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Trans-Mississippi Theater

When the drums of the American Civil War of 1861-65 fell silent, the states from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi Valley had acquired a sacred heritage of great battlefields, legendary armies and leaders, and home-front sacrifice and travail that has lived on as a legacy for their sons and daughters and for the reunited nation as a whole. It was in that eastern half of the country—containing the hearths of secession, slavery, and antislavery, the bulk of the population, and the seats of the Northern and Southern governments—that the great campaigns had to be, and were, fought and supported, and where the war had to be decided. In the years since then, what transpired in those states has provided the substance of a vast national literature.

In contrast, comparatively little notice has been paid to the Civil War as it was fought in the huge western reaches of the country—that is, from the western fringe of the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Ocean—all of it at that time also a part of the United States. No book or television portrayal has ever dealt comprehensively with what happened across the full expanse of the West—in California, Oregon, and Texas, in Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Dakota Territories, in what are now Arizona, Wyoming, and Oklahoma, and so on. In similar vein, almost every general broad- gauged history of the Civil War, with the point of view that everything west of the Union campaigns to secure Missouri and the Mississippi River was of little or no strategic importance to the outcome of the struggle, has simply ignored the events of the conflict in the western sections of the nation.

To be sure, a large number of excellent studies have been published about specific states, territories, or regions of the West during the war and about individual campaigns and personalities in those areas. In addition, numerous memoirs, journals, unit accounts, and popular articles have appeared from time to time to help illuminate various phases and incidents of the war beyond the main theaters in the East. Largely, however, these works have dealt with isolated fragments of the conflict in various parts of the West, have been marked by local or limited perspectives, and because they have concerned events and areas outside the main arenas of the war have been generally unnoticed or, being deemed "sideshow" in content, have been dismissed as irrelevant. Even well-known episodes of Indian-white conflict that occurred in the West during the war years, like the destruction of the Sioux in Minnesota, the Kit Carson campaign against the Navajos in the Southwest, and the Sand Creek massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahos in Colorado, have often been treated as if they had nothing to do with the Civil War, but lay outside its time period and sphere of interest.

The results have been curious and not altogether salutary. On the one hand, there have been fostered unreal images of an American West where nothing happened during the Civil War and whose inhabitants at the time were silent and passive bystanders, merely watching the sectional conflict in the East and waiting for it to end. In this misshapen view, the history of the West, with all of its many subthemes, including the westward migrations and the dispossession of the American Indian, came to a sudden halt in 1861 and started abruptly again in 1865, a notion that is obviously nonsensical. On the other hand, the western states themselves and their modern-day diverse and growing populations have been denied a just measure of recognition of their own Civil War legacy—in many cases, a direct heritage from ancestors—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American—who fought and died in the West, sometimes on their own homelands, during the years of the war.

The West, in truth, was a very stormy part of the nation during the Civil War, a tumultuous area in constant motion and conflict. Then, as now, it was a land of ethnic and cultural pluralism, of stark contrasts and challenges that encouraged tension and combativeness. Sectional traditions, values, and backgrounds differentiated the views of those who still had roots and families in the Northern or Southern states from which they or their parents had originally come. In many parts of the West, also, were recently arrived foreign-born immigrants—Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese, and other and across the Southwest were thousands of long- established Hispanos who only thirteen years before the outbreak of the war had been nationals of Mexico and in 1861 were still trying to learn a few words of English. There were free blacks, freedmen and runaway slaves who had become frontiersmen, trappers, and builders of settlements. And there were Indians in all stages of acculturation: civilized tribes in the Indian Territory; village-dwelling farmers, gatherers, and fishermen of dozens of different Native American societies from the Rio Grande to Puget Sound; and unconquered, nomadic, buffalo-hunting peoples on the plains.

All of them, in one way or another, became enmeshed in the Civil War. Members of pioneer farm families, professional men, miners, and frontier adventurers marched from California, Texas, Colorado, and other western states and territories to forts and fields of battle from Arizona and the Washington coast to the Dakota Badlands and the piney woods of western Louisiana. Regiments of free black volunteers fought across the prairies of Kansas and the Indian Territory for the end of slavery. Along the Rio Grande, in the Southwest, many companies of Hispanic volunteers and militia men, rallying to the Union, helped drive a Confederate army out of New Mexico, and in the Indian Territory, Arkansas, and western Missouri, organized brigades of American Indians, torn by their own tragic "little Civil War," battled furiously against each other in the armies of both the North and the South. It is scarcely noted in most histories of the war that the last Confederate general to lay down his arms, two months after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, was an Indian, Stand Watie, Cherokee commander of the Indian regiments fighting in the West for the Confederacy and, though also generally ignored by white historians, one of the South's ablest guerrilla leaders.

