This is an engrossing narrative account which shows how the civil war, theiv indian wars and western expansion were all interconnected. The 1860s were truly a time of National Conflict which involves not only the north and south but also the american west. Her primary Source Research involves letters and diaries, military or its oral histories and photographs adapted from that time and specifically about nine individuals who worked toward selfdetermination and the fight for control of the region. Some of these o people are fairy wellknown to us like frontiersman kit carson. Others like juanita and navajo weaver who we get to know their stories with a lofty history until now and under their stories to showw the imports of individual actions even the midst of a larger military conflict. The book earned a star review in the Library Journal and indeed its history that keeps the reader turning the pages. Megan nelson is aes writer and historian living in Lincoln Ridge has written about the civil war u. S. Western history and American Culture for several publications including the news york times the Washington Post and smithsonian magazine. She earnedimt her b. A. From Hard University and her ph. D. In american studies from the university of iowa. She has taught at Texas Tech University cal state fullerton harvard and brown and is the author of trembling earth. Tonight she will talk to us abouts the three cornered war ad tell us how it came to be in the things she learned during the Research Process and read a passage or two. We will then take questions from the audience. Please give a warm welcome to megan kate nelson. [applause] thank you guys. Thanks for coming out on this drizzly cold and dreary night. Before we begin i would like to acknowledge that we meet here tonight on the traditional lands the the three cornered war tells the story of the civil war in the far west. Most of the action takes place in mexico in what would become arizona during the war as well asex texas colorado and california. At this point you may be asking yourselves why toward the west . I have never heard of about a war quick that i was about gettysburg and appomattox. I thought the same thing myself when i started teaching and researching Civil War History 15 years ago. It seemed like a very long time. I grew up in colorado. I had never heard that there were civil war battles in new mexico or colorado soldiers were really important to the Union Victory in that theater. I had no idea that they were involved at all. In colorado we have silver mining history and it was a little bit later and the denver broncos. I wanted to find out more about this theater of the war and i wanted to find out why theyd never heard of this conflict before. Some things i found out, between 1861 and 1868 if that is the correct year. Usually we talk about 61 to 65 but in Civil War History when you expand the jacket for you expand the chronology so the work becomes broader and longer when you look at it from this place. Between 1861 and 1868 the union the confederacy and native People Struggle to control the region for the union and the confederacy wanted the west for its gold and its specific ports. Each of them saw the west as part of this important vision of isa future so the north was envisioning this empire of free labor, free of slavery from coast to coast and the west was pivotal to that project or the confederacy sought as an empire of slavery also from coast to coast so they thought they could secure the west and they could jump off from their and move south and invade mexico and trace the hemispheric empire of slavery during the caribbean and latin america. The navajos have been living in the southwest for hundreds of years saw this white mans war as an invasion of their territory in both the union and the confederacy sought indigenous groups as optional to their attempt to control the west and his national future. We also learned thated after the union mexico defended the territory from confederate invasion. They initiated against them so what this meant was that the same time the union is fighting this war to emancipate enslaved men and women in east they were fighting a war to exterminate or remove native peoples in the west. I figured all of those things out and i thought that was really interesting. People have not thought about it and then i figured out some things about why it never heard about this war. I think Civil War History focuses on the east and focuses on virginia and the battlefields in the home fronts and politics and of course the subjects are extraordinarily important but what that means is barely do we move outside that kind of area. Also theres a tradition in Civil War History of referring to the transmississippi west with the battle of shiloh and tennessee in general all the areas around the mississippi river. Civil war historians called it the west. Thats a problem with the words that we use because it seems impossible. Also if you open up any kind of Civil War History and you see a map in theirr of the war it usually ends right around the 100 inn fact if you have the bok you can flip to the front to where i have included a map of the 100th meridian which is right in the middle of this new page map in the book. If you and a map there you are erasing 40 of the nations land mass. Where literally erasing the story of the war so it was really important to me when i was talking to Simon Schuster about the books production is that i want to have this map in here and its the entire continent that you see all of the territories as they were western territories and states and as they were organized at the beginning of the war and you also see the navajo and the apache homeland on this map layered in three different layers of the map and its a continental map from the atlantic to the pacifico. Also whats interesting in what i found out when i went on my researchch