Civil War in the Southwest - Recollections of the Sibley Brigade

Canseco-Keck History Series, Vol. 4

In 1861 and 1862, in the vast deserts and rugged mountains of the Southwest, eighteen hundred miles from Washington and Richmond, the Civil War raged in a struggle that could have decided the fate of the nation.

In the summer and fall of 1861, Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley raised a brigade of young and zealous Texans to invade New Mexico Territory as a step toward the conquest of Colorado and California and the creation of a Confederate empire in the Southwest. Of the Sibley Brigade's sixteen major battles during the war, their most excruciating experiences came during the ill-fated New Mexico Campaign.

Civil War in the Southwest tells the dramatic story of that campaign in the words of some of the actual participants. Noted Civil War scholar Jerry Thompson has edited and annotated eighteen episodes written by William Lott "Old Bill" Davidson and six other members of Sibley's Brigade that were originally published in a small East Texas newspaper, the Overton Sharp Shooter, in 1887-88.