The Civil War in the American West (review)

BOOK REVIEWS249 all relevant sites in the Fairfax-Warrenton-Front Royal-Leesburg quadrangle . Two additional tours cover outlying areas pertinent to Mosby's life and military operations, notably the Harpers Ferry area and central Virginia. Most of the sites are structures of one kind or another, but a significant number of skirmishes and burial places are included. Privately owned sites are identified as such in order to prevent possibly unpleasant confrontations with property owners. No effort is made in the book to analyze critically Mosby's campaigns and his significance or lack of same in the eastern theater. The work is simply a guidebook, and, although overly adulatory in places, it fulfills the requirements of the genre quite adequately. Those readers who want more details and a chronology of Mosby's activities will turn to the works of Virgil C. Jones and Jeffry Wert; those who want to ride where Mosby rode and stand where he stood will be thankful for the work of Evans and Moyers. They, like James I. Robertson, have produced a book that will provide pleasure to segments of the general reading public, who may then turn to more substantive treatments of the subject for further study. William Glenn Robertson U.S. Army Command and General Staff College The Civil War in the American West. By Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Pp. xiv, 448. $27.50.) This book contains five vignettes on military movements in the transMississippi West during the Civil War: the battles of Glorieta Pass and Pea Ridge, General Nathaniel Banks's campaigns in Louisiana, and Indian warfare in Minnesota and on the High Plains. Mr. Josephy describes background events leading up to each movement and offers detailed descriptions of the military action. For example, his narrative of Glorieta Pass begins with a discussion about the repercussions of secession on army units in Texas and the Southwest and its impact on reducing United States military strength in the region. Similarly, his description of the Sand Creek Massacre includes an account of Caucasian-Indian difficulties on the plains as well as those leading to the massacre itself. Each section of the book contains a detailed map, which permits the reader to follow the account more easily. As one might expect, given Mr. Josephy's background, the book is well written and the narrative uncomplicated. Author of a number of books on Native Americans in the West, Mr. Josephy also served as an associate editor for Time and as editor of American Heritage before retiring. Josephy's study is the first major publication that describes military events in both western states and territories under one cover, and for that reason it is a worthwhile contribution to the literature of the Civil War. Roy Colton's Civil War in the Western Territories (1959) focuses 250CIVIL WAR HISTORY on the Southwest, and LeRoy Fisher's The Western Territories in the Civil War (1977) is a collection of graduate seminar papers that deal with territories only. Despite its contribution, Josephy's book is, in some respects, a disappointment . For one thing, it suffers from jumpy organization. Josephy intersperses military events that had some relationship to the Civil War with Indian troubles and warfare. Thus in the first section he describes the fighting at Glorieta Pass in New Mexico, and in the second he moves on to the Sioux outbreak in Minnesota. From there the narrative focuses on Banks's efforts in Louisiana before returning to the central plains for descriptions of the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, and bushwhacking in Missouri and Kansas. In addition, Josephy does not follow a strict chronological order; nor does he define the West for his reader. While placing events in chronological order is not an essential requirement in writing history, it is somewhat disconcerting to read about the 1864 occurrence at Sand Creek before an account of the Battle of Pea Ridge, which occurred in 1862. And some readers might consider Banks's Port Hudson and Red River campaigns integral to the military movements along the entire Mississippi River rather than separate from them. Except for the fact that they took place on...