trip is that even though the fight for the civil war in the southwest is really well preserved everywhere because if you go to virginia and you are trying to find battlefield sites in important areasnt if they are not preservd they are usually under a parking lot and there is not that kind of suburban suburbanization or urbanization and large areas of the southwest. What happens is a lot of the sites that you read about in the threecornered war are actually there. Its just they are very far apart. They are run by all different kinds of federal agencies. They are not particularlyy well funded and most tourists go to the southwest and south western culture for the Indigenous Culture for its architecture and its great enchiladas. They are not going for war history so theres a great example ofer this in Santa Fe Plaza. If youve ever beenta there rigt in the middle of Santa Fe Plaza is a memorial to the Union Soldiers who fought in the war against as it says the confederate and the savages. There was a little protest around that monument word savages. Its interesting but everyone ignores it. When i went for my research i went around and talk to people and i asked that obelisk do you know what it is and they were like no. We started walking the path of the plaza and look at the shops that were all around and they had no idea. You will read about it. And that the antagonists in the book john clark takes part in the fundraising for that memorial. The plaza itself is a civil war site because it was built by Union Soldiers. When the officers were like we need the system too work otherwise they will start carousing around one of the officers have been built the plaza. That is something that you would never know because it is not noted. For various reasons and through various mechanisms the history of the war has really been sometimes forgotten and sometimes not even mentioned. During all of this research i discovered how complicated the civil war was and how many different groups of people were involved in the war and how it took place over hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. Its an enormous region of all these armies had to march in the groups of people at the march sometimes 400 miles at a time. Along this stretch was 800 miles my challenge was how do i tell the story . I didnt really want to tell it in a traditionally academic way in an argument driven thematically oriented kind of way so i started thinking about all the different ways i could possibly tell the story. At the time i was reading a lot of novels and one of those novels was and this is very surprising that i would be reading this novel because im not usually bound with the misogynist and excessively violentt novels. I was just devouring this book and i try to figure out why. I went and i looked at it and i mapped it out. Started taking notes of what he was doing and what he was using was actually a form that was quite common in literature which is a multiperspective narrative. If you go into the book and you look at the table of contents you will see that each of these chapters is named after person. There are only three that are not and those are the names of battles in which multiple people come together. In each of these chapters you are going to follow that through time and that he will leave them and go to somebody else and then he will come back to them a little bit later. Each person has anywhere from two to three chapters. Some of them stay for a short time in new mexico and some for the entire time that one of them dies. I wont tell youou who so that u can save that for later and be intrigued. I decided to try this approach to bring the reader of the threecornered war through the experiences of nine different people and they are all representing the movie of nine different communities and different war actions. Im not going to introduce them all to you here because i would be overwhelming and probably would take too long but im going to talk about three of them in particular to give you a sense of the books range and there is an image insert in the middle if you would like to look at it. The second image here and i can hold us this up to you here on the left page. This is John Robert Taylor who i affectionately started referring to as crazy eyes but i think his eyes are very light live in the photography at the time kind of washed out his eyes so he looks particularly crazed in this picture. Is actually holding a sword that makes him look like hes holding a bowie knife. I knew i wanted to start with baylor because i wanted to start with the confederate invasion of the territory in the summer of 1861 and baylor was that the head of that. He was born in kentucky along with several people who were born in kentucky including kit carson so thats an interesting and weird connection. Baylor moved to texas in the 1840s and he and his family members were lured by the promise ofve rich land and the owners of. His uncle is the one after whom baylor is named so its a family with a long history in texas. He got married and started a family and over the next 15 years he worked as a farmer and a rancher and he enslaved men and women in both of those ventures. The law was submitted to the bar in thehe Texas State Legislature but he also became the editor of a newspaper called its the white mans in 1860 in this is the sort of thing that i appreciate about mid19th century racist is that they are very open about it. They are just like we are going to start a paper that will be called the white man. In 1860 this newspaper had a lot of pieces about comanche acts odd angle is in texas and they use this to gin up all this fear about comanches. He was kind of a prototexas ranger and he would gather a people and throw them right out after comanches in the war. He was wearing a belt buckle made out of silver that he had melted down from a coat he had taken from a comanche warrior. As