This is an engrossing narrative account which shows the civil war, the indian wars, and western expansion, were all interconnected. The 1860s were truly at times, National Conflict which involve not only the more pleasant south but also the american west. Her primary Source Research involved letters and diaries, military records and oral histories and photographs and maps from that time and nestor i specifically about nine individuals who worked towards it selfdetermination and fight for control of the region. Some of these people are generally well known to us like frontier carson. Others, like wanting to a navajo late weaver who is now, their stories were lost in history until now. And noticing under their stories show the importance of individual actions even in the midst of a larger military conflict. In the book learning start reviewing Library Journals and indeed it is history that keeps the reader turning the pages. Megan cates nelson is a writer and historian living in lincoln and she has written about the civil war from u. S. Western history and American Culture several publications including the New York Times and the Washington Post and the smithsonian magazine. She and her ba in history and literature from Harvard University printed. Dawn and her phd from the university of iowa. She taught at texas tech university, cal state fullerton, harvard and brown and is also the author and trembling earth. Tonight she will talk to us about the three cornered more, tell us how it came to be measure some anecdotes about things she learned during the Research Process and read passenger to an open it up to questions to the audience. Please something of a warm welcome to megan case nelson. [applause]. Megan thank you guys. Thank you for coming out on this drizzly cold dreary night. Before we begin, i would like to acknowledge that we meet here tonight on a Traditional Land of these people. So the threequarter, also story tells the story of the civil war the far west. Most of the action takes place in mexico. It would become arizona during the war. As well as texas and colorado and california. And so this point, you may be asking yourselves, what. What more i have never heard of this. I thought it was about gettysburg. And basically virginia. So i thought the same thing myself when i first started teaching and researching Civil War History 16 years ago. Seems like a very long time. I grew up in colorado. I had never heard that there were civil war battles in new mexico or that colorados borders were really important. To the Union Victory in that theater. In a new idea that so many people were involved at all. And even in colorado, we have put in history, mining history, indian wars a little bit later. And then you know. So, i wanted to find out more about this theater of the war and i wanted to find out why i had never heard of this conflict in all before. Since the things and found out, so between 1861 and 1868, if thats correct year, usually we talk about 61 65. But in Civil War History when you expend the geography, you expand the chronology. The word becomes both broader and longer when you look at it from this place. So between 1861 and 1868, the union, and 80 people struggled to control freedom. In the Union Confederacy wanted the left is gold and its specific ports bring each of them also so part of this really important vision for the future. So that the north was envisioning this empire of labor free labor. Creative slavery, from coasttocoast in the west was pivotal in the project and the confederacy saw it, their future as empires of slavery also coasttocoast. So they thought they could secure the west and they could jump off from there actually move south. And invade mexico and this sort of hemispheric empire of slavery and caribbean and latin america. And the apache nomos been living in the southwest for hundreds of years saw this as an invasion of their territories. And by the union and confederacy saw these indigenous groups as obstacles. Obviously to their attempt to control the west and the views and region of this national future. Soy also learned that after the union, so definitely the mexico territory from confederate agency in spring of 1862, they turned to the seven enemies and hard Work Campaign against them. So with this meant is that at the same time, and the union was fighting this for to emancipate enslaved men and women in the east, providing more to discriminate or remove native people in the west. I figured all of those things out method that was a really kind of an interesting aspect of the war the people had not ever thought about. And then i figured out some things about why i never heard about this before. First thing the civil war, the feel of the civil war, really focuses on the east. On virginia and also focuses on eastern battlefield and politics. And of course their extraordinary important but what that means is that rarely do we kind of move outside of that kind of area. Im also, in the tradition in Civil War History referring to the trans mississippi west was see where we the ball of shiloh in tennessee in general and all this area around the mississippi river. Called the west. So that is a problem right. What terms of use. When we consider west of the westbury like it seems impossible. Also if you open up any kind of war history ac map in there. And you see the war, usually in this ride railed the 100th meridian in fact if you if you have the book, you can flip to the frontier wouldve included a map, this and it is the and at that one meridian. It is actually right in the middle of this twopage map. If you and then there, youre actively erasing 40 percent of the nations landmass. You are literally erasing it from the story of the civil war. So is really important to me when i was talking to schuster about the book production from ice and want to map in here first thing. That is the entire continent that you see all of the territories as the western territories and states that the work. They were organized, since the beginning of the work and you also see the homelands of the apaches. On this map kind of layered with three kind of different layers of the map. And it is a continental map to the pacific. Also what is interesting when i found out when i went on my Research Trip is that even though the size of the civil war and the southwest are really well preserved and everywhere because if you go to virginia and youre trying to find Better Things in important areas, usually under a parking lot. First of all. There is not a kind