Goodies!

Now that I'm settling in to my "new" life, I've started to catch up on new publications and am casting around for a new research project. Today, I discovered that the University of Oklahoma Press has just published The Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867 by Andrew E. Masich; immediately, I navigated to Amazon and purchased a copy. Several years ago, Masich's excellent narrative and compilation of primary accounts, The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861-1865, was published. I'm looking forward to receiving his latest book!

In April, the University of North Carolina Press will be publishing Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861-1865 by Thomas W. Cutrer who is a professor emeritus at Arizona State University. Its length is advertised as 600 pages, and, judging by the publisher and the author, it will be a high quality book.

About three years ago, I noticed an uptick in scholarship about the trans-Mississippi, and the pace of publication appears to be accelerating.

The Pacific Coast and Atmospheric Rivers

As an Oklahoman, I have a profound interest in the weather, an enthusiasm shared by approximately 99.9% of Oklahomans. I have yet to meet an Oklahoman who could not talk at length about weather issues. It is not surprising, then, that my attention was drawn to an article in the January 2013 issue of Scientific American titled “The Coming Megafloods.” What surprised me is that it had a Civil War connection.

Authors Michael Dettinger and B. Lynn Ingram wrote “The intense rainstorms sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually unabated for 43 days… The rivers and rains poured into the state’s vast Central Valley, turning it into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, and one quarter of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned. Downtown Sacramento was submerged under 10 feet of brown water filled with debris from countless mudslides on the region’s steep slopes. California’s legislature, unable to function, moved to San Francisco until Sacramento dried out—six months later. By then, the state was bankrupt” (p. 66). The authors explain that the intense rains were caused by phenomena known as atmospheric rivers (“pineapple expresses” are one type of these). Sometimes these atmospheric rivers become megafloods, and these megafloods occur approximately every two hundred years along the Pacific Coast…

California soldiers were marching to Fort Yuma in Arizona during part of this time period. Here is Andrew E. Masich’s description of the ordeal from his book, The Civil War in Arizona:

“Roads became mud bogs, making the movement of men and supplies virtually impossible. Soon after [Lieutenant Colonel Joseph] West’s command reached the Colorado, the river overflowed its banks. Torrents of muddy water carved a channel around Fort Yuma, making it an island, and swept away tons of stockpiled supplies. Despite these conditions, by February 1862, ocean-going vessels and river steamers had delivered all of the expedition’s supplies, now safely stored on high ground at Fort Yuma” (p. 28). In training at Camp Wright in southern California, George Hand wrote entries such as “heavy rain,” “Very stormy,” “Very rainy,” “Rained all day and night very hard,” “Rained, snowed and the wind blew heavy” in his diary through the period.

Citation for George Hand diary: Carmony, Neil B., ed. The Civil War in Apacheland: Sergeant George Hand’s Diary: California, Arizona, West Texas, New Mexico, 1861-1864. Silver City, NM: High-Lonesome Books, 1996.

Hard Marching

“Though other corps made marches during the campaign which may have been equally grueling, the circumstances attending that of the Sixth Corps made it famous. The word came that they were needed, and needed in a hurry, so they marched from ten at night until five the next afternoon with only a few breaks for coffee or now and then a short rest. On and on they trudged, endlessly it seemed, at first through darkness and then in the glare of the July sun, thirty-four long miles to Gettysburg” (p. 357). So wrote Edwin F. Coddington in his classic book, The Gettysburg Campaign, published in 1968. Fortunately for the men of the Sixth Corps, they saw only light combat during the battle itself.

And yet, the soldiers in the trans-Mississippi were involved in many marching feats that were more impressive than those performed by their eastern counterparts, even including the marching of Jackson’s famed “foot cavalry” during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign.

William L. Shea documents the most famous trans-Mississippi example in Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign: “Between the afternoon of 3 December and the morning of 7 December, a period of three and a half days, the Second and Third Divisions of the Army of the Frontier marched 105 and 120 miles respectively and went directly into battle at Prairie Grove. The actual distance varied from regiment to regiment, but the entire command averaged over thirty miles per day on primitive frontier roads in bitterly cold weather with only brief halts for food and rest” (p. 128).

There was also the impressive, well-organized trek of the California column in 1862 from Camp Latham (Los Angeles, California) to Tucson. The soldiers averaged “about twenty miles a day” during this march of “nearly six hundred miles” (p. 43) across the desert, according to Andrew E. Masich in The Civil War In Arizona: The Story Of The California Volunteers, 1861-1865.

The Confederates could also point to an extraordinary feat of marching by Walker’s Texas Division (Walker’s Greyhounds) and fighting at the battles of Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins’ Ferry during the Red River campaign. Richard Lowe in Walker’s Texas Division C.S.A.: Greyhounds Of The Trans-Mississippi states “In seventy days they had marched, often without food or tents, about 930 miles and fought three pitched battles. This was the equivalent, roughly speaking, of a Federal army marching from Washington, D.C., to Memphis, Tennessee, and fighting along the way, all in ten weeks. It was one of the more amazing physical feats of the American Civil War” (p. 232).