These inspection reports, edited by award-winning Civil War historian Thompson, provide unique insight into the military, cultural, and social life of a territory struggling to maintain law and order during the early Civil War years.

Thompson draws on service records and numerous other archival sources that few earlier scholars have seen in this comprehensive work.

Motorists traveling along State Highway 104 north of Tucumcari, New Mexico, may notice a sign indicating the location of Fort Bascom. The post itself is long gone, its adobe walls washed away. In 1863, the United States, fearing a second Confederate invasion of New Mexico Territory from Texas, built Fort Bascom. Until 1874, the troops stationed at this site on the Eroded Plains along the Canadian River defended Hispanic and Anglo-American settlements in eastern New Mexico and far western Texas against Comanches and other Southern Plains Indians. In Fort Bascom, James Bailey Blackshear presents the definitive history of this critical outpost in the American Southwest, along with a detailed view of army life on the late-nineteenth-century western frontier. Located in the middle of what General William T. Sherman called “an awful country,” Fort Bascom’s hardships went beyond the army’s efforts to control the Comanches and Kiowas. Blackshear shows the difficulties of maintaining a post in a harsh environment where scarce water and forage, long supply lines, poorly constructed facilities, and monotonous duty tested soldiers’ endurance. Fort Bascom also describes the social aspects of a frontier assignment and the impact of the Comanchero trade on military personnel and objectives, showing just how difficult it was for the army to subdue the Southern Plains Indians. Crucial to this enterprise were logistics, including procurement from civilian contractors of everything from beef to hay. Blackshear examines the strong links between New Mexican Comancheros and Comanches, detailing how the lure of illegal profits drew former military personnel into this black-market economy and revealing the influence of the Comanchero trade on Southwestern history. This first full account of the unique challenges soldiers faced on the Texas frontier during and after the Civil War restores Fort Bascom to its rightful place in the history of the U.S. military and of U.S.-Indian relations in the American Southwest.

Written "to set the record straight," these veterans' stories provide colorful accounts of the bloody battles of Valverde, Glorieta, and Peralta, as well as details fo the soldier's tragic and painful retreat back to Texas in the summer of 1862.

Life in early New Mexico was often perilous. Geographic isolation attracted outlaws and ruffians, and skirmishes often arose between the indigenous tribes and settlers. In response, the U.S. government set up military forts and outposts to protect its new citizens. These strongholds include Fort Craig, where logs were made to look like cannons to fool Confederate troops. Kit Carson, John Pershing and Billy the Kid all called Fort Stanton home, before it became the first federal tuberculosis sanatorium and later a detention center for German prisoners of war. Author Donna Blake Birchell relates little-known yet highly important Civil War battles, the tragedies of the Navajo and Mescalero Apache internments and other dramatic frontier stories.

The Civil War in the Indian Territory proved to be a test of valor and endurance for both sides. Author Steve Cottrell outlines the events that led up to the involvement of this region in the war, the role of the Native Americans who took part in the war, and the effect their participation had on the war's outcome, particularly in this region. For Indians, as in the rest of the country, neighbor was pitted against neighbor, with members of the same tribe often fighting against each other. Cottrell describes in vivid detail the guerilla warfare, surprise attacks, and all-out battles that stained the grassy plains of Oklahoma with blood. In addition, he introduces the reader to the interesting and often colorful leaders of the military-North and South-including the only Indian to attain the rank of general in the war, Confederate general Stand Watie. With outstanding illustrations by Andy Thomas, this story is a tribute to and a revealing portrait of those who fought and the important role they played in this era of our country's history.

Following Zebulon Pike’s expeditions in the early nineteenth century, U.S. expansionists focused their gaze on the Southwest. Explorers, traders, settlers, boundary adjudicators, railway surveyors, and the U.S. Army crossed into and through New Mexico, transforming it into a battleground for competing influences determined to control the region. Previous histories have treated the Santa Fe trade, the American occupation under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, the antebellum Indian Wars, debates over slavery, the Pacific Railway, and the Confederate invasion during the Civil War as separate events in New Mexico. In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William S. Kiser demonstrates instead that these developments were interconnected parts of a process by which the United States effected the political, economic, and ideological transformation of the region. New Mexico was an early proving ground for Manifest Destiny, the belief that U.S. possession of the entire North American continent was inevitable. Kiser shows that the federal government’s military commitment to the territory stemmed from its importance to U.S. expansion. Americans wanted California, but in order to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation-building project. The use of armed force to realize this claim fundamentally altered New Mexico and the Southwest. Soldiers marched into the territory at the onset of the Mexican-American War and occupied it continuously through the 1890s, leaving an indelible imprint on the region’s social, cultural, political, judicial, and economic systems. By focusing on the activities of a standing army in a civilian setting, Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.

This two-volume encyclopedia offers a unique insight into the Civil War from a state and local perspective, showing how the American experience of the conflict varied significantly based on location. Intended for general-interest readers and high school and college students, American Civil War: A State-by-State Encyclopedia serves as a unique ready reference that documents the important contributions of each individual state to the American Civil War and underscores the similarities and differences between the states, both in the North and the South. Each state chapter leads off with an overview essay about that state's involvement in the war and then presents entries on prominent population centers, manufacturing facilities, and military posts within each state; important battles or other notable events that occurred within that state during the war; and key individuals from each state, both civilian and military. The A–Z entries within each state chapter enable readers to understand how the specific contributions and political climate of states resulted in the very different situations each state found itself in throughout the war. The set also provides a detailed chronology that will help students place important events in proper order.

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.