Boldly They Rode; A History Of The First Colorado Regiment
Boldly They Rode; A History Of The First Colorado Regiment

Author: Ovando J. Hollister

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2015-11-06

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1786254824

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“Hollister was a private in the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers which fought the New Mexican campaign against the invading Texan troops in March, 1862. This book might have been a dry recital of facts. Fortunately Hollister was not only an educated man but natural writer who brought to his task imagination, a deep human interest, and a careful reporter’s news sense. Here is no grandfather’s tale but a narrative so live that it might have taken place yesterday. Here is history that echoes with thrilling adventure. Hollister, hardened, realistic soldier-author, seemed to know, as he made daily entries in his diary, that his on-the-spot reportage of the rawhide passions and broadrange loyalties, the hearty campfire humor and the grim punishment of forced winter marches, the ignoble details of life as he saw it in a fighting man’s era, must be set down for all of us who were to come after his rugged breed. The true importance of the campaign between the Coloradans and the Texans goes far beyond a local effect. It was one of the decisive struggles of the Civil War. If Sibley’s seasoned Texas Brigade had won, they surely would have dominated the West and its resources. They would have seized the defenseless gold mines which were the potential treasure cache of the armies of the North. The war might have been prolonged indefinitely.”-William MacLeod Raine

Colonels in Blue--Missouri and the Western States and Territories
Colonels in Blue--Missouri and the Western States and Territories

Author: Roger D. Hunt

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-11-07

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1476636850

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This biographical dictionary catalogs the Union army colonels who commanded regiments from Missouri and the western States and Territories during the Civil War. The seventh volume in a series documenting Union army colonels, this book details the lives of officers who did not advance beyond that rank. Included for each colonel are brief biographical excerpts and any available photographs, many of them published for the first time.

Ned Wynkoop and the Lonely Road from Sand Creek
Ned Wynkoop and the Lonely Road from Sand Creek

Author: Louis Kraft

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-02-14

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0806189541

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When Edward W. Wynkoop arrived in Colorado Territory during the 1858 gold rush, he was one of many ambitious newcomers seeking wealth in a promising land mostly inhabited by American Indians. After he worked as a miner, sheriff, bartender, and land speculator, Wynkoop’s life drastically changed after he joined the First Colorado Volunteers to fight for the Union during the Civil War. This sympathetic but critical biography centers on his subsequent efforts to prevent war with Indians during the volatile 1860s. A central theme of Louis Kraft’s engaging narrative is Wynkoop’s daring in standing up to Anglo-Americans and attempting to end the 1864 Indian war. The Indians may have been dangerous enemies obstructing “progress,” but they were also human beings. Many whites thought otherwise, and at daybreak on November 29, 1864, the Colorado Volunteers attacked Black Kettle’s sleeping camp. Upon learning of the disaster now known as the Sand Creek Massacre, Wynkoop was appalled and spoke out vehemently against the action. Many of his contemporaries damned his views, but Wynkoop devoted the rest of his career as a soldier and then as a U.S. Indian agent to helping Cheyennes and Arapahos to survive. The tribes’ lifeways still centered on the dwindling herds of buffalo, but now they needed guns to hunt. Kraft reveals how hard Wynkoop worked to persuade the Indian Bureau to provide the tribes with firearms along with their allotments of food and clothing—a hard sell to a government bent on protecting white settlers and paving the way for American expansion. In the wake of Sand Creek, Wynkoop strove to prevent General Winfield Scott Hancock from destroying a Cheyenne-Sioux village in 1867, only to have the general ignore him and start a war. Fearing more innocent people would die, Wynkoop resigned from the Indian Bureau but, not long thereafter, receded into obscurity. Now, thanks to Louis Kraft, we may appreciate Wynkoop as a man of conscience who dared to walk between Indians and Anglo-Americans but was often powerless to prevent the tragic consequences of their conflict.

The Howling Storm
The Howling Storm

Author: Kenneth W. Noe

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-10-07

Total Pages: 687

ISBN-13: 080717419X

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Finalist for the Lincoln Prize! Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. In The Howling Storm, Noe retells the history of the conflagration with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers’ food supply, lowered morale, and undercut the government’s efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. By contrast, the superior equipment and open supply lines enjoyed by Union soldiers enabled them to cope successfully with the South’s extreme conditions and, ultimately, secure victory in 1865. Climate conditions during the war proved unusual, as irregular phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña, and similar oscillations in the Atlantic Ocean disrupted weather patterns across southern states. Taking into account these meteorological events, Noe rethinks conventional explanations of battlefield victories and losses, compelling historians to reconsider long-held conclusions about the war. Unlike past studies that fault inflation, taxation, and logistical problems for the Confederate defeat, his work considers how soldiers and civilians dealt with floods and droughts that beset areas of the South in 1862, 1863, and 1864. In doing so, he addresses the foundational causes that forced Richmond to make difficult and sometimes disastrous decisions when prioritizing the feeding of the home front or the front lines. The Howling Storm stands as the first comprehensive examination of weather and climate during the Civil War. Its approach, coverage, and conclusions are certain to reshape the field of Civil War studies.