As the Union gained the upper hand in the West and the danger posed by Confederate forces and western secessionists receded, the conflict in that part of the nation turned, to a large extent, into an aggressive war against Indians. It was a natural continuum of the prewar westward movement and the dispossession of Indian tribes. The differences were that now the western volunteer armies that moved against both secessionists and Indians were tougher and harder on the tribes than the prewar Regulars had been, and the Federal government, preoccupied with the task of restoring the Union and impatient with any diversion that seemed to help the Confederacy, did little to control the volunteers' anti-Indian zeal. During the four years of the Civil War, as a result, more Indian tribes were destroyed by whites and more land was seized from them than in almost any comparable period of time in American history. Although some of the most heinous massacres of Indian peoples, such as that by volunteer Union forces in 1863 at Bear River in present-day Idaho, accompanied this process, the warfare in various parts of the West was inconclusive and continued on after 1865 when Regular troops, freed by the defeat of the Confederacy, sought under Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, and others to complete the conquest of those tribes that were still able to resist.

Throughout the Civil War, the military campaigns in the West were generally viewed by both Washington and Richmond as if through the reducing end of a telescope. The main conflict was fought east of the Mississippi River, where the war would be won or lost, and except when it affected the control of Missouri or the protection of the western flank of the contending forces in the Mississippi Valley, what happened farther west was often regarded as of secondary interest. "Crush the head and heart of the rebellion, and the tail can then be ground to dust or allowed to die," said one of General U. S. Grant's officers, alluding to the Trans-Mississippi theater. It was an opinion shared by Grant and most Union leaders.

Nevertheless, large areas west of the Mississippi saw some of the most implacable fighting of the war. The border state of Missouri was deeply scarred by savage conflict, and portions of Arkansas and the Indian Territory were laid almost prostrate. Few parts of the embattled nation, however, and no place in the West suffered more from continuous fighting than that section of Louisiana that lay west of the Mississippi River and which in the 186os could still be regarded as western country. Many of the lush cotton- and sugar-producing parishes opposite New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Port Hudson, and Vicksburg were devastated during the protracted struggle for control of the great river. But even after the fall of those strongpoints to the Union, Trans-Mississippi Louisiana, stretching westward to the Texas border and encompassing the greater part of the state, continued to be fought over in bitter campaigns and battles. Often marked by Confederate wrangling and by Union bumbling and mismanagement of the worst order, they were all climaxed by one of the North's most questionable and disastrous ventures of the war, a huge land and naval attempt to invade Texas by way of Louisiana's Red River.

To the suffering troops on both sides, Louisiana was a miserable place to fight a war. Much of the state's eastern and southern sections were a watery maze of dark, sluggish bayous, lagoons, swamps, lakes, rivers, and canals, alive with alligators and poisonous snakes and dank with moss- hung trees, tangles of vines, and decaying vegetation. Stifling heat, fevers, hordes of insects, and torrential rains that flooded the camps and turned the narrow roads and levee-protected fields into morasses sapped the soldiers' morale and energy and kept the sick lists high. In the west, where gloomy stands of pine, thick with chiggers and scorpions, extended across a barren, sandy upland toward Texas, the problem was often not enough water. Streams were infrequent, and in dry weather men suffered from heat, dust, and thirst. "I would not give two bits for the whole country," complained one unhappy Confederate after months in the state.

The turbid Red River, flowing southeastward between high, muddy banks from Louisiana's northwest corner to the Mississippi River, cut the state almost exactly in half. Lining the lower Red, and covering the alluvial lands among the bayous north of the river, were most of Louisiana's prosperous cotton plantations, some of them bigger than 5,000 acres and worked by hundreds of slaves. South of the Red, on undulating prairies in the Creole country of the Teche, Atchafalaya, and Lafourche waterways, were wealthy sugar estates, and farther south, in the marshy Gulf Coast parishes, extensive rice plantations. In each region, most of the commerce was waterborne, especially in seasons of floods when steamboats could thread their way to almost every plantation. The ease of movement was double-edged; in time of war it gave Union gunboats and troop transports access through many of the parishes.

During the first two years of the war, the Red River was an important route for supplying Confederate armies east of the Mississippi. At Shreveport near the Texas border, river boats were loaded with locally manufactured clothing and shoes, Texas corn, beef, and salt, and European arms, blankets, and medicines that had come into Texas from across the Mexican border. Carried down the Red, the cargoes were transferred to wagons or railroad cars at Vicksburg and Port Hudson on the Mississippi's eastern bank. In July 1863, when the fall of those river strongholds effectively isolated the Trans-Mississippi South from the rest of the Confederacy, the Red River route was blocked from further use for the rebels in the East.

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. The . Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1991.

Walker's Texas Division, CSA Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi. This fascinating book shows how a collection of farm boys, store clerks, carpenters and lawyers became the trans-Mississippi's most potent Confederate fighting unit. It covers action ranging from the vain attack at Milliken's Bend during Grant's Vicksburg campaign to stellar performances at the battles of Mansfield, Pleasant Hill and Jenkins' Ferry that helped repel Nathaniel P. Banks's Red River campaign of 1864.

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