Good evening, everyone. Welcome, we are happy youre here tonight, very happy to have Megan Kate Nelson with us with her book the 3cornered war, the union, the consistory and native people in their fight for the rest. This is an engrossing narrative account which shows how the civil war, the indian wars and western expansion were all interconnected. The 1860s were a time of National Conflict which has north and south and the American West was the resource involves letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and maps from that time. Nelson writes about nine individuals who worked toward Self Determination and the fight for control of the region. Some of these people are well known to us like frontiersmen kit carson. Others like juanita who we get to know. Their stories were lost to history until now and to unearth their stories show the important of individual actions even in the midst of a larger military conflict. The book earned a star review in Library Journal and history keeps the reader turning the pages. Megan Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in lincoln, she has written about the civil war, us history and American Culture for several publications including the new york times, the Washington Post and smithsonian magazine. Shared a ba in history from Harvard University and her phd or in american studies from the university of iowa. She has taught at texas tech university, cal state, harvard and brown is the author of a ruined nation and trembling earth. She will talk to was a bit about the 3quarter war, tell us how it came to be, share some anecdotes of things she learned during the Research Process and read a passage or two and we will open up to questions from the audience. Please help me give a warm welcome to Megan Kate Nelson. [applause] thank you, guys, for coming out on mister italy, cold, dreary night. Before we begin i would like to acknowledge we meet here on the traditional lens so the three cornered war tells the story of the civil war in the far west. Most of the action takes place in new mexico in what will become arizona as well as texas and colorado and california. At this point you may be asking yourself what war in the west . Never heard of a war, i thought it was about gettysburg and appomattox and virginia. I thought the same thing myself when i started teaching and researching Civil War History, 15 years ago seems like a very long time. I grew up in colorado. I never heard that there were civil war battles in new mexico or colorado soldiers were really important to the Union Victory in that theater and had no idea that Indigenous People were involved at all. In colorado, we have indian wars, a little later and that was the industry. The Denver Broncos i wanted to find out more about this theater of the war and never heard of this conflict at all before. There are some things i found out. Between 18611868, that is the correct year, usually we talk 6165 but in Civil War History when you expand the geography you expand the chronology so the war becomes broader and longer when you visit it from this place. Between 1861, and 1868 the union, the confederacy and native People Struggle to control this. They wanted the west for its gold and each of them also saw the west as part of this important vision for their future. The north envisioning an empire of free labor. Free from coasttocoast and with west was pivotal to this. The confederates or he saw it and an empire of slavery. They could jump off from there and invade mexico and create a hemispheric, latin america, the navajos who are living in the southwest, saw the white mans war, and indigenous groups as obstacles. And their vision of this national future. After the union, successfully defended with confederates invasion in spring of 1862 they turn to these other enemies. What this meant is at the same time that the union was fighting the war to emancipate, enslaved men and women in the east, to exterminate or remove native people in the west. I figure these things out, it was an interesting aspect of the war, and why i never heard about this before. The civil war, focuses on the east, focuses on virginia, focuses on eastern battlefields, and those subjects are extraordinarily important but what that means is rarely do we move outside that kind of area. There is a tradition in Civil War History of referring to the transmississippi west which is where we get the battle of shiloh, invasion of tennessee in general, around the mississippi river, what historians call the west. That is a problem with the words we use because what can the west of the west . It seems impossible. Also if you open up any kind of Civil War History and see a map in their it usually ends right around the one hundredth meridian. If you have the book you can flip to the front where i have included a map that does not end at the one hundredth meridian which is right in the middle of this 2page map in the book. If you end the map there you are actively erasing 40 of the nations landmass, your literally eat racing it from the story of the civil war. It was important to me when i was talking to simon and schuster about the book production that i want to have this map in here first thing, the entire continent that you see all the territories and states as they were organized at the beginning of the war and you see the navajo and apache homeland on this map kind of layered, three layers of the map and it is a continental map to the pacific. Also what i found out when i went on my trip is even though the sites of the civil war in the southwest are well preserved and everywhere, if you go to virginia and try to find battlefield sites in important areas, if they are not preserved they are usually under a parking lot, there is not that kind of intensive suburban, or urbanization in