory from confederate invasion in the spring of 62, they turned to the other enemies and initiated hard work campaigns against them. What this meant, at the same time that the union was fighting the war to an answer paid enslaved men and women in the east they were fighting a war to exterminate or remove native people in the west. I figured all of those things out, i thought it was an interesting aspect to the where the people never thought about. And then i figured out some things about why i had never heard about this before. First i think the Civil War History focuses on the east and virginia and also focuses on eastern battlefield in the homefront in politics. And of course no subjects are extraordinarily important but what that means is rarely do we move outside that kind of area. Also there is a tradition in Civil War History of referring to the trans mississippi west which is where we get the battle of shiloh, the invasion of tennessee in general, all the area around the Mississippi River and the historians call the west. So that is a problem with the words that we use, what can be west of the west. Like it seems impossible. Also, if you open up any Civil War History and you see a map of the seat of war, usually ends right around the 100th meridian, if you have the book you can flip to the front to where i have included a map that does not and at the 100th meridian which is actually in the middle of the twopage map in the book. If you in the map there, you are actively erasing 40 of the nations landmass. You are literally erasing it from the story of the civil war. It was important when i was talking to the people of the book production and said i wanted to have the map in first thing, if the entire continent that you see all the territory, the western territory and states as they were organized in the beginning of the war and you also see the navajo and apache homeland. On the map layered three different layers of the map intercontinental map from the atlantic to the pacific. Also what is interesting, what i found out when i went on my trip is that even though the sites of the civil war in the southwest are really wellpreserved and everywhere because if you go to virginia and youre trying to find battlefield sites in important areas, theyre not preserved there under parking lot or stripmall and theres not that intensive suburbanization or urbanization in large areas of the southwest what happened a lot of the sites you will read about in the threequarter work are actually there. It is just they are very far apart, they are run at all different kinds of federal agencies, theyre not particular well signed and most tourists go to the southwest for the southwestern culture, the indigenous culture, the open adobe architecture to bring chile into lagos theyre not going for Civil War History. There is a great example of this in Santa Fe Plaza, if you go to santa fe and if you ever have been there. But right in the middle of Santa Fe Plaza is a memorial to the Union Soldiers who fought in the war against the confederates and the savages. And theres a little protest action around that monument for savages. It is overly interesting but everyone ignores it. So i went for a research one day and i went around and talk to people and i said you know where that is and they were all like no and i was walking the path of the plaza and all the shops around and they had no real idea, theres not anything calling your attention to the Civil War History and you will read about it, one of the protagonist in the book, john clark takes part in the fundraising for that memorial in 1866. In the plaza itself is actually created a civil war site because it was built by Union Soldiers with their officers were like we need to put them to work otherwise they will start carousing around, one of the officers had them build the plaza in santa fe. That itself is something you never know because it is not noted. For various reasons and through various mechanisms the history of the war has been sometimes arrays, sometimes forgotten, sometimes not even mentioned. So during all this research i also discovered how complicated the civil war west was, how many different groups of people were involved in the work and how the fight took place over hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles, theres an in normas region in all of these armies had to march in different groups of people had to march sometimes 400 miles at a time in the longer stretch was a hundred miles my challenge was how do i tell the story, its a massive story and i didnt want to tell it an academic way or are driven dramatic oriented way soy started think about all the ways i could tell the story and at the time i was reading a lot of novels in one of the novels was game of thrones. And this is very surprising, right, that i would be reading this novel. I am not usually down with a misogynist and violent novels. But he was making me turn the pages, i was devouring this book and i tried to figure out why so i went in and looked at it and i actually mapped it out and started taking notes on what he was doing and what he was using was actually a form that is common in literature which is multiperspective narrative. So if you go into the book and you look at the table contents, you will see that each of these chapters is named after a person, theres only three that are not in 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 and you will go to somebody else enter come back to them a little later. Each person has anywhere from two to three chapters. Some only stay for a short time and some day the entire time, one dies, i will not tell you who so you can save that for later. And be intrigued. I decided to try this approach to bring the leader through the experiences of nine different people. With nine different communities in different war actions. Im not going to introduce them all to you because that would be overwhelming and probably take too long, but im going to talk about three in particular to give you a sense of the books range, if you do have the book with you, there is an insert in the middle if you would like to look at it so the second image here on the left page, this is John Robert Baylor who i affectionately started referring to as crazy eyes. [laughter] because i think his eyes are very light blue in the photography at the time washes out. He looks particular crazed in this picture, hes actually holding a sword but it looks like hes holding an buoy knife or something in the picture. But when i started thinking about the project i knew i wanted to start with baylor because i wanted to start with the confederate invasion of new mexico territory in the summer of 1961 and baylor was at the