The Three-Cornered War Quotes

“The desert exploded with life: yellow and pink flowers opened the tips of the cholla's spiny fingers; purple wildflowers sprang up in the meadows; and sunflowers lifted their heads. The Treaty of 1868 had been a victory, but not without cost. In order to secure a measure of freedom from the U.S. government, the Navajos had to accede to new methods of federal control. By signing the treaty, however, the government had acknowledged the Nagajos' sovereignty as a people, and that was a significant achievement. Now they had come home. Returning to Diné Bikéyah after four years of imprisonment and exile, the Navajos were trees blooming after a cold, dark winter.”
― Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

“These struggles for power in the West exposed a hard and complicated truth about the Union government’s war aims: that they simultaneously embraced slave emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American empire of liberty.”
― Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

“for the Southwest has always been a landscape that requires mobility for survival.”
― Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

“The Navajos could not explain why so many disasters had befallen them at the Bosque. They could only say that the ground was never intended for them.20”
― Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

“Over the past few years, stories had filtered back to Diné Bikéyah about the dead who had been left behind during these forced marches. It was said that a pregnant woman, about to give birth and too weak to walk on any longer, stopped to rest by the side of the road. “Go ahead,” she had told her parents, “things might come out all right with me.” And so they had left her, and kept walking. A few minutes later, they heard a gunshot. The soldiers did not allow them to go to their daughter and cover her body.11”
― Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

“Mangas Coloradas’s son-in-law stepped forward. Cochise was shorter than Mangas, five-foot-nine, with a stout frame and broad shoulders. He had long been a war chief of the Chokonen band of the Chiricahuas, who lived in the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains near Tucson. He had married one of Mangas Coloradas’s daughters, cementing their bands’ alliance. 1 Now he joined Mangas in his father-in-law’s stronghold, bringing all of his people with him. Cochise’s warriors moved into the light behind him.”
― Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West