Last week, I returned from
a vacation with my mom to Antietam, Harpers Ferry, and Manassas. It had been about twenty
years since I had visited these places, and I met up with a friend who
had never seen them. While on the trip, though, my mom reported that a National
Park Service volunteer informed her that not much had happened west of the
Mississippi. Grrr. If I had heard the volunteer say that, I would have had a
few things to say in response! It’s sad that myths still abound about the
trans-Mississippi, but as Dr. Norman D. Brown wrote in his introduction in the
1994 reprint of The Campaigns of Walker’s
Texas Division, “Yes, Virginia there was a war west of the Mississippi" (p. xxiv).
In his introduction, Brown
also wrote that Confederate “Trans-Mississippi veterans actually begged for
recognition” (p. vii). No doubt that was the case for Union veterans as well.
Brown quotes Texas veteran W. L. Morrison who wrote the following to the Confederate Veteran magazine in 1895:
“’From reading the Veteran, one would almost conclude we
had no war west of the Mississippi, while, in proportion to our numbers, we
held as many Federals in check, when protecting Texas and western Louisiana, as
any portion of the Confederate forces had to contend with. We also had as brave
men, as noble women as ever lived on earth’” (p. viii).
Although historians have
increasingly turned their attention to the trans-Mississippi, there is still
much work to do. Sadly, I think if veteran Morrison were here today, he would
write about the same sentiment concerning most of our contemporary Civil War
magazines.