head of the invasion. He was born in kentucky along with several of the people born in kentucky along with carson, thats a weird connection. But baylor was born in kentucky moved to texas in the 1840s, he was lowered, to the promise of rich cotton land and the right to own slaves. And he actually is a family, his uncle is whom Baylor University is named. This is a long history in texas, he got married and started a family and over the next 15 years he worked as a farmer and rancher and he enslaved men and women in both of those ventures, he read the law, admitted to the bar and elected to the texas state legislature, he also became the editor of a newspaper called the white man in 1860. This is sort of the thing i appreciate about mid19th century racist because theyre very open about it. They are just like we will start a paper and it will be called the white man. In 1860 he became the editor of the newspaper, they printed a lot of pieces about attacks on anglos in texas and they use this for comanches and was a product texas ranger and would gather people and write out after comanches before the war and when he rode into the new mexico he was wearing a belt buckle that said csa and one was made out of silver he melted down from macomb he had taken from a Community Warrior comanc. He was pride to join in defense of slavery and the right of white man to get land away from native people and by all accounts he was charismatic, he was a capable commander, about 63 which is super tall for someone in this. In opposing strong guy he was impetuous and ambitious and resentful and all of those characters reflect his actions in 1861 in 1862 preview will meet him in chapter one, he is quite a character. To bring you into this context of the civil war west. The next person is the last image, wanita who dawn mentioned in her introduction. Wanita was a teenager when she married a powerful navajo headman with a long history of spanish and mexican and american incursions in the homeland. Pretty soon after their wedding before the war began and leaders of the threecornered war will follow wanita as she and him in their band would negotiate with manipulative and invade union forces in their homeland and forced my impending starvation to the u. S. Army in the fall 1866. Wanting to story of the long walk in incarceration at the union army reservation in a place we can think of as a prison camp dominates the final part of the book, juanitas wartime experience was one of suffering but a persistence and survival. Of all the protagonist, she is the heart of the book, she learned from the beginning to the end. And her story really reveals the extent to which the civil war in the west was a the threecornered war. So the last person i just want to tell you about was john clark whose picture is in here in the middle on the righthand side of the page, you will not have heard of john clark adult in your life, he was a surveyor, a lawyer, a land owner in illinois when the war began, he was too old in his early 40s. But he had really helped to serve the union and other ways. So president lincoln who was a friend of his from illinois law circuit days appointed him survey general of new mexico territory in the summer of 1861. Clark left his large family in illinois in order to pick up his post which he held until 1868. He also was in new mexico consistently for the entirety of the book, he took a couple of furloughs and went home at one point he went as he fled santa fe and went to d. C. When the confederates were marching upon the city and went to go report to lincoln and stanton in the General Land Office. So he had a d. C. Vacation in the midst of the most intense part of the new mexico conflict. But clark was the voice of the Lincoln Administration and new mexico territory. A dedicated republican who believed in the parties vision as a landscape of free white labor, cleared of both perfectionist innovat native pe. He was responsible, he not only surveyed the reservation, he also did a survey of the arizona gold country in 1863 after gold was discovered a little bit north over the town of prescott is which is north of phoenix. So he went out there to confirm that the gold had been discovered and it was legit mining that was going on and came back and reported to santa fe citizens into the union army that there was gold and there was more than 1000 minors in the mountains and they needed protection and they also needed to clear navajos from the area because the road from albuquerque to the gold mines went through navajo territory. The letters that he wrote to his superiors in washington help the lincoln diminished in the conquest of the west and i would say clark was my Biggest Surprise because i found his diary, they were hidden or anything, i just hid in the metadata that the archivist had put together, i knew he was a surveyor general and had been in santa fe for this period of time and when i called the items, the john clark diary, when you go to these Research Trips you will never know what youre going to get or what it means, sometimes its a teeny pocket diary and a little penciling of what they ate or if it rained but what i got was enormous box a page long entries everyday talk about what he did every day, talking about his feelings, talking about going to seances at night after dinner amazing amazing content for the entirety of the war and when i went to the national archives, all the letters that he wrote to his bosses at the General Land Office also in a super huge box because he wrote very regularly from new mexico and sometimes his original maps were there, he did a flat map of santa fe and i truly believe that i was maybe the second person to open those letters ever. They were in pristine condition. The all the folds still perfectly there, very crisp, no stains, no marks of where in terror. Often with a wax seal that he had. He was really an amazing person who again and unusual suspect, you would not really think that the surveyor general would be an important person in the history of the civil war. And yet he is. I think you would be interested and intrigued coming to get to know him. So i think overall looking at the civil war with an unexpected place, the far west shows us a couple of important things, that the civil war was a the threecornered war in a couple of different ways, the concept took place in the north, south and the west between the Union Confederacy and native people in these comfort symbol anglos, his pianos in native shoulders, those are three by three which is very pleasing to me. As a writer. The threecornered war complicate her notion of the unions were. And it has as a continental co

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