As most Americans of the 1860s fixed their attention on the battlefields of Shiloh and Manassas, another war raged on the largely unsettled Western frontier. This splendid work by the author of The Patriot Chiefs restores this "other" Civil War to its true, epic proportions. With formidable scholarship and irresistible narrative ease, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., tells of the Yankee armada that foundered in the Louisiana bayous; of the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states. where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender -- two months after Appomattox: and of the U.S. Army's brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians in theaters as far apart as Minnesota and Colorado. - Publisher.

This definitive history, the first comprehensive examination of the Civil War as it was fought west of the Mississippi, is also a fine account of the 1861-1865 Indian wars that drew thousands of Union troops away from the main Eastern theaters. Josephy ( The Patriot Chiefs ) describes the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, Ark., in 1862, the Union victory in '63 over Texas troops at Glorieta, N.M. (the ``Gettysburg of the West''), the '63 raid on Lawrence, Kans., led by Confederate William Quantrill, and the unsuccessful Union expedition up the Red River in '64. As Federal forces gained the upper hand, the conflict turned into an aggressive war against the Indians. Josephy describes how President Lincoln sent Gen. John Pope to suppress the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and such various ensuing massacres as the slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children at Sand Creek, Colo., in 1865. - Publishers Weekly.