Confederate Pathway to the Pacific: Major Sherod Hunter and Arizona Territory, C.S.A. (review)

8oCIVIL WAR HISTORY On a happier note, anyone who has compiled a scholarly bibliography will sympathize with Eicher's dilemma. He has engaged an enormous literature and, much like an archivist, has arranged, described, and appraised the items he considered . In doing so, Eicher provides generally insightful, accurate, and critical annotations, much more so than Wiley, Robertson, and Nevins supplied in their volumes published almost three decades ago. Eicher also notes, when available, reprint editions, with full bibliographical information. His coverage, then, of mainstream topics and the works of leading historians will prove more than adequate for buffs, generalists, and college students. Unfortunately, however, specialists will judge Eicher's bibliography a promising foray but an unsuccessful campaign. John David Smith North Carolina State University Confederate Pathway to the Pacific: Major Sherod Hunter and Arizona Territory , C.S.A. By L. Boyd Finch. (Tucson: Arizona Historical Society, 1996. Pp. xv + 318. $39.95.) In March 1 862, following the repulse at Glorieta Pass of the Confederate thrust up the Rio Grande, one despondent Texan wrote, "our operations out here will all be lost in history, when such great struggles are going on nearer home" ( 1 63). Indeed, both contemporary and subsequent historical accounts of the war in the darkest corner of the Confederacy have been eclipsed by events in Virginia , Tennessee, and the Confederate heartland. However, to the growing list of books shining a light into the trans-Mississippi and, in fact, pushing the western border of Civil War historiography to the Rio Grande and beyond, add L. Boyd Finch's treatment of the Civil War in Arizona Territory. Finch's book is both a history ofthe war inArizona and a biography ofone of the key figures in that struggle, Maj. Sherod Hunter. Hunter, little known before or after the war, was born in 1 834, migrated at an early age to Tennessee, and from there followed the frontier toTexas. A strong Jacksonian Democrat, Hunter was drawn to the Kansas frontier in 1 857 after the death of his wife and infant son, and he then was attracted to the Tucson area by the mining boom of 1 859. There he lived in isolation and obscurity in the Mimbres Valley until Apaches and Civil War brought him out. Pathway to the Pacific is rich in context, not only placing Hunter in antebellum Tennessee, bleeding Kansas, and Arizona Territory, but offering extensive background on those places and events importantto an understanding ofHunter's life. Especially detailed are the Apache Wars of the period between 1 848 and 1 86 1 and the secession crisis in Arizona Territory. The great contribution of Finch's book, however, is its account of the Civil War in Arizona Territory, where Hunter and his command ofArizona Rangers achieved the deepest Rebel BOOK REVIEWS8l drive into Union territory of the war and mounted the most distant campaign from home soil. The high-water mark of the South's attempt to make the Confederacy a two-ocean republic and tap California's gold came at Picacho Peak, beloved of Southwesterners as the westernmost "battle" of the Civil War and "the Gettysburg ofArizona."There, onApril 1 6, 1 862, the vanguard of Hunter's forces, probing westward from Tucson, encountered and were repulsed by the leading elements of Col. James Henry Carlton's "California Column." The tiny affair at Picacho "ended any real possibility of Arizona Territory becoming a state stretching from Texas to California" (145), and soon thereafter Hunter's column abandoned Tucson, which Carlton occupied on May 20, ending forever the Rebel dream of a Pacific empire. After the Confederate failure to reach California, Hunter and his veterans took part in Maj. Gen. RichardTaylor's Louisiana campaign in 1 863, playing a major role at the Battle ofBrashear City, a locally important Confederate victory, overshadowed by events one week later at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. He then returned to the southwest, spending the remainder of the war in a hopeless attempt to recover the losses of 1 862. Hunter was one of the estimated ten thousand former Confederates to go into a self-imposed exile at the end of the war, settling, at least for a time, in the...