The Prairie Was on Fire: Eyewitness Accounts of the Civil War in the Indian Territory

Abstract

The Prairie Was on Fire: Eyewitness Accounts of the Civil War in the Indian Territory. By Whit Edwards. (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 2001. Pp. vii, 200. Photographs, map, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.) One of the more memorable books I had read for a graduate seminar in historical methods was E. H. Carr's What is History? We students read Carr's philosophical treatise understand the underpinnings of historical writing and our responsibilities in interpreting the past. To illustrate the issues involved in determining historical causation, Carr used the analogy of a fictional traffic accident in which a man is killed while crossing the road buy cigarettes. Those investigating the accident painstakingly analyze the contributing factors, finding that the street lights were not working on the night of the accident, that it was raining, and that the automobile driver was speeding. But, at last, one examiner insists that the victim's addiction cigarettes was the real cause of his death. Aside from making his point about determining causation, Carr's story can also serve demonstrate the obligation of the historian judge the evidence once it has been carefully assembled. The historian must make his case rather than rely on witness statements. In The Prairie Was on Fire, historian Whit Edwards gathers eyewitness accounts of the Civil War in the Indian Territory and allows them to tell about the engagements of the war in their own words. But in so doing Edwards restricts his own contributions a narrative connecting the spokespersons, creating a situation, similar Carr's fanciful traffic accident, be sorted out by the reader. Still, viewed as the results of an investigation rather than a set of conclusions about the events described, the book succeeds admirably. The Civil War in the Indian Territory was arguably one of the most diverse of any theater of the conflict, with military and civilian participants from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Black Union freedmen, standing shoulder shoulder with Colorado miners, squared off against Confederate Indians who rode with Texas cavalrymen. Many of the engagements in which this melting pot of participants battled were little more than bushwhacking raids carried out in savage isolation. As one might expect from such diversity among witnesses so many confused, backcountry fracases, the accounts vary tremendously in their relation of the particulars. …