Annie Heloise Abel describes the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, a bloody disaster for the Confederates but a glorious moment for Colonel Stand Watie and his Cherokee Mounted Rifles. The Indians were soon enough swept by the war into a vortex of confusion and chaos. Abel makes clear that their participation in the conflict brought only devastation to Indian Territory.

Born in England and educated in Kansas, Annie Heloise Abel (1873 1947) was a historical editor and writer of books dealing mainly with the trans-Mississippi West. They include The American Indian as Slaveholder and...

" Abel's] story is a tragic one, but leaving it untold would be a greater tragedy. Native American southerners shared the experience of the Civil War with other Americans, and their involvement in that upheaval had as profound an effect on their subsequent history. Abel's was the first serious telling of that story."--Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green.

The secession of southern states in the winter and spring of 1861-62 brought about a crisis for the Five Civilzed Tribes living in present-day Oklahoma, or Indian Territory. Forced out of the South thirty years earlier and relocated there,...

Late in April 1861, President Lincoln ordered Federal troops to evacuate forts in Indian Territory. That left the Five Civilized Tribes-Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles-essentially under Confederate jurisdiction and control. The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863-1866, spans the closing years of the Civil War, when Southern fortunes were waning, and the immediate postwar period. Annie Heloise Abel shows the extreme vulnerability of the Indians caught between two warring sides. "The failure of the United States government to afford to the southern...

Thirty years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed through the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota, the Upper Missouri River region was being plied by fur traders. In 1834 Francis A. Chardon, a Philadelphian of French extraction, took charge of Fort Clark, a main post of the American Fur Company on the Upper Missouri.The journal that Chardon began that year offers a rare glimpse of daily life among the Mandan Indians, including the Arikaras, Yanktons, and Gros Ventres. In particular, it is a valuable and graphic record of the smallpox scourge that nearly destroyed the...