People are serving. Good evening everyone we are happy you are here tonight happy to have me again kate nelson with us the three cornered war. This is an engrossing narrative account to show the civil war and indian war and the western expansion are all interconnected and rightsetteors specifically about selfdetermination and fight for control of the region summer very well known to us orhers like juanita a navajo rito reader who stories were lost to history until now. With those individualal actions in the midst of a larger conflict. And indeed it is history keeping the reader turning the pages a writer and historian living in lincoln is written about the civil war and American Culture for several publications including the New York Times and smithsonian magazineor ba in history of literature from harvard and phd in american studies from the university of iowa. From texas tech and cal state fullerton also the author of ruination. And then to read a passage or two please help me to give a warm welcome to megan kate nelson. [applause] thank you for coming out on this cold and dreary night. Before we begin we also meet tonight of the traditional lands of the indian people. So that was taken place in new mexico. And texas in colorado and california you may be asking yourself i have never heard of this theater of the war or gettysburg. I thought the same thing myself in that seem like a long time i grew up in colorado. I never heard there were civil war battles in new mexico or colorado soldiers were important in i had no idea Indigenous People were involved at all. And those indian wars and then it was with the industry. And then the denver broncos. I wanted to find out more about the theater of the war and why i never heard of this conflict before. Between 1861 and 1868 and Civil War History if you u pand the geography you expand chronology. And through 1868 the confederacy tried to control the region. And with this important vision of the future so the north and visions this free of slavery from coasttocoast and also from coasttocoast. So then they could jump off from there. And then to create this hemisphere empire from latin america. But the navajo that were living there for hundreds of years saw the invasion of the territory. But that confederacy saw thean indigenous groups and obviously with their attempts to control the west. And then from the confederate invasion they turn to the other enemies to initiate the campaign against them. So what that meant come at the same time the union was fighting the war to emancipate enslaved men and women but to teexterminate or remove native people in the west. And that is an interesting aspect of the war. Why i never heard about this before. Those focusing on virginia. So what thatpo is important and with that kind of area. And then referring to the trans mississippi west with the battle of shiloh, and all this area around the a mississippi river. So what could be west of the west . In possible. It if you open any Civil War History and then it usually ends right around the 100th meridian. If you have a book you can slip to the front where it does not end at the 100th meridian its right in the middle of a twopage map. You are actively erasing 40 percent of the nations landmass. Literally from the civil wars what is important when we are talking to Simon Schuster that i want to have this map in here first thing the entire continent you see all the territories as they were organized at the beginning of the war layered through three different layers and the continental map so i went to my Research Trip and those are really well preserved and then to go to the battle of those areas we are under a parking lot and with that suburbanization with the large areas of thend southwest so what you will read about in the three cornered war is that they are very far apart run well different kinds of federal agencies and in most taurus go to the southwest for the southwestern culture indigenous culture, the architecture or the green chili and gelatos not Civil War History. There is a great example of s,this if youve ever been to santa f fe, right in the middle is an obelisk and it is a memorial to the soldiers who fought in the war against the confederate and the savages. So around that monument what we found interesting but everyone ignored it. So we went around and talk to people do you know what that is . Know. So walking the path all the way a around so there isnt anything calling the attention to the Civil War History. And that john clark takes part in the fundraising for that memo on dash memorial so the pause itself it is created the sites when the officers put them to work otherwise they start crowding around. And then you would never know that because it is not noted. For various reasons and those mechanisms the history of the war has sometimes been forgotten. And also how complicated and how many different groups of people and how they take place over hundreds of thousands of lives. And the groups of people had to march 200 miles at a time so my challenge is how do we tell the story cracks in a traditionally academic way so all the different ways to tell the story and at the time one of the novels was game of thrones. This is very surprising that i would be reading this novel. Not usually down with the misogynist. But i wasin just devouring and then i mapped it out. And what he was using is a form that is quite common in literature which is at perspective narrative. So if you go into the book into the table of contents that each of these chapters is named after a person those are the names of battles in which the people come together so you can follow that person and then you will come back to them later and with those two or three chapters. One of them dies i will not tell you who. You can save that later and be intrigued. So to try this approach through the experiences of nine different people and to represent the movements of nine different communities. I will not introduce them all because i would be overwhelming and take too long but in order to give a sense of the books range. There is and image insert in the middle if you would like to look at it so the second image this is John Robert Baylor that i would refer to as crazy eyes. They are very light blue and the photography washed