Southern California Quarterly

BOOK REVIEWS THE THREE-CORNERED WAR: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. By Megan Kate Nelson (New York: Scribner, 2020. xx þ 331 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $28.00). Reviewed by Matthew Babcock. In this intricately-constructed, well-written book, historian Megan Kate Nelson explains how the American Civil War in New Mexico Territory was what one soldier has called a “three-cornered war” between “Union soldiers, Confederates, and Native peoples fighting for power over the region’s natural resources” (xx). Skillfully blending military and social history, the author tells this story through the intersecting lives of nine men and women—Union officers James Carleton and Kit Carson, Colorado soldier Alonso Ickis, New Mexico Surveyor General John Clark, and Colonel Richard Canby’s wife Louisa Canby; Confederate officer John Baylor and Texas soldier William Davidson; and Apache chief Mangas Coloradas and Navajo headman Manuelito’s wife Juanita. Part of the burgeoning recent scholarship on the Civil War in the West, Nelson’s book is significant for expanding the war’s geographical scope, presenting the conflict from multiple perspectives, and demonstrating its impact on Native peoples. Something that immediately jumps out in this book is the Union’s inability to monopolize the moral high ground on race in the Civil War’s far western theater. As Nelson explains, the Union aimed to prevent Confederate occupation of New Mexico and create an empire of liberty, consisting of free laborers across the Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 493–503. ISSN 0038-3929, eISSN 2162-8637. © 2021 by The Historical Society of Southern California. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2021.103.4.493. 493 continent, which in the West excluded African Americans. Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis sought to create a transcontinental empire of slavery, and both sides wanted to force the Apaches and Navajos from their homelands so that they could access New Mexico Territory’s precious metals and construct transcontinental railroads connecting Atlantic and Pacific ports. Many of the events in Nelson’s story—Sibley’s New Mexico campaign, Carleton ’s California Column’s march to the Rio Grande, Carson’s Navajo and Apache campaigns, the Navajo “Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo, and the death of Mangas Coloradas—are familiar to western historians, just not all as part of the same conflict in a single book. What James L. Haley once dismissively called the “Civil War’s Southwestern Sideshow” in his Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait (1981) (231), Nelson makes an integral part of the national conflict. Although the 6,300 Union and Confederate troops who met at Valverde were far fewer than the “more than 100,000 men” who “had been fighting in . . . Virginia and Tennessee,” Sibley and Canby’s troops were still “the largest fighting forces that the desert Southwest had ever seen in one place” (60). Indeed, some readers may be surprised by the extent of the Confederacy’s early success in this theater with Baylor’s victories at Mesilla and San Augustin Spring leading to his appointment as Governor of the Confederate Arizona Territory, headquartered in Mesilla and stretching from the Rio Grande to the Colorado River. The Sibley Brigade’s subsequent success at Valverde and occupations of Albuquerque and Santa Fe also loom large, as Nelson explains they “were the only Confederate Army to occupy a capital city in Union Territory during the Civil War” (100). Nelson’s decision to adopt a nine-pronged character-driven approach in this book makes for a complicated narrative. At times, particularly in the Ickis and Davidson chapters, which are told from Union and Confederate soldiers’ perspectives , there can be more uneventful marching and waiting than military engagement . But the overall story does move quickly, extends to parts of the West beyond New Mexico, and comes neatly together at the end. The high quality of prose throughout each chapter is a testament to the author’s skill as a writer...