Between Two Fires


Book Description

Tragic historic story of the destruction of Native American peoples as a result of the Civil War, including their own service in both the Union and Confederate armies.




Civil War and the Indian Wars


Book Description

A chronicling of the Indian wars fought between 1861 and 1865. While many know of the major events of the Civil War, few realize there were also Indian wars fought during that period of strife. This account covers those conflicts, from a prewar incident that sparked an Apache war in Arizona to the Navajo war in New Mexico, the Sioux uprising in Minnesota, and the struggle of the Plains Indians in Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Divided by chapters into the five years of the Civil War, this book reveals how the war impacted everyone in America, including Indians on the frontier.




The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory


Book Description

In Indian Territory the Civil War is a story best told through shades of gray rather than black and white or heroes and villains. Since neutrality appeared virtually impossible, the vast majority of territory residents chose a side, doing so for myriad reasons and not necessarily out of affection for either the Union or the Confederacy. Indigenous residents found themselves fighting to protect their unusual dual status as communities distinct from the American citizenry yet legal wards of the federal government. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory is a nuanced and authoritative examination of the layers of conflicts both on and off the Civil War battlefield. It examines the military front and the home front; the experiences of the Five Nations and those of the agency tribes in the western portion of the territory; the severe conflicts between Native Americans and the federal government and between Indian nations and their former slaves during and beyond the Reconstruction years; and the concept of memory as viewed through the lenses of Native American oral traditions and the modern evolution of public history. These carefully crafted essays by leading scholars such as Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Clarissa Confer, Richard B. McCaslin, Linda W. Reese, and F. Todd Smith will help teachers and students better understand the Civil War, Native American history, and Oklahoma history.




The Earth Is Weeping


Book Description

Bringing together Custer, Sherman, Grant, and other fascinating military and political figures, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo, this “sweeping work of narrative history” (San Francisco Chronicle) is the fullest account to date of how the West was won—and lost. After the Civil War the Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.




Caught in the Maelstrom


Book Description

The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole during America s Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature. From 1861-1865, the Indians fought their own bloody civil war on lands surrounded by the Kansas Territory, Arkansas, and Texas. Clint Crowe s magisterial Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War reveals the complexity and the importance of this war within a war, and explains how it affected the surrounding states in the Trans-Mississippi West and the course of the broader war engulfing the country. The onset of the Civil War exacerbated the divergent politics of the five tribes and resulted in the Choctaw and Chickasaw contributing men for the Confederacy and the Seminoles contributing men for the Union. The Creeks were divided between the Union and the Confederacy, while the internal war split apart the Cherokee nation mostly between those who followed Stand Watie, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, and John Ross, who threw his majority support behind the Union cause. Throughout, Union and Confederate authorities played on divisions within the tribes to further their own strategic goals by enlisting men, signing treaties, encouraging bloodshed, and even using the hard hand of war to turn a profit. Crowe s well-written study is grounded upon a plethora of archival resources, newspapers, diaries, letter collections, and other accounts. Caught in the Maelstrom examines every facet of this complex and fascinating story in a manner sure to please the most demanding reader."




Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars 2 Vols


Book Description

A handsome and critical addition to the library of every historian, genealogist, and Civil War buff, this rare two-volume set is the official record of Minnesota's participation in the Civil and Dakota Wars. Published in two parts in the 1890s and written by the men who fought in battle, Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars contains regimental rosters (names lists with ages, muster dates, transfers, and remarks) as well as detailed narratives describing the wartime service of each regiment, battery, battalion, and brigade--their marches, campaigns, battles, surrenders, wounded lists, furloughs, reenlistments, and return to Minnesota. Letters, telegrams, and descriptions related to the development of the Dakota War, including dispatches written from the field, offer a personal face to this wartime history. Included for the first time is a 144-page index to all the regimental rosters, making this an invaluable research tool. Together, these volumes are the essential reference for Minnesota's troops and their campaigns.




American Indian Wars


Book Description

Providing an indispensable overview of the American Indian Wars, this book focuses on Native American tribes and warriors and their varying responses to the onslaught of European colonists and American settlers in the centuries following contact. This work provides an overview of the Indian Wars from the arrival of Europeans until 1890. The work focuses primarily on Native American tribes and warriors and their role in battles and campaigns against other Native Americans and Europeans/Americans, while also including key European/American leaders and soldiers as well as treaties between Native Americans and Europeans/Americans. The introduction provides a broad overview of the Indian Wars and also considers whether the Indian Wars should be considered genocide. The bibliography focuses on the most important works published on the Indian Wars. Each entry also includes a list of references for readers to consult. The work also includes a collection of primary source documents that span the entire time period.




A Misplaced Massacre


Book Description

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars. Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.




Remembering the Modoc War


Book Description

On October 3, 1873, the U.S. Army hanged four Modoc headmen at Oregon's Fort Klamath. The condemned had supposedly murdered the only U.S. Army general to die during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. Their much-anticipated execution marked the end of the Modoc War of 1872–73. But as Boyd Cothran demonstrates, the conflict's close marked the beginning of a new struggle over the memory of the war. Examining representations of the Modoc War in the context of rapidly expanding cultural and commercial marketplaces, Cothran shows how settlers created and sold narratives of the conflict that blamed the Modocs. These stories portrayed Indigenous people as the instigators of violence and white Americans as innocent victims. Cothran examines the production and circulation of these narratives, from sensationalized published histories and staged lectures featuring Modoc survivors of the war to commemorations and promotional efforts to sell newly opened Indian lands to settlers. As Cothran argues, these narratives of American innocence justified not only violence against Indians in the settlement of the West but also the broader process of U.S. territorial and imperial expansion.




Lincoln and the Indians


Book Description

"With a new preface by the author"--P. [1] of cover.