out his eyes is actually holding a sword but it looks like a knife orok something. So i knew i wanted to start with baylor because a confederate invasion of the territory in the summer ofyl 1861 and to be at the head of that invasion. Born in kentucky there were several so that is an interesting connection so to move to texas in the 18 thirties with the promise of rich cotton land and the right to own slaves and actually is he is named after Baylor University he got married and started a family working as a farmer and rancher and he read the law and then elected to the Texas State Legislature and also became the editor of a newspaper called the white man. In 1860 that is what i appreciate that they are very open about it. So when 1860 and editor of the newspaper with a lot of the comanche attacks and the use this to generate that furor and with that texas ranger and in fact when he rode into new mexico he was wearing that but on that belt buckle it was made out of silver that he melted down so in the spring of 1861 and join to have that Confederate Army and succession in the white man for ther native people and by all accounts he is extremely charismatic he is about 6foot 3 inches which is super tall for this. He was impetuous and all of those characters shape all of his actions in the civil war west so in chapter one and is quite a character into this context of the civil war west. So the next person is one need a is just a teenager who was the powerful navajo woman with a very long history to speak spanish and mexican incursions in their homeland. Pretty soon after the civil war began and then word follow juanita and then to negotiate and manipulate those forces in the homeland and then of course to surrender to the u. S. Army in the fall of 1866 her story and incarceration what we can think of as a prison camp to dominate the final part of the book the wartime experience was one of suffering and the survival of all the protagonist, she is the heart of the book. Her story really reveals the extent to which the three cornered war. I just want to also tell you about john clark his picture is here in the middle on the righthand side of the page as a surveyor, a lawyer and land owner he was too old in his early forties but he really had hoped to serve the union in other ways. And those from the law circuit days and the mexico territory from the summer of 1861 and then we did through 1868 so also and was there pretty consistently for the entirety of the book and at one point as he fled santa fe the confederates were marching i went to go report to lincoln and to visit the General Land Office so to have a dc vacation in the midst of the mexican and conflict. But the base of the Lincoln Administration dedicated republican who believed in the parties vision, cleared succession list and native people. Clark was p responsible not only for the reservation but a survey of the arizona gold country and where the town of prescott is now. So he went out there to confirm and what has been discovered and has been reported for the union army. And that there were more than a thousand minors and also needed to declare navajos from the area because from albuquerque to the gold mines from the navajo territory. And that which appears helps the Republican Party envisioned the conquest of the west and my Biggest Surprise they werent hidden but the archivist had put together a new they were in santa fe in this time and with those john clarkpu diaries you never know what you will get her what that means and with that pocket diary or what they ate that day. But what i got was this enormous box of 27 volumes of diaries. Meticulously written page long and trees every day talking about the weather, what he di did, his feelings, going to assailants at night to assailants. And the entirety of the war. And then at the air on the archives also in the box because he wrote very regularly the original maps were there and i truly believe i was the second person to open those letters ever. They were in pristine condition all the folds are there and chris no marks of wear and tear often with the wax seal that he had. Still there. And then you didnt really think the surveyor general would be importing parts. So looking at the civil war with the unexpected place and that concept took place in the north and thenf south between the union and the confederacy and that native soldiers. And with that element within to complicate the notion as a just war. And a truly national war and then to go across the borders. But i will stop there so we have more time for questions. Are you inclined to do more with clark . Has anybody ever done a whole book . So if i needed to write a longer biography of him i know where he went, he left mexico it was the attorney general very briefly of utah but then when the transcontinental came in. I cant document he was there at the ceremony but he is nearby. So i wouldnt be surprised if he was there but then he went east and worked for a Kansas Railroad company and ultimately he died of cancer when he was older after a very long and fulfilling career. I think i have done enough of the biographical work to scratch that itch. I hope you got to know him. And the fullscale biography little hard. Obviously he does touch a lot of different points but then here is a spoiler alert, when he leaves in 1860 to go back to does the on dc the things he will go home but then stop e at dc first to attend the impeachment trial. [laughter] so that will be interesting. But there is more to learn and with people like this. But they are actually fascinating. Or how did you select those characters . Some i just knew because they singlehandedly would decide. So he gets it done. So then to successfully occupy to force the surrender ofit union troops but then the confederate territory. So thats in the space of three or l four days. Plus once i started to read more about it with the university of texas, i knew i had to write about him. He loved his wife so much and unfortunately we did not find and for them to check their addicts i think it would be amazing is very valentines day like. [laughter] that it should be more interesting to write about complicated people i knew that had those really important moments. Which were ther battles at the end of this