This book is the first comprehensive history of the Civil War as it was fought from the western fringe of the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Ocean, and t portrays in rich detail the battles, personalities, and issues involved. Josephy shows how in the early months of the civil War, a Confederate army penetrated as far was as Tucson and Santa Fe before it was stopped by Union troops on a fast march from Colorado. He makes clear the involvement of Native Americans in the war-how, for example, Indians in Minnesota rising against the ever-encroaching white settlers diverted federal troops from the East. He reveals how volunteer groups charged with keeping the Western trails open for the Union fought a monstrous war against the Plains Indians, taking the opportunity to seize the tribes' lands for themselves. He makes vivid the months long series of battles between Confederate and Union troops on the rivers and in the bayous of western Louisiana and along the coast of Texas-many of them disasters for the North. He recounts the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states of Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas, and in the Indian Territory, where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender-two months after Appomattox.

Part I: The glory road to New Mexico. "Texas...Texas" -- Up the Rio Grande -- Gettysburg of the west / Part II: Anguish of the northern plains. Red morning on the Minnesota -- Columns of Vengeance / Part III: The ordeal of General Banks. Of ships and mud -- "The earth will shake and the wool fly" / Part IV: War on the Western trails. Agents of manifest destiny -- The iron fist / Part V: The wasteland. The way to Pea Ridge -- Fading trumpets.