of intensive suburban or urbanization, and large areas of the southwest so whats happened is a lot of these sites that you will read about in the more are actually there. It is just there are very far apart. And theyre run by all different kinds of federal agencies and are not particularly will find and most, in the southwest for first culture. For its adobe architecture, ratio on colitis, they are not going for Civil War History so theres a great example of this, if you go to santa fe plaza. Right in the middle of the plazas outlet. As a memorial to the Union Soldiers fought in the war and again as it says over the confederates and the savages. As all protest around that monument where it says savages. I found really interesting that everyone ignores it. I went around and talk to people about it. You noted this. He said no. Theyll just kind of Walking Around and nursing shops all around so no real idea. Starting and calling your attention to that were history. And you actually read about it. John clark in the book, took part in the fundraising for that memorial in 1866. The positive self, is actually created as a civil war site because it was built by Union Soldiers. And when their officers put them to work, otherwise they would just start harassing around. With of officers had been built, the type of thing. You would never know that though. It is not noted. For various reasons, and through various mechanisms, the history of the war has really been sometimes erased or forgotten and sometimes just kind of not even mentioned. So doing this research, heisel found that the civil west was full of different groups. The story its this massive story, you really want to tell it in a traditionally academic way, an argument driven kind of thematically oriented way. Mr. To think about all the different ways i could possibly 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, right . [laughter] that i would be reading this novel because im not usually down with the misogynist excessively violent novels. But abwas making me turn the pages. I was devouring this book and i try to figure out why so i went and looked at it and i actually kind of mapped it out i started taking notes on what he was doing and what he was using was actually a form its quite common in literature which is multiperspective narrative. If you go into the book and you 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 and those are the names of battles in which multiple people come together. In each of these chapters you will follow that person kind of through space and time and then you will leave them and go to somebody else and then you will come back to them a little bit later, each person has anywhere from 2 to 3 chapters. Some of them stay for only a short time in new mexico some stay the entire time. One of them dies, i will tell you who, so that you can save it for labor. And be intrigued. I decided to try this approach to bring the reader of the the threecornered war into the civil west through the experiences of 90 for people and they are representing movements of nine different communities. And different war actions. Im not going to introduce them all to you here because that would be overwhelming and probably take to long. I just cannot talk about three of them in particular in order to give you a sense of the books reign. If you have the book with you there is an image insert in the middle if you would like to look at it. The second image here, i can hold this up to you here on the left page, this is John Robert Baylor who i sort of affectionately started referring to as crazy eyes because i think his eyes are very light blue and the photography of the time kind of washes out his eyes. He looks particularly crazed in 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 kentucky along with several of the people here were born in kentucky including kit carson thats an interesting weird connection. Baylor was born in kentucky he moved to texas in the 1840s he was lord he and his family members were lured by the promise of rich cotton land. And the right to own slaves. He actually is of the family his uncle is the one after harm Baylor University is named. This is a family with a long history in texas. He got married and started a family and over the next 15 years he worked as a farmer and he enslaved men and women with both of those adventures. He was admitted to the texas state legislature. He also became the editor of a newspaper called the white man in 1868. This is sort of the thing that i appreciate about the mid19th century racists, they are very open about it. Theyre just like, organist start the paper and we will be called abit will be called the white man in 1860 he became the editor of this newspaper and they printed a lot of lord pieces about attacks on anglos in texas and they use this to really gin up all this fear about comanches and he was kind of a prototexas ranger and would gather up people and ride out after comanche before the war. When he rode into new mexico he was wearing a belt buckle that said cfa and it was made out of silver he had melted down from a comb he had taken from a comanche warrior. So by the spring of 1861, as you can imagine, you can get the flavor of this, john baylor was really primed to join the Confederate Army in texas texas and success of slavery and secession and the right of white men to rest lands from native people. By all accounts he was extremely charismatic, he was a capable commander he was about six foot three inches which is super tall for someone in this period and an imposing strong guy he was impetuous and ambitious and resentful and all of those characteristic shapes all of those actions in the civil war west in 1851 and 62. You will meet him in chapter 1. He is quite a character. To bring you into this context of the civil war west. The next person she is the last image here when nita who don mentioned interaction actions. When nita was just a teenager when she married manwell ito who is a powerful navajo headman with a very long history of resisting spanish and mexican and american incursions in their homeland. Pretty soon after their wedding the civil war began and readers of the three cornered war will follow when nita as she and manwell ito and their band negotiate with, manipulate, and evade union forces in their homeland and are forced by impending starvation to surrender to the u. S. Army in the fall of 1866. When he does story of the long walks and incarceration 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 involv