The Blue, the Gray, and the Red: Indian Campaigns of the Civil War

Beginning with the flight of the Creeks into Union territory pursued by Confederate forces (including many of Stand Watie's Cherokees), this popular history recounts grim, bloody, lesser-known events of the Civil War. Hatch (Clashes of the Cavalry) largely forgoes Confederate activities after that, but the book brings together some telling incidents nonetheless. Kit Carson, who fought Apaches and Navajos under the iron-fisted Colonel Carleton, arranged the Long Walk of the Navajos that made him infamous in Navajo history to this day. The North's""Captain"" Woolsey, a volunteer soldier, became a brutal raider of the Apaches. General Sibley, a northerner and first Governor of Minnesota, oversaw the response to the Sioux Uprising of 1862 that left several hundred dead on either side. The slaughter of Black Kettle's Cheyennes at Sand Creek in 1864--by Colorado volunteers under Colonel Chivington, a militant abolitionist whose views on Indians were a great deal less charitable--forms a devastating chapter. Hatch, a veteran of several books on the Indian Wars that focus on George Armstrong Custer, has added to this clear and even-handed account a scholarly apparatus that adds considerably to its value.