Hoehne on Rein, 'The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains'


Christopher M. Rein. The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. 288 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-6481-6

Reviewed by Patrick Hoehne (University of Nebraska)
Published on H-War (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55179

The Second Colorado Cavalry, written by Christopher Rein, chronicles the Second Colorado’s service throughout New Mexico, Indian Territory, Missouri, and Kansas from 1861 through 1865. Rather than depicting the regiment as an isolated unit stationed along the western edge of a massive North-South conflict, Rein argues that the Second Colorado Cavalry provides an important lens through which to view the linkages between the Civil War and the western expansion of the American empire. 

A closer examination of the service of the Second Colorado Cavalry, Rein argues, muddles the distinctions between the Civil War and the conquest of the American West. In doing so, Rein joins a cadre of historians like Heather Cox Richardson, Megan Kate Nelson, and Thomas Cutrer who have written on the Civil War West. The Second Colorado performed the arduous and dangerous work of combatting Confederate guerilla forces, cultivating skill at exerting control through intelligence collection and rapid, mobile response. The unit would later apply that experience against Native Americans along the Santa Fe Trail, operating as effective and seasoned agents of empire in unceded territories.

Relying on official records, diaries, and the unit’s newspaper, Rein tracks the service of the Second Colorado chronologically, following the regiment’s movements throughout the Great Plains. Chapter 1 examines the history of the Colorado Territory and explores the backgrounds of the men and women who would eventually serve with the Second Colorado. Initially organized as an infantry regiment, the unit generally attracted enlistment from miners and farmers who had failed to make their fortunes during the 1859 gold rush. Chapter 2 follows the unit to New Mexico, where the Coloradans partook in a campaign to repulse a Texan invasion designed to expand the Confederacy into the Southwest. In chapter 3, Rein documents the Second Colorado’s last year as an infantry regiment, 1863. The unit moved into Indian Territory, where it would see action at the Battle of Honey Springs, fighting alongside the First Kansas Colored Infantry and allied Native Americans. Chapter 4 sees the Second Colorado deployed to the “Burned District” along the Kansas-Missouri border, an area wracked by bloody guerilla warfare. Transitioning to a cavalry regiment, the Second Colorado emerged from 1864 as a skilled and aggressive guerilla-hunting unit. Chapter 5 details the Second Colorado Calvary’s move to Kansas. There, in the wake of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre, the regiment applied the lessons learned in Missouri to conflict with Native Americans.  

One of the greatest strengths of The Second Colorado Cavalry stems from the work’s depiction of the regiment’s evolution as guerilla-hunting unit. Many of the Second Colorado’s soldiers were themselves no strangers to extralegal violence, with some having experienced the turbulence of Bleeding Kansas while others encountered vigilantism through the extrajudicial “miners’ courts.” The soldiers were comfortable enough with vigilantism that when Pvt. Charles Lockman killed Pvt. John Groce in 1864, the men organized their own hasty trial and lynched Lockman, in flagrant violation of military regulation (p. 37). This attitude towards violence served the Second Colorado well as the unit adjusted its tactics to “bushwhack the bushwhackers” (p. 135). Confederate guerillas had long used disguise and aggressive, often merciless violence against the Union’s forces and supporters. The Second Colorado’s willingness and ability to adopt tactics similar to their irregular opponents enabled the regiment to mount an effective and feared campaign against the guerillas. As Rein argues, the “exterminationist logic” of the guerilla-hunters would translate easily to the campaigns against Native Americans in the subsequent months and years (p. 143). 

There are minor flaws in the book, such as the sometimes unnecessary connections to contemporary warfighting, as is the case when Rein attempts to characterize the Second Colorado as a “kind of forerunner to modern United Nations ‘peacekeepers’” (p. 122). A handful of similar instances can be found throughout the text, which encourage readers to draw unhelpful or potentially misleading parallels between the combat experience of the Civil War and the present. Still, such instances are relatively rare, and do not do too much to detract from the larger narrative or argument. 

The Second Colorado Cavalry is a compelling, readable, and useful history. The work should be of great interest to scholars and members of the general reading public interested in the histories of the Civil War and American West. The book is of particular benefit to those interested in the Civil War’s guerilla warfare, and in the connected violence against Native Americans that followed. Far from an inconsequential unit stationed in a remote region, Rein makes a successful case that the Second Colorado Cavalry possesses a significance worth revisiting. 

Citation: Patrick Hoehne. Review of Rein, Christopher M., The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains. H-War, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55179

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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