During the last few days of the Civil War, a company of Confederate raiders rode into the small Kansas town of Elbow. There they raped, pillaged and murdered among the local populace, thus triggering a chain of events and a chase that extended for more than a thousand miles across the grasslands and mountains of Kansas and the deserts of New Mexico.
On a balmy day in April 1863, Union Colonel Abel D. Streight, at the head of a brigade of Federal infantry, set out on a 220-mile ride to destroy the Western and Atlantic Railroad at Rome, Georgia. The most fascinating thing about the raid is that Streight’s brigade of four infantry regiments, almost 1,800 soldiers, was mounted on mules, a huge problem in itself; few of his men had ever ridden a horse, let alone a mule.
Just after first light on the morning of September 18th, 1863, in the deep woods on the banks of Chickamauga Creek, a single brigade of Federal infantry stumbled into a full division of Confederate cavalry, and so began one of the bloodiest conflicts of the American Civil War. The result? A huge victory for the Confederate army. The cost? More than 37,000 casualties; the Battle of Chickamauga was the bloodiest two days of the entire Civil War.
On a dark day in April 1865, a band of former Confederate guerillas slaughtered more than forty Comanches, most of them women and children. This began a six-month reign of terror along the Santa Fe Trail as Comanche chief, White Eagle, took his revenge. The U.S. Cavalry was assigned the task of tracking White Eagle and his warriors down.
If you love Civil War stories, you’ll love this fact-based novel of the bloodiest two days at Chickamauga as told by Major Chester Rigby CSA, ADC to General Bushrod Johnson.
For more than two months, Union General William Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland pursued General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee from Murfreesboro to Chattanooga. Finally, on September 18, 1863, on the banks of a small river in Northwest Georgia, the two great armies came face to face, and so began three days of hell, including the two bloodiest days of our nation’s Civil War.