campaign, and then he came back to santa fe and was nursed by louisa was another one of those protagonists. She was this kind of fascinating viewpoint on the experience and was an army wife, so i thought that was an interesting thing because she went with her husband is with the army was like before the war and what life was like because she was in california in the 1850s when it first came in as the state ended in utah. They wrote a column and published it. Basically they were withh the army like how dare you come to our land. I had a list of material but i only had one letter. You dont necessarily need to have everything, but you need to have something and because she was married to a pretty senior officer in the u. S. Army, i could track her. I knew where she was and other soldiers talked w about her so i could find her in the documents and because she would this battle they wrote about her and then the newspaper printed an article on her that was a little dicey. She seemed too nice to be true. She was also one of the attendees at the seances, so that was one way to. Th was a combination of a food that i think about in that context thait in thatcontext the enough sources that they would also allow me to talk about the Larger Community and their role in it. I wondered if you could say a little more about that last pa part. It had the first and they said something when we focus on the Eastern Theater we focus on the proclamation and African American soldiering and racial armies kind of in the east. But in the fall of 1861, the volunteers and officers were joining the first new mexico. The militia is and native scots and despise her joining the volunteers this army was interesting. It was a small army in comparison to those of the east. It was kind of the fighting forces between 35 to 4500 on any given day, but they were actually very much like the fighting forces of the east and that not many of them had any experience d. But the soldiers were defending their homeland. At least in this early period where they are the invading force so you see the union force as defensive and they were quite willing to pick up arms and fight for the union not necessarily because they supported the federal government because they had only been american citizens for 12 or 13 years and they had a sort of uneasy relationship with the federal government. Government. Thats more thamore than anyoned texas. In 1841, texas believe to santa fe was part of texas and a long legacyid so they were taken prisoner and most of them died they remembered that moment and they were raised in full and leery of them trying to march in again so this is one of the misjudgment he came after him with a larger force and assumed that they would be on his side but he was wrong on both accounts ended up as a huge disaster because he was counting on them to provide food for his army on the march. The officers participated in all of the fights not only in the confederacy but with the navajos they were reorganized into two groups and put in to fight the south and apaches in the north, so it is a really interesting army to study a. Some military historians have done so but there is more work that needs to go into it. I read the first few chapters were the soldiers were marching and basically they are defeated by a landscape and im wondering how much it becomes another character and factor. That is a great question. I was talking to a podcast or. I think that is true in many ways because some of you have been to the southwest if you fly there a specialty here it is shocking. Its very high in elevation and extreme dry and the distance the soldiers were traveling even on horseback they were spending two or three months out on the road and in west Texas Water Resources once you got past were very few and far between so there was another protagonist from california to also the water source is few and far between so seeing how they dealt with that logistically one of the ways they did it which is interesting is that they staggered their Companies Said they would only be Going Forward 100 rather than a thousand at a time and they wouldnt just suck it dry all at one time, they had to give it time to replenish so that is one of the things they tried to do to help. Carlton who you will meet was a meticulous commander and he oversaw everything. He made them. Water with them and he did not lose a Single Person in that art except in and engagement. On the other hand they lost 13 . Some were battle wounds, but most of it was exposure because they started marching and i think if you havent been to the desert it does snow there and it gets very cold at night during the winter so you will hear from david asenap blog particular talking about how cold they are and often if they are in a part of the desert without trees, they cannot set fire, because how do you. So, the soldiers in the theater are more vulnerable to the elements than any other theater and more reliant and this is proof the reason the confederacy lost, spoiler alert. The union forces were commanded by a denver lawyer that had no experience whatsoever. He sent half the army around the and they destroy the wagon train and wit let most of them go. Move the rest of us who have lefwhat you haveleft during thes period they went all the way back to san antonio and they did that in the spring and summer in june and july is extreme and they see the nature and climate impacting them. Of course they have more helpful transportation now. One of the interesting tidbits about that is that he had a huge wagon train they had these wagons made out of wood and once they started getting into these areas is started to shrink said they were literally falling apart and where are they going to get more so it is working in challenging ways mostly for the confederates was there somebody thatat you just didnt have enoh ulbecause i think that would spk nicely to the questions historians make allma the time t it didnt work either from these methods are from the narratives. I think there were multiple people who i could have included that were on my original list and was a major player in this conflict also. He has the more intensive experience and his interaction catapults into the full scale war but he was with them and most of those locations and you will