Season of Terror
Season of Terror

Author: Charles F. Price

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2013-06-15

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1457181371

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Season of Terror is the first book-length treatment of the little-known true story of the Espinosas—serial murderers with a mission to kill every Anglo in Civil War–era Colorado Territory—and the men that brought them down. For eight months during the spring and fall of 1863, brothers Felipe Nerio and José Vivián Espinosa and their young nephew, José Vincente, New Mexico–born Hispanos, killed and mutilated an estimated thirty-two victims before their rampage came to a bloody end. Their motives were obscure, although they were members of the Penitentes, a lay Catholic brotherhood devoted to self-torture in emulation of the sufferings of Christ, and some suppose they believed themselves inspired by the Virgin Mary to commit their slaughters. Until now, the story of their rampage has been recounted as lurid melodrama or ignored by academic historians. Featuring a fascinating array of frontier characters, Season of Terror exposes this neglected truth about Colorado’s past and examines the ethnic, religious, political, military, and moral complexity of the controversy that began as a regional incident but eventually demanded the attention of President Lincoln.

The Blue, The Gray and The Red
The Blue, The Gray and The Red

Author: Thom Hatch

Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1684424550

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The Blue, the Gray, and the Red is the first book dedicated solely to chronicling the numerous campaigns waged against the Indians in the American West during the Civil War. In fact, more Indians were killed between 1861 and 1865 than in any other period in history. Some of the most noteworthy Indian Campaigns ever conducted, featuring a fascinating cast of larger than life characters, took place during these years. Award-winning author Thom Hatch offers chronological narrative rich in details and full of new revelations of the bloody hostilities in the West. The Blue, the Gray, and the Red will appeal to all those interested in the Civil War and the Indian War in American history. It provides a thoroughly researched background of the conflicts and cross-references simultaneous battles and events in the eastern theater of the Civil War. The exhaustive documentation and analysis paired with the uniqueness of the subject will cast new light on this most turbulent period.

Great River
Great River

Author: Paul Horgan

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 1041

ISBN-13: 0819573604

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The Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning epic history of the American Southwest from the acclaimed twentieth-century author of Lamy of Santa Fe. Great River was hailed as a literary masterpiece and enduring classic when it first appeared in 1954. It is an epic history of four civilizations—Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American—that people the Southwest through ten centuries. With the skill of a novelist, the veracity of a scholar, and the love of a long-time resident, Paul Horgan describes the Rio Grande, its role in human history, and the overlapping cultures that have grown up alongside it or entered into conflict over the land it traverses. Now in its fourth revised edition, Great River remains a monumental part of American historical writing. “Here is known and unknown history, emotion and color, sense and sensitivity, battles for land and the soul of man, cultures and moods, fused by a glowing pen and a scholarly mind into a cohesive and memorable whole.” —The Boston Sunday Herald “Transcends regional history and soars far above the river valley with which it deals . . . a survey, rich in color and fascinating in pictorial detail, of four civilizations: the aboriginal Indian, the Spanish, the Mexican, and the Anglo-American . . . It is, in the best sense of the word, literature. It has architectural plan, scholarly accuracy, stylistic distinction, and not infrequently real nobility of spirit.” —Allan Nevins, author of Ordeal of the Union “One of the major masterpieces of American historical writing.” —Carl Carmer, author of Stars Fell on Alabama

Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway
Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway

Author: Louis Kraft

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-03-12

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 0806166703

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Western Heritage Award, Best Western Nonfiction Book, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Nothing can change the terrible facts of the Sand Creek Massacre. The human toll of this horrific event and the ensuing loss of a way of life have never been fully recounted until now. In Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway, Louis Kraft tells this story, drawing on the words and actions of those who participated in the events at this critical time. The history that culminated in the end of a lifeway begins with the arrival of Algonquin-speaking peoples in North America, proceeds through the emergence of the Cheyennes and Arapahos on the Central Plains, and ends with the incursion of white people seeking land and gold. Beginning in the earliest days of the Southern Cheyennes, Kraft brings the voices of the past to bear on the events leading to the brutal murder of people and its disastrous aftermath. Through their testimony and their deeds as reported by contemporaries, major and supporting players give us a broad and nuanced view of the discovery of gold on Cheyenne and Arapaho land in the 1850s, followed by the land theft condoned by the U.S. government. The peace treaties and perfidy, the unfolding massacre and the investigations that followed, the devastating end of the Indians’ already-circumscribed freedom—all are revealed through the eyes of government officials, newspapers, and the military; Cheyennes and Arapahos who sought peace with or who fought Anglo-Americans; whites and Indians who intermarried and their offspring; and whites who dared to question what they considered heinous actions. As instructive as it is harrowing, the history recounted here lives on in the telling, along with a way of life destroyed in all but cultural memory. To that memory this book gives eloquent, resonating voice.