Civil War Photo Friday: Thomas and William Duval, 3rd Confederate Missouri Infantry

Thomas (left) and William (right) Duvall, along with their brother Henderson, enlisted in Company C, 3rd Confederate Missouri Infantry on December 10, 1861, at Richmond, Missouri. They were already veterans, having served under General Sterling Price in the Missouri State Guard at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington.

William was promoted to junior second lieutenant on May 8, 1862 and the Duvall brothers continued to see service at such battles as Pea Ridge, Farmington, Iuka, and Corinth. On October 4, 1862, William was killed during the Confederate attack on Corinth while trying to plant the Confederate flag on the Union fortifications. An eyewitness said William died waving his sword and shouting “Victory.”  Thomas and Henderson Duvall were later killed at Champion Hill, Mississippi, on May 16, 1863.

Indie Life: Free photos for your book cover!

Welcome to the second month of the Indie Life bloghop, where we indie authors talk about the trials and rewards of going independent in the tough world of publishing.

As I mentioned in my previous post asking How can I help you? I want to do what I can to help my fellow indies. I just realized that in addition to hosting guest posts and announcing reader news, there's another thing I can do.

As many of you know, I travel a lot. In fact, one of my day jobs is as a travel blogger for Gadling. I've accumulated thousands of photos from more than two dozen countries and while I've published many of them, many more are just sitting on my hard drive. Let's put them to work.


Some subjects include:

Castles
Medieval weapons and armor
Medieval manuscripts
African markets
Mosques
Churches
Hyenas
Scottish countryside
Old English buildings
military hardware
graveyards
graffiti art
Rome
Iraq
Ghost towns
The Orkney Islands
. . .and much more

I've even done some rather silly experiments with horror photography and haunted graveyards.  

If you're looking for a photo for your book, I'd be happy to help. All photos were taken in the highest resolution and can be used for print as well as ebooks. All I ask in return is credit and a copy of the book.

I'm in Estonia this week adding to my photo collection so I may be a bit slow in replying to email at the moment.

Wild West Photo Friday: Pinal, Arizona, a lost boom town

I've been working on the maps for a book on Wyatt Earp and the Arizona War for Osprey Publishing. One place I couldn't put on the map with any exactitude was this town--Pinal, Arizona.

Pinal was established in the 1870s to mill the ore for the nearby Silver King mine. Pinal's post office opened in April 10, 1878. The mine was a rich one and the town quickly grew to about 2,000 residents. It even had its own newspaper called the Pinal Drill. The town benefited from its good location about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, making it more accessible than some other mining towns.

The town had all the usual miners, prospectors, gamblers, and ladies of the evening. One of them was Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp's common-law wife. In Tombstone, Wyatt had fallen in love with the beautiful actress Sadie Marcus and left her. The jilted Mattie moved to Pinal and --> went into a quick spiral of decline as a drug-addicted prostitute. She killed herself on July 3, 1888.

Unfortunately, silver prices slumped and by 1890 there were only ten people left in Pinal. The post office closed November 28, 1891. Now nothing remains of this old boom town. Even the exact location is in dispute. Imagine that--an entire town that nobody alive remembers. Probably there's nobody alive who even once met someone who remembers it. It's gone.

The top photo shows ore wagons from the Silver King mine at the Pinal mills, circa 1885. The bottom shot is a southeast view of the mill and town of Pinal, circa 1880.

For another shot of Pinal, check out my post on creative foraging in the Civil War. That blacksmith shop is in Pinal.


Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Destroying a Confederate saltpeter works

The Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas was made up of mostly small skirmishes. Researcher Carolyn Bartels counted 1100 fights in Missouri alone, and suspects that estimate is low. Only a couple of dozen of them could rightly be called battles. As I've written before, there's no such thing as an insignificant skirmish. One small action in Arkansas in January of 1863 shows why.

At this time, northern Arkansas was a sort of No-Mans-Land between the two sides. There was little infrastructure in the Ozarks to support a large force, and the rough hills and thick brush made any supply wagons easy targets for ambush. The region was full of deserters and bushwhackers, sandwiched between the Union army to the north and the Confederates to the south.

There was one Confederate outpost, however. Along the Buffalo River in northern Arkansas was a large saltpeter works. Saltpeter, of course, is a key ingredient in gunpowder, something of which the rebels were always in short supply. While they didn't have the manpower to control the Buffalo River, they left a few men to run the saltpeter works in order to supply the beleaguered Arkansas Confederates.

Union troops learned of this operation and decided to put a stop to it. Major J.W. Caldwell of the First Iowa Cavalry took 300 men from Huntsville in northwestern Arkansas and rode out on the morning of January 9. That evening he camped in the general vicinity of the works and sent out scouts to find its exact location. Before dawn the next day, he set out and completely surprised the rebels. Of the 20 workers, only three escaped and the rest were captured.

In his report, Maj. Caldwell says he destroyed 14 buildings, 2 steam engines, 3 boilers, 7 large iron kettles, and half a ton of saltpeter. This was a large enterprise indeed. As a bonus, his men found a second, smaller works four miles downriver and destroyed that too. The workers there managed to escape but the Iowa boys had made a good haul. The expedition also netted 20 bushwhacker prisoners.

While military histories tend to focus on the big battles, these skirmishes had an accumulated effect far beyond any single battle. The works on the Buffalo River weren't the only supply of saltpeter for the rebels in Arkansas, but its loss exacerbated their supply problem and made them that much weaker. Losing all those men to Union prisons didn't help their cause either.