hear about him quite a bit. He doesnt become the focus. I do wish that i could have included more protagonists. He was the head of the first new mexico in all these places and a lot of his officers and soldiers were his panda and we know a fair bit about some of them, but with the demands of the storytelling it would have createcreated iterative repetitf what i try to do instead is to bring in the actors and name them when i have the chancewh ad also he was married into the community and from a prominent family in new mexico and also i can bring in all the stories about their experiences and their morale and why they were fighting the motivations. And of course i always wished more were there writing. I think we all ru run into situations in this particular period there wasnt a much material being generated and i would get these kind of elements they were kind of circulating in this world i couldnt put enough of their stories together. They didnt have kind of the advantage. It was more challenging for other women, for me to include others. I kept going to the archive and hoping for that kind of moment where you find someone like yes, this iss the person. I think that there are sort of caches of sources we may not know aboutor it now or they are sort of in the archives but not sort of brought in so we havent found them yet. That is what im hoping is that people will come away with a better sense of why it was meaningful in this moment and i hope theyst finish it thinking was a good read but also i hope that they think like i wonder what else is out there because this is the story primarily as the gateway to the larger west there ar but there o many others that are engaged in the war during this time and we need to know more about them. What sources did you uncover that helps you to find her voice . I was extremely lucky to have the research. She is within the buck and several articles also about her and her role. Also there arele several historians have collected stories and in particular of women and there is a great book about novel not also the name its about living traditionally so i felt like that could give me some good context knowing what her life could have been like and put domestic tasks would she have been in charge of and also we know theres a lot of good work out there on the textiles because they were in theca currency in the southwest. They were very well known for being wellmade and watertight and so they had one of these trade items along with enslaved so there was to their residual f slavery which took a different sape but i was able to talk about that also. He had been enslaved in some sort of a raid and was brought into the navajo tribe so that allowed me to talk about that aspect and then weaving and blankets and addresses and the work that women do to clothes their family and keep them warm and in agriculture and storytelling and cooking, they are the storytellers. I went to the museum and looked at a lot of the material so i could see the early period and then also other things like baskets and other items they would have had and also its interestinghe she along with kit carson are the most photographed people in this book. The reason, she went as a part of a not also a delegation in 1874 in so the photograph is from that trip although she was also photographed several times so i have these visuals a lot of them you can see the dres dresss wearing so thatshe is wearing sd describe that ascoul well. I think that in building the story that was a interdisciplinary and all of the kind of biography building because i was using visual and records ande, oral histories collected not only by her descendents but also by the community. Any other questions . I was thinking about how most of us are introduced for history textbooks which its ever been said that its a good read so much of the reason many of us dont pursue history and for me this idea of taking and bringing people into the narratives that can almost read like fiction and be engaged in that kind of way seems likes a radical way to disrupt and how we think of history. I dont know if i have a question except id have to thought about thyouthought abour this type of narrative to be a way to bring students into history along those lines if you think about a project that you want to do in history and how you might write about it. The first three are pretty easy to. I hear a lot from people if they really do love the civil war one of the things that brought them into it is the documentary. Its what iit is called in the t the reason it is so compelling as it is about people. They picked out individuals they followed through those segments and kind of read those words out loud as if they were speaking to you. One of the things i tried to do here is with the quotations and all this stuff instead of using it as evidence you Say Something like december was cold but they are and then you have three soldiers saying how cool this was a. Uoor actively writing saying how it is i would love to see more history written in different and interesting ways. I think that we have a lot of good narrative history that you can write iny different ways ad it would be really cool to see how people canex experiment without a. Of members in the audience are like yeah, thats going to be hard. I do hope that this is assignable for students because one of the things that is not is an excerpt. Except for the prologue and the first chapter you cant really take a chapter from the metal and photocopy it for your student. It would make no sense. It would be like taking a chapter from the middle. Its like youre in the middle of the action. Youve already learned things about the people and whats happening if you read from the beginning. So i will be interested to hear from colleagues of mine if they are able to assign the book to students in a way they can read it from beginning to end i think that is one of our challenges is if people are reading it for class like how do you divvy it up and work it into the syllab syllabus. Hopefully for the people that are just reading it at night on on their bed stand and reading along im really hoping that they can devour it. Like they would a novel. Thank you all so much for coming. [applause]
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