Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 by Thomas W. Cutrer (review)

There were several principal land theaters of the Civil War: the Virginia theater, largely confined to action between the Union and the Confederate capitals; the trans-Appalachian theater, confined to action south of the Ohio River; coastal operations in the Carolinas and Florida; and the trans-Mississippi theater, which covers the Confederate campaign in New Mexico, pro-Union and pro-Confederate guerrilla skirmishes on the Kansas-Missouri state line, Union attempts at landings on the Gulf Coast of Texas, overland invasions of Texas via the Red River, and intratribal and intertribal conflicts between the recently arrived Five Civilized Tribes and Plains tribes, who had come to the region about a hundred years earlier. These subjects and the simultaneous French-sponsored invasion of Mexico provide plenty of material for a 588-page book by Thomas W. Cutrer, a professor emeritus of history at Arizona State University.

Unfortunately, the book's 588 pages are relieved by only one map. The previous paragraph has indicated at least a half-dozen subtheaters and campaigns, each of which requires its own map to understand the text. What the book provides is a map spread on facing pages, showing the Rio Grande from Glorieta Pass, New Mexico (but not Santa Fe) to Palmito Ranch, Texas (but not Brownsville), and the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri (but not Fort Pillow) to New Orleans, Louisiana (but not Helena, Arkansas). Any author who has had to meet cartographers' charges will understand production costs, but the effect is to spoil the book.

Misspellings are rife: "Fort Donaldson" instead of Donelson, "Helen," Arkansas, instead of Helena, and "General McGruder" instead of General John Bankhead Magruder (pp. 66, 267, 434). Other examples of confusion abound: "breech" instead of breach, and redoubts is misspelled as "readouts" (pp. 227, 273). This reviewer senses that the author confuses the meanings of intrigues and "inveigled" (p. 337). The author's prose style is suggested by the following sentence: "The morale of those troops who remained in Texas was negatively impacted by the failure of the War Department to keep them adequately supplied" (p. 310).

Beyond misspellings and stylistic failings, the book suffers from an uncertain sense of the author's meaning. For instance, he writes, "Lt. Col. Frederick Benteen, who was later to ride to infamy at the Little Big Horn with Samuel Davis Sturgis's Seventh U.S. Cavalry" (p. 416). What does the author mean by infamy? This reviewer's understanding is that Benteen was the senior officer who kept his head at the battle of the Little Bighorn and was largely responsible for saving the remainder of the regiment. Does Cutrer confuse the Washita with the Little Bighorn?

Finally, one wonders at the following sentences in a chapter about the Dakota Sioux uprising in Minnesota in the late summer of 1862: "Little Crow, against his better judgment, at last agreed to lead his people to war. On 18 August 1862—when, ironically, the First Minnesota Infantry, which had performed heroically at Gettysburg seven weeks earlier, was helping to subdue the bloody New York Draft Riot—his war party killed twenty whites and burned the Redwood Agency" (p. 125). The battle of Gettysburg and the New York Draft Riots both took place in 1863. The author wrote it, and it got past the referees and the editors. Does anyone stay awake during business hours nowadays?