Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis by Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff (review)

In the late 1870s, when Charles A. Curtis wrote an account of his Civil War-era experiences in the Southwest, he was at the height of an academic career, and his love for teaching comes through unmistakably in the stories he relates. Indeed, he blended two careers, as an academic and a soldier, throughout much of his adult life. Editors Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff have taken Curtis's original memoir, serialized in a Vermont newspaper between 1877 and 1880, and supplemented it with explanatory material to present a well-rounded picture of Curtis's service from 1862 to 1865 and, more importantly, of Arizona and New Mexico territories and nearby areas in that period.

Curtis had a wide variety of interests, including a fascination with people, places, events, and nature. He had the opportunity to interact with notable individuals such as Kit Carson, General James H. Carleton, and others, and he presents some interesting observations about them. However, less prominent frontier folk, male and female, Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian, receive the majority of his attention. Gaff and Gaff supplement those descriptions with additional information in the book's copious footnotes, sometimes identifying and correcting factual errors Curtis made concerning events he did not witness personally.

In addition to the focus on individuals, Curtis covers various groups and ethnicities from anthropological and sociological points of view. These include the Hispanic populations of settlements in the region; the Navajo, Pueblo, Apache, and Mojave nations; and in one case, frontiersmen as a group. More than any other topic, of course, he deals with the U.S. Army, both regular and volunteer units. His emphasis on the everyday routine of military life in the Southwest and the mundane workings of rank and command gives casual readers and scholars alike a firsthand glimpse of what it was like to soldier in mid-nineteenth century America. On a lighter note, his accounts of American dances and Mexican bailes, where the vastly outnumbered female participants were highly sought after, provide a picture of entertainments that were all too rare for inhabitants of a country where simple survival was often the chief pursuit.

For the military historian, Curtis offers good details on the construction and use of army posts in the region, as well as small-unit tactics against Indians. The major forts discussed include Craig, Marcy, Mojave, Union, and Whipple. He had a significant role in planning and constructing Fort Whipple, and he was quick to point out the defects in its defenses caused by oversights by the commanding officer, Captain Allen L. Anderson. When Curtis led his company to the fort, a remote little post at Los Valles Grandes, a fifty-mile march from Santa Fe, he immediately recognized its weaknesses and adjusted the defensive dispositions just in time to thwart an attack by 300 Navajos.

Charles Curtis takes his place among other chroniclers of the American Southwest, such as fellow army officer and writer John G. Bourke, in bequeathing to later generations of Americans a lively, candid, and personal snapshot of an era gone forever but peopled with individuals whose personalities and foibles are not so much different from our own.