When the war was over, some soldiers went back east, to New England’s manufacturing towns or to New York’s Bowery, their war-sharpened racism working its way into local politics, labor associations, and the Free Soil movement.27 Others spread out into the newly conquered western land, into California and up into Oregon. They were armed with federally supplied rifles and an ample stock of bullets, ready to deal with Native Americans the way they had with Mexicans. “A war of extermination,”
