Kit Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls


Book Description

"Following two journeys, Kit Carson's 1864 military expedition from Fort Bascom to Adobe Walls and Alvin Lynn's journey to document what happened are told"--




Kit Carson at the First Battle of Adobe Walls


Book Description

The ruins of Adobe Walls, one-time saloon, fort, and trading post with the Plains Indians was the 1864 site of the largest battle between the Indian and the U.S. Army. Some three hundred army troops, mostly cavalry, were led by famous western explorer, Indian agent, fighter and trapper Christopher (Kit) Carson. Not only was it the largest battle between the Indian and U.S. Army, it was the only time the army was forced to withdraw. Why withdraw? Because Carson and his New Mexico and California volunteers were outnumbered ten to one by their combined Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapaho enemy. Had it not been for Carson's command ability, a greater massacre than the Little Big Horn would have occurred.




Kit Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls


Book Description

"Following two journeys, Kit Carson's 1864 military expedition from Fort Bascom to Adobe Walls and Alvin Lynn's journey to document what happened are told"--




Adobe Walls


Book Description

In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one women set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. Moving south to follow the herds, they intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunter, or "hide men." At a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations After operating for only a few months, the post was attacked one sultry June morning by angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose physical and cultural survival depending on the great bison herd that were rapidly shrinking before the white men's guns. Initially defeated, that attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated leaving the deserted post to be burned by Indians intent on erasing all traces of the white man's presence. Nonetheless, tracing did remain, and in the ashes and dirt were buried minute details of the hide men's lives and the battle that so suddenly changed them. A little more than a century later white men again dug into the sod at Adobe Walls. The nineteenth-century men dug for profits, but the modern hunters sere looking for the natural time capsule inadvertently left by those earlier adventurers. The authors of this book, a historian and an archeologists, have dug into the sod and into far-flung archives to sift reality form the long-romanticized story of Adobe Walls, its residents, and the Indians who so fiercely resented their presence. The full story of Adobe Walls now tells us much about the life and work of the hide men, about the dying of the Plains Indian culture, and about the march of white commerce across the frontier.




Empire of the Summer Moon


Book Description

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.




Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867


Book Description

Still the least-understood theater of the Civil War, the Southwest Borderlands saw not only Union and Confederate forces clashing but Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos struggling for survival, power, and dominance on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. While other scholars have examined individual battles, Andrew E. Masich is the first to analyze these conflicts as interconnected civil wars. Based on previously overlooked Indian Depredation Claim records and a wealth of other sources, this book is both a close-up history of the Civil War in the region and an examination of the war-making traditions of its diverse peoples. Along the border, Masich argues, the Civil War played out as a collision between three warrior cultures. Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos brought their own weapons and tactics to the struggle, but they also shared many traditions. Before the war, the three groups engaged one another in cycles of raid and reprisal involving the taking of livestock and human captives, reflecting a peculiar mixture of conflict and interdependence. When U.S. regular troops were withdrawn in 1861 to fight in the East, the resulting power vacuum led to unprecedented violence in the West. Indians fought Indians, Hispanos battled Hispanos, and Anglos vied for control of the Southwest, while each group sought allies in conflicts related only indirectly to the secession crisis. When Union and Confederate forces invaded the Southwest, Anglo soldiers, Hispanos, and sedentary Indian tribes forged alliances that allowed them to collectively wage a relentless war on Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos. Mexico’s civil war and European intervention served only to enlarge the conflict in the borderlands. When the fighting subsided, a new power hierarchy had emerged and relations between the region’s inhabitants, and their nations, forever changed. Masich’s perspective on borderlands history offers a single, cohesive framework for understanding this power shift while demonstrating the importance of transnational and multicultural views of the American Civil War and the Southwest Borderlands.




Battles of the Red River War


Book Description

Battles of the Red River War unearths a long-buried record of the collision of two cultures. In 1874, U.S. forces led by Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie carried out a surprise attack on several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the Palo Duro Canyon of the Texas panhandle and destroyed their winter stores and horses. After this devastating loss, many of these Indians returned to their reservations and effectively brought to a close what has come to be known as the Red River War, a campaign carried out by the U.S. Army during 1874 as a result of Indian attacks on white settlers in the region. After this operation, the Southern Plains Indians would never again pose a coherent threat to whites’ expansion and settlement across their ancestral homelands. Until now, the few historians who have undertaken to tell the story of the Red River War have had to rely on the official records of the battles and a handful of extant accounts, letters, and journals of the U.S. Army participants. Starting in 1998, J. Brett Cruse, under the auspices of the Texas Historical Commission, conducted archeological investigations at six battle sites. In the artifacts they unearthed, Cruse and his teams found clues that would both correct and complete the written records and aid understanding of the Indian perspectives on this clash of cultures. Including a chapter on historiography and archival research by Martha Doty Freeman and an analysis of cartridges and bullets by Douglas D. Scott, this rigorously researched and lavishly illustrated work will commend itself to archeologists, military historians and scientists, and students and scholars of the Westward Expansion.




Buffalo Trail


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling author of Silver City brings history to life as Cash McLendon takes refuge in Dodge City and falls in with some of the most famous men in the American West... After barely escaping nemesis Killer Boots in the tiny Arizona Territory town of Glorious, Cash McLendon is in desperate need of a safe haven somewhere on the frontier. Fleeing to Dodge City, he meets an intrepid band of buffalo hunters determined to head south to forbidden Indian Territory in the Texas panhandle. In the company of such colorful Western legends as Bat Masterson and Billy Dixon, Cash helps establish a hunting camp known as Adobe Walls. When a massive migration of buffalo arrives, and newly hopeful that he may yet patch things up with Gabrielle Tirrito back in Arizona, Cash thinks his luck has finally changed. But no good can come of entering the prohibited lands they’ve crossed into. Little do Cash and his fellows know that their camp is targeted by a new coalition of the finest warriors among the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa. Led by fierce Comanche war chief Quanah and eerie tribal mystic Isatai, an enormous force of 2,000 is about to descend on the camp and will mark one of the fiercest, bloodiest battles in frontier history. Cash McLendon is in another fight for his life, and this time, running is not an option...




Blood and Thunder


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Ghost Soldiers comes an eye-opening history of the American conquest of the West—"a story full of authority and color, truth and prophecy" (The New York Times Book Review). In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.




Kit Carson and the Indians


Book Description

Portrayed by past historians as the greatest guide and Indian fighter in the West, Kit Carson has become in recent years a historical pariah--a brutal murderer who betrayed the Navajos, and an unwitting dupe of American expansion, and a racist. Many historians now question both his reputation and his place in the pantheon of American heroes. Here we are urged to reconsider Carson yet again. Carson was a man of the nineteenth century, whose racial views and actions were much like those of his contemporaries.