1858 · 1868
West of the War
The Forgotten Civil War West of the Mississippi and the Conquest That Built Modern America
C. V. Wooster
AI-generated film · artistic interpretation
1858 · 1868
The Forgotten Civil War West of the Mississippi and the Conquest That Built Modern America
C. V. Wooster
AI-generated film · artistic interpretation
A narrative history
For the better part of a decade, a second war moved across the territories west of that river, and what happened there decided what kind of country would come out the other side.
West of the War tells the full story of the Civil War’s western theater as one continuous narrative: the Confederate bid for a Pacific empire, the cotton road through Mexico, and the simultaneous war against the Native West that emptied the frontier of its first peoples while the East fought over slavery.
From the Texan invasion of New Mexico to the Cherokee Civil War, from Sand Creek to the Long Walk, from the California Column to the last Confederate general to surrender: this is the war that built modern America, told through the letters, diaries, depositions, and testimony of the people who lived it.
Coming soon in ebook, paperback and hardcover.
One war on many fronts, 1858 to 1868, told as one story.
The decade opens with war on the lower Colorado.
Texans invade, and the Confederacy reaches for the Pacific.
Southern cotton slips out through Mexico, past the Union blockade.
The Cherokee Nation fights its own civil war.
Union volunteers from California march east across the desert.
Soldiers massacre a Cheyenne and Arapaho village on the Colorado plains.
The Navajo are marched to the Bosque Redondo and held there until 1868.
The last Confederate general in the field surrenders, in Indian Territory.
It tells the story of the Civil War west of the Mississippi: the Confederate invasion of New Mexico, the war against Native peoples, the cotton trade through Mexico, and the legislation that remade America, as one connected narrative.
Nonfiction. Every quotation is from a primary source. No dialogue has been invented and no thoughts have been attributed that the record does not support.
West of the War covers the same Mojave Desert region as When the Birds Go Silent and Desert Eccentric, but from the broader perspective of the entire western war from 1858 to 1868.
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