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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE The CivilWar in theWest has a single goal: to promote historical writing about the war in the western states and territories. It focuses most particularly on the Trans-Mississippi theater, which consisted of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, most of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River), Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma),andArizona Territory (twofifths of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico) but encompasses adjacent states, such as Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, that directly influenced the Trans-Mississippi war. It is a wide swath, to be sure, but one too often ignored by historians and, consequently, too little understood and appreciated. Topically, the series embraces all aspects of the wartime story. Military history in its many guises, from the strategies of generals to the daily lives of common soldiers, forms an important part of that story, but so, too, do the numerous and complex political, economic, social, and diplomatic dimensions of the war. The series also provides a variety of perspectives on these topics. First, and most important, it offers the best in modern scholarship, with thoughtful, challenging monographs.Second,it presents new editions of important books that have gone out of print. And third, it premieres expertly edited correspondence , diaries, reminiscences, and other writings by participants in the war. It is a formidable challenge, but by focusing on some of the least familiar dimensions of the conflict, The Civil War in the West significantly broadens our understanding of the nation’s most pivotal and dramatic story. Scholarly assessments of the roles played by American Indians in the CivilWar have been mostly episodic.We know something of William Holland Thomas’s raids in North Carolina and Tennessee. Mention of the massacre at Sand Creek often elicits a nod of recognition.The actions vii viii SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE of one thousand Indian troops—mostly Cherokee—at Pea Ridge have received ample attention and comment. Nevertheless, most students of the war have only the vaguest idea of how that conflict unfolded in the Indian Territory or how it determined the fate of its people. The classic study of the war in Indian Territory is The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War, published in 1919, by Annie Heloise Abel. Subsequent scholars have enhanced, amended, and expanded Abel’s pioneering effort—most notably Laurence M. Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (1995)—but none has entirely supplanted it. And no wonder. It is a complex subject. The peoples of Indian Territory found themselves in the midst of a war not of their choosing, squeezed between Union Kansas and Confederate Texas, with Confederate Arkansas as their eastern neighbor . They had no way to escape the conflict and no alternative but to suffer the consequences of the national upheaval. Mary Jane Warde has devoted many years to researching and preserving the history of the old Indian Territory. Built on a solid foundation of published and unpublished sources, including such rich archival collections as the records of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek Nations, the present work demonstrates the impressive scope of her knowledge. From the removal acts of the 1830s to the post–Civil War readjustment of the western tribes, her sweeping narrative explores both the signal public events that marked that tumultuous era and the consequences for the territory’s tens of thousands of native peoples. More than a story of the Indian Territory during the war, it is a strikingly new version of the standard story of the Civil War era, from the antebellum years through Reconstruction. T. MICHAEL PARRISH DANIEL E. SUTHERLAND ...

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