The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (review)

During the past decade, Andrew E. Masich and Thomas W. Cutrer have joined Jerry D. Thompson in publishing new studies on the Civil War and the far Southwest. Megan Kate Nelson's The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West serves as an admirable addition to that growing field. Specialists will find most of the events familiar, but Nelson's book is distinguished because its approach—loosely framed around the experiences of a diverse set of nine individuals—humanizes the chaos wrought by the Civil War in New Mexico and Arizona.

Nelson has chosen her characters well, including several who will be recognizable to many readers. John R. Baylor established the short-lived Confederate Territory of Arizona and authorized the murder of adult Apaches and sale of their children into slavery under a flag of truce. Mangas Coloradas, war leader of Chihenne and Bedonkohu bands of Chiricahua Apaches, struggled with only mixed success to navigate the treacherous waters of the Civil War to improve the lot of his followers. As commander of the military Department of New Mexico, Brigadier General James Carleton organized punishing campaigns against Mescalero Apaches and Navajos that resulted in their removal to the dreaded Bosque Redondo reservation. Christopher "Kit" Carson, fabled frontiersman and scout, served as Carleton's field commander of choice.

More intriguing are those historical actors who have received less popular attention. Experiencing the brunt of the Carleton-Carson offensives was Juanita, fourth wife of Navajo war leader Manuelito, who did her best to care for her family and people amidst the army's scorched earth campaigns of 1863–64 and the miseries of life at the Bosque Redondo. Iowa-born Alonzo Ickis, working in the Colorado gold fields when the war broke out, fought for the Union at the Battle of Valverde. On the opposing side at that battle was William Davidson, a non-slaveholding lawyer from Texas later wounded at Glorieta Pass. Following the subsequent Confederate retreat to Santa Fe, Davidson and scores of other Texans were nursed to recovery through the efforts of Louisa Canby, wife of Colonel E. R. S. Canby, then Union commander of the region. Among her acquaintances in Santa Fe society was John Clark, appointed New Mexico's surveyor general in the early days of the Lincoln administration. Clark fled the region ahead of the Texas Confederate invasion of 1861–62 but returned to spearhead later surveys that reported favorably on the region's mineral and agricultural prospects.

Author of the provocative environmental and social history Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (University of Georgia Press, 2012), Nelson skillfully weaves the lives of these men and women into the greater narrative of the Civil War in the Southwest. The Three-Cornered War is based on a wide array of primary sources (published as well as manuscript collections), and a solid command of secondary literature is revealed in its bibliography and endnote citations. Well-written and ingeniously constructed, the book serves as an excellent survey of the period and region; those readers particularly interested in Texas history will find most noteworthy the first half of the book, which tells the tragic saga of those who participated in Henry H. Sibley's ill-fated Confederate invasion of New Mexico.