large areas of the southwest. A lot of sites you read about are actually there. It is just they are very far apart, they are run by all kinds of federal agencies. They are not particularly well signed. Most tourists go to the southwest for southwestern culture, indigenous culture, adobe architecture, green chili in gelatos. They are not going for Civil War History. There is a great example of this, in Santa Fe Plaza if any of you have ever been there, right in the middle of Santa Fe Plaza is an obelisk and it is a memorial to the Union Soldiers who fought in the war against the confederates and the savages. There is a little protest action around that monument over savages. It is interesting but everyone ignores it. The first time i went i went for research one day, talked to people, see that obelisk . Do you know what it is . Know, they are walking the path, going to the shops that are all around, they had no real idea, nothing is call your attention to that Civil War History and you will read about it. One of the protagonists in the book, john clark, takes part in the fundraising for that memorial in 1866. The plaza itself is a civil war site. It was filled by Union Soldiers when their officers were like we need to put them to work, otherwise they will start arousing around. Whether the officers have them build the present, that itself is something you would never know about. It is not noticed. For various reasons, and through various mechanisms the history of the war has been sometimes even raced, sometimes forgotten, sometimes not even mentioned. During all this research i discovered how complicated the civil war west was, how many different groups of people were involved in the war and the fight took place over hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. There is an enormous region and all these armies had to march, different groups of people had to march 4, 00 miles at a time, the longest stretch was 800 miles. My challenge was how do i tell the story . I didnt want to tell it in a traditionally academic way in an argument oriented way. I started thinking about different ways i could tell the story. At the time i was reading a lot of novels and one of those novels was game of thrones. This is very surprising. That i would be reading this novel because im not usually down with excessively violent novels but george rr martin was just making me turn the pages. I was devouring this book and i tried to figure out why. I looked at it and i mapped it out. I started taking notes on what he was doing and what he was using was a form that is quite common in literature which is multiperspective narrative. If you go into the book and even look at the table of contents, you will see that each of these chapters is named after a person. There are only three that are not in those are the names of battles in which multiple people come together. In each of these chapters you will follow that person, coming through space and time, you will leave them and go to somebody else and then come back to them a little later, each person has anywhere from two to three chapters. Some of them stay for only a short time in new mexico, some stay the entire time, one of them dies. I wont tell you who so that you can save that for later and be intrigued. I decided to try this approach of bringing the reader into the civil war west, through the experiences of nine different people all representing the movement of nine different communities, and different war actions. Im not going to introduce them all to you because that would be overwhelming and probably take too long but i will talk about three in particular to give you a sense of the books range and there is an image insert in the middle. The second image here on the left page, this is John Robert Baylor who i affectionately started referring to as crazy eyes because i think his eyes are very light blue and photography at the time washed it out. This picture and is actually holding a sword but it makes it look like hes holding a bowie knife. When i started thinking about this project i knew i wanted to start with baylor. Because i wanted to start with the confederate invasion of new mexico territory and the summer of 1861 and baylor was at the head of that invasion. He was born in several of the people here were boarding kentucky including kit carson so thats a weird connection. He moved to texas in the 1840s. He was bored. He had his family was lured by the promise of rich cotton land the right to own slaves. He is of the family his uncle is one after whom Baylor University is named. This is a family with a long history in texas. He got married and started a family at over the next 15 years he worked as a farmer and a rancher and he enslaved men and women in both of those ventures. He read the law, was admitted to the bar and elected to the texas state legislature. He also became the editor of a newspaper called the white and. In 1860. This is the thing that i appreciate about mid19th century racists. We are very open about it. They are just like were going to start a paper and it would be called the white man. In 1860 he became the editor of the newspaper and the printed a lot ofte lured pieces about comanche attacks on anglos in texas and the use of this to gin up this furor about comanches. He was a prototexas Ranger Ranger and would u gather a peoe and write out after comanches before the war. In fact, when he wrote into new mexico he was wearing a belt buckle that said csa edits made out of silver he had melted down from something getmb taken froma comanchenc warrior. By the spring of 1861 as you can imagine you can get the flavor of this, john baylor was prime to join the Confederate Army in texas in defense of slavery and secession and the rights of wightman to really rest lands away from native people. Bynf