Cry of the Hawk

It is not easy to visualize the enormous spread of frontier where these 6,000 [galvanized Yankees] marched and fought and endured the tedium of garrison duties. From Fort Kearney to Julesburg. From Julesburg to Laramie and along the Sweetwater through South Pass to Utah. From Julesburg up the South Platte to Denver, by Cache la Poudre to the Laramie Plains and Fort Bridger …. They made themselves a part of all the raw and racy names on that wild land of buffalo and Indians—Cottonwood Springs and Three Crossings, Lodgepole and Alkali Station, Medicine Creek and Sleeping Water, Fort Zarah and White Earth River, St. Mary’s, Fort Wicked, Laughing Wood, Soldier Creek, Rabbit Ear Mound, Dead Man’s Ranche, and Lightning’s Nest.

—Dee Brown

The Galvanized Yankees

Led by desperate men … the guerillas, most of them only boys, fought a total war. West of the Mississippi they plunged a fairly stable … society into intense partisan conflict that was felt by every man, woman and child. This was not a war of great armies and captains, this was bloody local insurrection, a war between friends and neighbors—a civil war in the precise definition of that term. Here organized bands of men killed each other and the civil population hundreds of miles behind the recognized battlefronts. Here there was ambush, arson, execution and murder; warfare without rules, law or quarter.

—Richard S. Brownlee

Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy