BiblioVault - Books about Southwest, Old

The Appalachian Frontier

America's First Surge Westward

John Anthony Caruso

University of Tennessee Press, 2003

John Anthony Caruso’s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward expansion. Bringing to life the region’s history from its earliest seventeenth-century scouting parties to the admission of Tennessee to the Union in 1796, Caruso describes the exchange of ideas, values, and cultural traits that marked Appalachia as a unique frontier.

Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the Regulators in North Carolina; the founding of the Watauga, Transylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland settlements; the siege of Boonesboro; and the patterns and challenges of frontier life. While narrating the gripping stories of such figures as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and Chief Logan, Caruso combines social, political, and economic history into a comprehensive overview of the early mountain South.

In his new introduction, John C. Inscoe examines how this work exemplified the so-called consensus school of history that arose in the United States during the cold war. Unabashedly celebratory in his analysis of American nation building, Caruso shows how the development of Appalachia fit into the grander scheme of the evolution of the country. While there is much in The Appalachian Frontier that contemporary historians would regard as one-sided and romanticized, Inscoe points out that “those of us immersed so deeply in the study of the region and its people sometimes tend to forget that the white settlement of the mountain south in the eighteenth century was not merely the chronological foundation of the Appalachian experience. As Caruso so vividly demonstrates, it is also represented a vital—even defining—stage in the American progression across the continent.”

The Author: John Anthony Caruso was a professor of history at West Virginia University. He died in 1997.

John C. Inscoe is professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is editor of Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation and author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.

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front cover of Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838-1842

Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838-1842 "Red River Reminiscences"

Jacques D. Bagur

University of North Texas Press, 2014

Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi, Vol 1

Essays on America's Civil War

Lawrence L. Hewitt, Arthur W. Bergeron, and Thomas E. Schott

University of Tennessee Press, 2013

Until relatively recently, conventional wisdom held that the Trans-Mississippi Theater was a backwater of the American Civil War. Scholarship in recent decades has corrected this oversight, and a growing number of historians agree that the events west of the Mississippi River proved integral to the outcome of the war. Nevertheless, generals in the Trans-Mississippi have received little attention compared to their eastern counterparts, and many remain mere footnotes to Civil War history. This welcome volume features cutting-edge analyses of eight Southern generals in this most neglected theater—Thomas Hindman, Theophilus Holmes, Edmund Kirby Smith, Mosby Monroe Parsons, John Marmaduke, Thomas James Churchill, Thomas Green, and Joseph Orville Shelby—providing an enlightening new perspective on the Confederate high command.
Although the Trans-Mississippi has long been considered a dumping ground for failed generals from other regions, the essays presented here demolish that myth, showing instead that, with a few notable exceptions, Confederate commanders west of the Mississippi were homegrown, not imported, and compared well with their more celebrated peers elsewhere. With its virtually nonexistent infrastructure, wildly unpredictable weather, and few opportunities for scavenging, the Trans-Mississippi proved a challenge for commanders on both sides of the conflict. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, only the most creative minds could operate successfully in such an unforgiving environment.
While some of these generals have been the subjects of larger studies, others, including Generals Holmes, Parsons, and Churchill, receive their first serious scholarly attention in these pages. Clearly demonstrating the independence of the Trans-Mississippi and the nuances of the military struggle there, while placing both the generals and the theater in the wider scope of the war, these eight essays offer valuable new insight into Confederate military leadership and the ever-vexing questions of how and why the South lost this most defining of American conflicts.

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Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi, vol. 2

Lawrence Lee Hewitt

University of Tennessee Press, 2015

In contrast to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the armies and events of the Civil War’s Trans-Mississippi Theater have received scant historical attention, to the detriment of our understanding not only of individuals and events west of the Mississippi River, but also to the east of it. In Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi, Volume 2, noted Civil War historians offer fresh scholarship on eight generals who made names for themselves in the region, providing intriguing insight into important wartime issues in the Trans-Mississippi and beyond.

Contrary to popular belief, the Trans-Mississippi did not serve as a dumping ground for generals who had failed in Virginia. Instead, the majority of generals who served in the region were homegrown and faced challenges unknown to their counterparts in the East—expansive territory, few men, and limited transportation for the meager supplies available. Superior Union numbers in the West, however, did not guarantee Union victory. As these essays show, southern generals often beat themselves because of personal failings or an inability to work together. Sterling Price and Ben McCulloch refused to cooperate, Henry Sibley combined alcoholism with cowardice, and the able French-born Prince de Polignac faced language barriers. The war ended before Joseph Brent, a visionary regarding tank warfare, could make his name as a brigadier, and “Prince John” Magruder’s achievements in Texas remain overshadowed by his earlier career in Virginia. The Cajun Alfred Mouton, a superior leader, died on a battlefield in his native Louisiana, while Mosby Parsons survived the war only to be murdered by Mexican cavalry. While some of these generals breathed life into the Confederacy, others hastened its downfall.

By chronicling the lives and careers of these eight generals, this welcome volume integrates the Trans-Mississippi more fully with the Western Theater and illuminates critical issues vital to understanding the South’s ultimate defeat.

Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is the author of Port Hudson: Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi and coeditor of six anthologies dealing with America’s Civil War.

Thomas E. Schott worked as a historian for the Department of Defense. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, winner of the Jefferson Davis Award, and coeditor with Lawrence Hewitt of Lee and His Generals: Essays in Honor of T. Harry Williams.

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Fetching the Old Southwest

Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain

James H. Justus

University of Missouri Press, 2004

For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain’s early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers.

James H. Justus’s Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern “new country,” a place that would, in time, become the Deep South.

Justus’s study focuses mainly on the humor from the area categorized in the federal censuses of the mid-nineteenth century as the Southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and, eventually, Arkansas and Texas. Where it is pertinent, he also includes North Carolina and Missouri in this cultural map. Although some of these pieces may not precisely reflect their cultural setting, they are assuredly refractions of it.

While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary.

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General Thomas Posey

Son of the American Revolution

John Thornton Posey

Michigan State University Press, 1992

Revolutionary War general Thomas Posey (1750-1818) lived his life against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic periods in American history. Posey, who played a minor role in the actual War for Independence, went on to participate in the development and foundation of several states in the transappalachian West. His experiences on the late 18th- and early 19th-century American frontier were varied and in a certain sense extraordinary; he served as Indian agent in Illinois Territory; as Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, as U.S. Senator from Louisiana, and as Governor of Indiana during its transition from territorial status to statehood.
His biographer speculates on the contrasting influences of Thomas's ne'er-do-well father, Captain John Posey, and the family's close friend, General George Washington. Posey's progress is then followed as he raises his own family in the newly formed nation. Of particular interest is an appendix containing a detailed analysis of evidence available to support popular 29th-century speculation that Thomas Posey was, in fact, George Washington's illicit son.

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I Acted from Principle

The Civil War Diary of Dr. William M. McPheeters, Confederate Surgeon in the Trans-Mississippi

Cynthia DeHaven Pitcock

University of Arkansas Press, 2000

At the start of the Civil War, Dr. William McPheeters was a distinguished physician in St. Louis, conducting unprecedented public-health research, forging new medical standards, and organizing the state's first professional associations. But Missouri was a volatile border state. Under martial law, Union authorities kept close watch on known Confederate sympathizers. McPheeters was followed, arrested, threatened, and finally, in 1862, given an ultimatum: sign an oath of allegiance to the Union or go to federal prison. McPheeters "acted from principle" instead, fleeing by night to Confederate territory. He served as a surgeon under Gen. Sterling Price and his Missouri forces west of the Mississippi River, treating soldiers' diseases, malnutrition, and terrible battle wounds. From almost the moment of his departure, the doctor kept a diary. It was a pocket-size notebook which he made by folding sheets of pale blue writing paper in half and in which he wrote in miniature with his steel pen. It is the first known daily account by a Confederate medical officer in the Trans-Mississippi Department. It also tells his wife's story, which included harassment by Federal military officials, imprisonment in St. Louis, and banishment from Missouri with the couple's two small children. The journal appears here in its complete and original form, exactly as the doctor first wrote it, with the addition of the editors' full annotation and vivid introductions to each section.

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John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court

Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest

Steven P. Brown

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Provides a penetrating analysis of US Supreme Court justice John McKinley

Steven P. Brown rescues from obscurity John McKinley, one of the three Alabama justices, along with John Archibald Campbell and Hugo Black, who have served on the US Supreme Court. A native Kentuckian who moved in 1819 to northern Alabama as a land speculator and lawyer, McKinley was elected to the state legislature three times and became first a senator and then a representative in the US Congress before being elevated to the Supreme Court in 1837. He spent his first five years on the court presiding over the newly created Ninth Circuit, which covered Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. His was not only the newest circuit, encompassing a region that, because of its recent settlement, included a huge number of legal claims related to property, but it was also the largest, the furthest from Washington, DC, and by far the most difficult to traverse.

While this is a thorough biography of McKinley’s life, it also details early Alabama state politics and provides one of the most exhaustive accounts available of the internal workings of the antebellum Supreme Court and the very real challenges that accompanied the now-abandoned practice of circuit riding. In providing the first in depth assessment of the life and Supreme Court career of Justice John McKinley, Brown has given us a compelling portrait of a man active in the leading financial, legal, and political circles of his day.

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Kirby Smith's Confederacy

The TransMississippi South, 1863-1865

Robert L. Kerby

University of Alabama Press, 1991

Offers a case study of a segment of American society that consumed itself by surrendering everything in pursuit of unattainable military victory

With the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, the Confederacy’s TransMississippi Department, which included Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, western Louisiana, and Indian Territory, was cut off from the remainder of the South. Robert Kerby’s insightful volume, originally published in 1972, “has gone far toward filling one of the most conspicuous gaps in the literature on the Confederacy,” according to The Journal of Southern History.

Kerby investigates the many factors that led to the Department’s disintegrating and offers a case study of a segment of American society that consumed itself by surrendering everything, including its principles and ideals, in pursuit of an unattainable military victory.

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The Land between the Rivers

Thomas Nuttall's Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819

Russell M. Lawson

University of Michigan Press, 2004

An adventure story from the wilds of early America, The Land between the Rivers recreates the journeys of the English botanist Thomas Nuttall, one of American history's most well-traveled scientists.

During the early nineteenth century, Nuttall explored the waters, valleys, plains, and mountains of the Great Lakes, Ohio River, Mississippi River, as well as the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, and Canadian river valleys of the former Louisiana Territory.

In this fascinating account of Nuttall's travels through the wilderness of the middle west, author Russell Lawson-using Nuttall's own journal-captures the sense of excitement of the early wanderer. As much a delight for the mind as the senses, The Land between the Rivers details the unremitting weather and rugged geography of uncharted lands within the Louisiana Territory. A sense of discovery pervades the narrative as Nuttall's odyssey builds to its climax in the prairie wilderness of what is now Oklahoma. Sickened by "ague"-in his case, malaria-Nuttall at times was barely able to go on; yet he continued to search for and catalog plants and animals.

The Land between the Rivers expands our knowledge of the work of one of the country's earliest botanists. We also learn a great deal about the early explorers, the inhabitants of the unsettled land, and about the land and culture of the times.

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Life beyond the Boundaries

Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest

Karen Harry

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Life beyond the Boundaries explores identity formation on the edges of the ancient Southwest. Focusing on some of the more poorly understood regions, including the Jornada Mogollon, the Gallina, and the Pimería Alta, the authors use methods drawn from material culture science, anthropology, and history to investigate themes related to the construction of social identity along the perimeters of the American Southwest.

Through an archaeological lens, the volume examines the social experiences of people who lived in edge regions. Through mobility and the development of extensive social networks, people living in these areas were introduced to the ideas and practices of other cultural groups. As their spatial distances from core areas increased, the degree to which they participated in the economic, social, political, and ritual practices of ancestral core areas increasingly varied. As a result, the social identities of people living in edge zones were often—though not always—fluid and situational.

Drawing on an increase of available information and bringing new attention to understudied areas, the book will be of interest to scholars of Southwestern archaeology and other researchers interested in the archaeology of low-populated and decentralized regions and identity formation. Life beyond the Boundaries considers the various roles that edge regions played in local and regional trajectories of the prehistoric and protohistoric Southwest and how place influenced the development of social identity.

Contributors: Lewis Borck, Dale S. Brenneman, Jeffery J. Clark, Severin Fowles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lauren E. Jelinek, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, Kellam Throgmorton, James T. Watson

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Old Mobile

Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711

Jay Higginbotham

University of Alabama Press, 1991

The highly praised, landmark history of the founding of Mobile

Commissioned to mark the 275th anniversary of the founding of the city of Mobile, Old Mobile is award-winning historian Jay Higginbotham’s definitive history of the origins of French settlement on Mobile Bay and the birth of the city.

Higginbotham’s narrative is replete with memorable characters, such as the LeMoyne brothers: Iberville, the aristocratic adventurer who abandoned the settlement and the younger Bienville, whose iron determination and Catholic faith sustained the community through its first hardscrabble years 26 miles upriver, a disastrous flood in 1711, and the community’s retreat to the city’s current location, nearer the French supply depot on Dauphin Island.

The majestic sweep of Higginbotham’s fascinating account also takes in early Mobile’s relations with neighboring European settlements, such as their meddling French neighbors in Louisana to the west and the Spanish in Pensacola to the east. Despite being rivals of a sort, Mobile and Pensacola became, of dire necessity, allies in survival. Higginbotham consulted a wealth of previously unpublished sources in the national archives of the United States, Canada, Mexico, France, England, Spain, and Cuba, creating an authoritative account never likely to be equaled. A copious bibliography, excellent illustrations and figures, tables of relevant statistics, and a detailed index round out this magisterial edition.

Scholars and readers interested in the founding of Alabama, the history of Gulf Coast settlements, the French colonial empire, or related subjects will find Old Mobile essential reading.

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Peculiar Honor

A History of the 28th Texas Cavalry 1862-1865

Jane Johansson

University of Arkansas Press, 1998

This regimental history tells the story of the 28th Texas Cavalry (dismounted), a unit of Walker's Texas Division which campaigned throughout the Civil War in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Part of the division known as "Walker's Greyhounds" because of their amazing mobility and stamina, the men of the 28th, helped preserve Texas from Federal invasion. 1997 Winner of the Ottis Lock Award for the Best Book on East Texas History

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Plainview

The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains

Edited by Vance T. Holliday, Eileen Johnson, and Ruthann Knudson

University of Utah Press, 2017

The Plainview Paleoindian artifact style was first recognized in 1947, after numerous projectile points were found during excavations of a bison kill site near Plainview, Texas. In the decades that followed, however, Plainview became something of a catch-all category with artifacts from across the continent being lumped together based merely on gross similarities. This volume unravels the meaning of Plainview, detailing what is known about this particular technology and time period. Contributing authors from the United States and Mexico present new data gleaned from the reinvestigation of past excavations, notes, maps, and materials from the original Plainview site as well as reports from other Plainview Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains, northern Mexico, and the southwestern United States.

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The Southern Frontier 1670-1732

Verner Crane, with a new introduction by Steven C. Hahn

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period

This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.

Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.

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Southern Frontier Humor

An Anthology

Edited by M. Thomas Inge & Ed Piacentino

University of Missouri Press, 2010

If, as some suggest, American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, then the humorists of the Old South surely helped us to shape that literature. Twain himself learned to write by reading the humorists’ work, and later writers were influenced by it. This book marks the first new collection of humor from that region published in fifteen years—and the first fresh selection of sketches and tales to appear in over forty years.

Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino bring their knowledge of and fondness for this genre to a collection that reflects the considerable body of scholarship that has been published on its major figures and the place of the movement in American literary history. They breathe new life into the subject, gathering a new selection of texts and adding Twain—the only major American author to contribute to and emerge from the movement—as well as several recently identified humorists.

All of the major writers are represented, from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Thomas Bangs Thorpe, as well as a great many lesser-known figures like Hamilton C. Jones, Joseph M. Field, and John S. Robb. The anthology also includes several writers only recently discovered to be a part of the tradition, such as Joseph Gault, Christopher Mason Haile, James Edward Henry, and Marcus Lafayette Byrn, and features authors previously overlooked, such as William Gilmore Simms, Ham Jones, Orlando Benedict Mayer, and Adam Summer.

Selections are timely, reflecting recent trends in literary history and criticism sensitive to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. The editors have also taken pains to seek out first printings to avoid the kinds of textual corruptions that often occur in later versions of these sketches. Southern Frontier Humor offers students and general readers alike a broad perspective and new appreciation of this singular form of writing from the Old South—and provides some chuckles along the way.

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Spartan Band

Burnett's 13th Texas Cavalry in the Civil War

Thomas Reid

University of North Texas Press, 2005

To Battle for God and the Right

The Civil War Letterbooks of Emerson Opdycke

Emerson Opdycke, Ed. by Glenn V. Longacre and John E. Haas.

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Emerson Opdycke, a lieutenant with the 41st Ohio Infantry and later a commander of the 125th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, won fame at the Battle of Franklin when his brigade saved the Union Army from defeat. He also played pivotal roles in some of the major battles of the western theater, including Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Missionary Ridge.

Opdycke's wartime letters to his wife, Lucy, offer the immediacy of the action as it unfolded and provide a glimpse into the day-to-day life of a soldier. Viewing the conflict with the South as a battle between the rights of states and loyalty to the Union, his letters reveal his dislike of slavery, devotion to the Union, disdain for military ineptitude, and opinions of combat strategies and high-ranking officers. A thorough introduction by editors Glenn V. Longacre and John E. Haas and a foreword by Peter Cozzens provide additional historical context and biographical information.

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The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark

Jo Ann Trogdon

University of Missouri Press, 2015

In 1798—more than five years before he led the epic western journey that would make him and Meriwether Lewis national heroes—William Clark set off by flatboat from his Louisville, Kentucky home with a cargo of tobacco and furs to sell downriver in Spanish New Orleans. He also carried with him a leather-trimmed journal to record his travels and notes on his activities.

In this vivid history, Jo Ann Trogdon reveals William Clark’s highly questionable activities during the years before his famous journey west of the Mississippi. Delving into the details of Clark’s diary and ledger entries, Trogdon investigates evidence linking Clark to a series of plots—often called the Spanish Conspiracy—in which corrupt officials sought to line their pockets with Spanish money and to separate Kentucky from the United States. The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark gives readers a more complex portrait of the American icon than has been previously written.

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A Whole Country in Commotion

The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest

Patrick G. Williams

University of Arkansas Press, 2005

Bringing together the work of prominent scholars and rising stars in southern, western, and Indian history, A Whole Country in Commotion explores lesser-known aspects of one of the better-known episodes in U.S. history. While the purchase has been seen as a great boon for the United States, doubling the size of the new nation and securing American navigation on the Mississippi River, it also brought turmoil to many. Looking past the triumphal aspects of the purchase, this book examines the “negotiations among peoples, nations and empires that preceded and followed the actual transfer of territory.” Its nine essays highlight the “commotion” the purchase stirred up—among nations, among Louisiana residents and newcomers, even among those who remained east of the Mississippi. Many of these essays look at the portion of the Louisiana territory that would become Arkansas to illustrate the profound impact of the purchase on the diverse populations of the American Southwest. Others explore the woeful commotion brought to many thousands of lives as Jefferson’s “noble bargain” set the stage for the forced migration of native and African Americans from the east to the west of the Mississippi.

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The Wigwam and the Cabin

The Arkansas Edition

William G. Simms

University of Arkansas Press, 2001

One of the most important volumes of short fiction published before the Civil War. The Wigwam and the Cabin represents William Gilmore Simms at his very best. It is the work that led Poe to say of Simms, ". . . in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical management of his themes, he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen." Praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Wigwam and the Cabin focuses n the Southern frontier that Simms knew so well, a frontier whose vernacular, courage, humor, folklore, violence, injustice, and beauty are vividly brought to life through the strokes of his pen. "I have seen the life," Simms wrote, "—have lived it—and much of my material . . . is the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro—the bold and hardy pioneer, the vigorous yeomen—these are the subjects." Simms's portrayal of frontier life is the most realistic and graphic in all nineteenth-century American literature; and the Arkansas edition of The Wigwam and the Cabin, with Dr. Guilds's fine editing and informative introductin, brings back into print an invaluable contribution to the development of the short story in America.

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