all accounts he was extremy charismatic, a capable commander. He was about 63 which was super tall for someone in this time and sort of an opposing strong guy. He was impetuous and ambitious and resentful at all of those characteristics shaped all of his actions in the civil war west in 1961 and 62. You will meet him in chapter one and he is quite a character. To bring you into this context of the civil war west. The next person, the last immature, one meter one dita, a teenager when she married a powerful navajo headman with a very long history of resisting spanish and mexican and american incursions in theiran homeland. Pretty soon after their wedding a civil war began and readers of the threecornered war will follow her as she and their band negotiate with them manipulate and invade union forces in their homelandei and then are forced y appending starvation to surrender to the u. S. Army in the fall of 1866. At the union army reservation and a place i think we can really think of as a prison camp named bousquet redondo dominates the final part of the book. When nitas wartime experience was one of suffering but also one of persistence and survival. Of all the protagonists, she is i think the heart of the book. She is there from the beginning to the end. Her story really reveals the extent to which the civil war and the west was a three cornered war. The last person i just want to tell you about here was john clark. The picture is in here in the middle on the right hand side of the page. You will not have heard of john clark at all in your life. He was a surveyor, a lawyer, a landowner in illinois when the war began. He was too old he was in his early 40s to shoulder a rifle but he really had hoped to serve the union in other ways. President lincoln, who was a friend of his from their illinois law circuit days appointed him surveyor general of the new mexico territory in the summer of 1861. Clark left his large family in illinois in order to take up his post which he held until 1868. He also was in new mexico pretty consistently for the entirety of the book. He took a couple furloughs and went home at one point he went as he kind of fled santa fe and left and went to dc when the confederates were marching upon the city and went to go report to lincoln and Edwin Stanton and went and visited the General Land Office to whom he reported. He had a dc vacation in the midst of the most intense part of the new mexico conflict. Clark really was the voice of the Lincoln Administration in new mexico territory. A dedicated aba free secessionist and native people. Clark was responsible he not su the Reservation Committee also did a survey of the arizona gold country in 1863 after gold was discovered a little bit north of where the town of prescott is now which is north of phoenix. He went out there to confirm that the gold had actually been discovered and that it was legit mining going on and came back and reported to santa fe citizens and the army that there was gold out there and there were more than a thousand minors already in the mountains and they needed detection and also needed to clear navajos from the area because the road from albuquerque to the gold mines went through navajo territory. The letters kroc clark wrote to his superiors in washington help the Lincoln Administration and the Republican Party envision the conquest of the west. I will say that clark was my Biggest Surprise because i found his diaries, they werent hidden or anything, i just in the metadata that the archivist had put together i knew he was a surveyor general, he knew he had been in santa fe for this period of time and when i called the items it was john clark diary when you go to these research trips, you never know what youre gonna get. You never know what that means. Sometimes its like a teeny tiny pocket diary, has pencilings in about what they ate that day or like it rained. But when i got was this enormous box with 27 volumes of diaries in it. Meticulously written page long entries every day talking about the weather, talking about what he did every day, talking about his feelings, talking about going to scances. At night after dinner parties. Just amazing amazing content for the entirety of the war and then when i went to the National Archive all of the letters he wrote to his bosses at the General Land Office, also in super huge box because he wrote very regularly from mexico some of 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 with all the folds still perfectly they are very crisp, no stains, no marks wear and tear. And often with the wax seal that he had with his jc in it. He was really this kind of amazing person who one of these unusual suspects. You wouldnt really think that a surveyor general would be an important person in the history of the civil war and yet he is. I think you will be interested and intrigued coming to get to know him. Really i think overall looking at the civil war from this really unexpected place, the far west, shows us in couple important things that the civil war was a three cornered war and a couple different ways the conflict took place in the north to the south, and the west, between the union, for confederacy and native people and that these conflict involved and goes to spanos and native soldiers. Those are my three by three element which was very pleasing to me. The three cornered war complicates our notion of the unions war as a just war and it has us understand the war as a continental conflicts. A truly national war that involved all regions and all People Living within sometimes across its borders. I will stop there so that we have more time for questions. Should you have any about the topic or about the Research Process or the writing process, the three athe threecornered war. [applause] picking up on clark, ar