you get the flavor of this john baylor was proud to join the Confederate Army in texas and defense of slavery and secession in the right of white men to rest lanes away from native people. By all accounts he was extremely charismatic. He was about 6 feet 3 inches. He was super tall for someone in that period with an imposing strong guy. He was impetuous and ambitious and resentful and all those characteristics will describe all of his actions in 1862. This context of the civil war west. The next person she is the last image here when megan suwanee was just a teenager when she married and he was a powerful navajoma pigman. As long history in the homeland. Pretty soon after the wedding,ci the war began. In raiders of the Three Corners will follow juanita as she and he, they negotiate and manipulate and he made union forces in their homeland. And then intending starvation to surrender to the u. S. Army. The story and incarceration at the union army reservation, a place we can really think of as a prison camp. They dominate the final part of the book. Wanting to sort times experience is one of suffering but one of persistence and survival. And of all of the intactness, she is the heart of the book. She is there from the beginning and until the end in your story really revealsls the extent to where the threequarter war the civil west. I just want to tell you about john clark. His picture is in here kind of in the middle. Parents on the righthand side ofth the page. You will not have heard of john clark it all in your life. He was a surveyor, a lawyer, a land owner in illinois. When the war began. He was too old, he was in his early 40s. But he really had hoped to serve the union in other ways. So president lincoln was a friend of theirs from their law professor days, appointed him Surgeon General of the mexican territory. In the summer of 1861. And clark left his large family in illinois in order to take up his post. Anyhow that until 1868. He also wasnt new mexico pretty consistently the entirety of the book. He took a couple of furloughs went home and at onene point he went as a kind of fled the santa fe and left and went to dc and went marching up on city and went to report to lincoln and stanton and then visited the General Land Office and then he reported. Those sort of the dc vacation in the most intense part of the new lyxico conflict. The court really was the voice of the Lincoln Administration and new mexico territory. A dedicated republican who believed in the parties vision in the lap and trend landscape of the free white labor pretty clark was responsible, not only surveyed reservation but also dd a survey of the arizona cold country in 1863. After gold was discovered a little bit north to a town prescott is now which is north of phoenix. So he went out there to confirm that the gold had actually been discovered and it was mileti just finding that was going on. And then he came back and reported to santa fe citizens and to the army there was gold other and there were more than a thousand miners already there in the mountains and the needed protection and also needed to clear the navajos from the area because the road from albuquerque to gold mines went through nava hope territory. In the letters appears in washington also credit hope that Lincoln Administration and Republican Party envision the conquest of the west i would say that clark was my Biggest Surprise because of found his diary so they were not hidden or anything that in the data they had put together and i knew that he was a general pain in santa fe for this time and when i called the diary, when you go to these reviews, these Research Trips coming at you neverer what you will get. So sometimes its a teeny tiny something and maybe has Something Like what they think that they weret in range. All i got was this anonymous box with 27 volumes of diary unit. Meticulously written. Pages long entries every day talking about the weather, but they did every day, talking about the feelings that were talking about going to seances, after night at dinner parties. Just amazing amazing content for the entirety of the work. And then i went the national archives, all of the letters that he wrote to his bosses at the land office also were in a super huge box because he wrote very regularly from new mexico. Some of his original maps for their pretty good plot map of santa fe. I truly believe that i would was maybe the second person to open those letters ever. They were in pristine condition. All of the folds still perfectly there, very chris. No stains, no marks of wear and tear. And often the wax feel that he had or seal. Still there. So he was really is kind of amazing person who again one of these unusual suspects right pretty you wouldnt really think that he would be an important person and yet he is. So you would be interested in coming to get toed know him several you think of are all looking at the civil war from this most unexpected place, the far west, shows us a couple of important things. The civil war was a frequented war in a couple of different ways. The north and the south and the west. , between the union and the confederacy and the native people. And ankles has panos and native soldiers. So those of three of my three element there is a writer but i think really complicated motion of the unions work as a just war. And it has continental conflict, truly national war that includes all regions and all People Living within cross this quarter. So stop there so you more time for questions should you have any about the topic of the Research Process or the writing process. The threequarter west. [applause]. The three cornered war. [applause]. Are you inclined doing more with him or about him. Has anybody done a whole story on him. Megan so the question is about john clark and will i pursue him a little bit more maybe write a longer biography of him. I know more about him. I kn