This Wikipedia photo shows a reproduction of Anderson Mill, built in the 1850s as a corn mill and cotton gin. It was converted to a gunpowder mill for the Civil War. After the war it resumed as corn, wheat, and cotton processing. It was bought by Pioneer Mills of San Antonio and idled at the turn of the century. This reproduction was built in 1965 in Anderson Mill, Texas when the original site was flooded by the Lake Travis reservoir. OK, so it isn't a saltpeter works. I couldn't find a good public domain photo of one! Here's one I couldn't use.

Book Review: The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and Endgame in Iraq

The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq by Francis J. West Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book about the Coalition occupation of Iraq was written by Bing West, a Vietnam veteran and former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. He examines the changing strategy and tactics of the occupation from its troubled beginnings through the height of the insurgency and up until 2009.

Despite West's background, he is not kind to the Bush administration. He accuses Bush of being out of touch with the reality on the ground and unwilling to listen to those who were better informed. He places the blame for much of America's troubles in Iraq at the feet of its then Commander-in-Chief

The armed forces did learn from its mistakes, however, and the bulk of this book is devoted to Coalition's attempts to devise strategy and tactics to defeat the insurgency. West embedded with numerous frontline units to get a better idea of how the changing tactics worked on the ground. His detailed military analysis is fascinating for any student of the subject and West keeps it from being a dry Defense Department briefing by giving vivid descriptions of the individuals involved and some of their firefights.

One thing I especially appreciated is that the author gives full credit to the bravery and commitment of the many Iraqis who fought alongside the Coalition to make their country a better place. Having been to Iraq myself, I have met many such Iraqis and it's too bad their story isn't told more often. The Americans got to go home at the end of their tour of duty. The Iraqis, however, didn't have that option and ran the risk of assassination at the hands of terrorists. Many fell victim to such a fate.

There are holes in his coverage, however. Coalition partners are given short shrift, and the whole Blackwater scandal (overcharging the government, pointlessly killing civilians, etc.) is shrugged off in a single page with the statement that new rules were put in place to keep the "mistakes" from happening again. That's a shockingly naive statement coming from such an experienced observer and I wonder if West actually believes it.

The Abu Ghraib scandal is treated in a similarly flippant manner. West never considers the possibility that the blame went higher than those immediately involved. I'm not saying it did; I'm just saying that it's a question worth asking.

Despite these quibbles, I still found The Strongest Tribe the single best general coverage I've read on the war. Anyone who wants to understand the occupation of Iraq or the changing tactics of modern warfare should read this exciting and informative book.

View all my reviews

How Frank and Jesse James swore loyalty to the Union

As I discussed in my post on loyalty oaths in the Civil War, many rebels swore to stop fighting the Union in return for being allowed to live as civilians. Some stopped fighting and some didn't.

Two of the most famous people to take the oath were Frank and Jesse James. At the beginning of the war, Frank joined the rebellious Missouri State Guard and saw action at Wilson's Creek and Lexington in 1861. While the State Guard was retreating to southwest Missouri in September of that year Frank fell ill, got left behind, and was captured and paroled. He took the loyalty oath and returned to the family farm in Clay County.

And he might have stayed there for the duration if it weren't for General Order No. 19, enacted in July of 1862, which forced all able-bodied men, including paroled Confederates, to join local Union militias. While this swelled the ranks of the militia, it also made many hardcore Southerners flee to the Confederate army or become bushwhackers. Frank took the latter option and joined the band of the notorious William Quantrill.

His younger brother Jesse joined him the next year. They became hardcore guerrillas and fought until the end. In May of 1865, Jesse and a group of bushwhackers rode into Lexington to surrender and Jesse got shot by a nervous group of Union troops. He survived his wound and formally surrendered on May 21. Frank was in Kentucky with the remnants of Quantrill's group and surrendered on July 26, more than three months after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

You can read more about Frank and Jesse in my book The Last Ride of the James-Younger Gang. They also make an appearance in my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness.


Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. For a photo of 16 year-old Jesse James the bushwhacker, click on the link.

Civil War Photo Friday: Taking the Oath of Loyalty

This week's image shows a group of Confederate prisoners taking the Loyalty Oath in 1864. This was an option given to most rebel prisoners. The deal was that if they swore loyalty to the United States, they'd be given a certificate proving they'd done so and could return to civilian life. If their home was in Union-occupied territory, they could even go home.

Most prisoners honored the oath. Some were sick of the war, while others were draftees who had never wanted to be in it in the first place. The temptation of a return to civilian life was a strong one. The Confederate armies in all theaters of the war were plagued with desertions.

Not everyone honored the oath, however. Sometimes a rebel would be captured and would take the oath in order to get out of prison. They considered the oath to have been taken under duress and therefore invalid. Often these guys would become bushwhackers. The Union Military correspondence in Missouri and Arkansas is filled with reports of bushwhackers being killed and having the loyalty oath paper being found on their persons.

Right at the bottom of the form was a line that said that if you broke the oath by acting in support of the Confederacy, the punishment was death. Sometimes oath breakers were taken alive. They nearly always faced execution.

In my next post I'll be talking about the oath of loyalty two Confederate bushwhackers named Frank and Jesse James took.

OK, so this isn't a photo, but hey, it's a photo of a drawing, right?

Image courtesy Library of Congress.