The Civil War in the American West

As most Americans of the 1860s fixed their attention on the battlefields of Shiloh and Manassas, another war raged on the largely unsettled Western frontier. This splendid work by the author of The Patriot Chiefs restores this "other" Civil War to its true, epic proportions. With formidable scholarship and irresistible narrative ease, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., tells of the Yankee armada that foundered in the Louisiana bayous; of the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states. where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender -- two months after Appomattox: and of the U.S. Army's brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians in theaters as far apart as Minnesota and Colorado."Marvelous, original...that great, adventurous, little-known side of the Civil War...is all here for the first time: the clash of North and South set in the immense space of the West and peopled with some of the most vivid characters of that vivid time." -- David McCullough"Only occasionally does one find such a felicitous pairing of author and subject as in this important new book.... Mr. Josephy again serves justice with his clear-eyed, even-handed scholarship.... The entire era is cast into a different light by this powerfully wrought narrative."

-- The New York Times Book Review

"A sweeping and often surprising account of the untold stories of the war between the states." -- Los Angeles TimesAlvin M. Josephy, Jr., a leading historian of the American West, was the author of many award-winning books, including The Patriot Chiefs, The Indian Heritage of America, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, The Civil War in the American West, 500 Nations, and A Walk Toward Oregon. He was a vice president and editor of American Heritage magazine, the founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and president of the Western History Association. Josephy died in the fall of 2005.