January 1863. On the first, the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Enslaved people in Confederate territory were declared free.
Twenty days later, soldiers at Fort McLane in New Mexico Territory killed Mangas Coloradas, the Chiricahua Apache leader, after luring him in under a flag of truce. The officer who ordered his torture and death was Brigadier General Joseph R. West, a California Volunteer who would later serve as a Republican U.S. Senator from Louisiana during Reconstruction.
Nine days after that, on January 29, California Volunteers under Colonel Patrick Edward Connor attacked a Shoshone winter camp at Bear River in present-day Idaho. They killed somewhere between 250 and 400 men, women, and children. Some accounts describe soldiers using rifle butts on infants.
Same government. Same month. Liberation and extermination, running on parallel tracks.
I keep coming back to that January. Not because the juxtaposition is shocking, though it is, but because of what it reveals about the story we tell ourselves.
The version most of us learned treats these as separate narratives. The Civil War was about slavery and freedom. The West was about expansion and frontier. They happened in the same country during the same years, but they belong to different genres, get taught in different courses, and show up in different sections of the bookstore.
I think that separation is doing a lot of work. And I think it's wrong.
The version we inherited
Here's the conventional story, compressed: The Civil War was a moral contest between slavery and freedom. The Union won. Reconstruction was the attempt to build multiracial democracy in the former Confederacy. It was imperfect but genuinely radical. Then white Southerners overthrew it through terror and political maneuvering, and the nation moved on to other things.
The West, meanwhile, was being "settled," which is its own story with its own cast, its own timeline, its own set of mythologies.
None of that is wrong, exactly. But it leaves some things out, and the things it leaves out change what the rest of it means.
What disappears
Start with Congress. The 37th Congress, sitting in 1862, passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, the Morrill Land-Grant Act, created new western territories, and authorized military campaigns against the Shoshone, the Navajo, and the Apache. These were not side projects. They were not distractions from the war. They were the same session, the same members, often the same committees.
The government that was fighting to end slavery in the South was simultaneously building the infrastructure of dispossession in the West.
When you separate those stories, the western project vanishes from the Civil War. Indigenous dispossession becomes someone else's narrative, happening in a different genre with different stakes.
And a continuity disappears: what the federal government was doing before the war and what it did after Reconstruction look remarkably similar. Land acquisition. Railroad subsidies. Military suppression of resistance. Treaty-making followed by treaty-breaking.
But "similar" isn't quite right either. The war didn't pause the colonial project. It accelerated it. The Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, the Morrill Act had all been blocked by Southern Democrats before secession. The moment the Southern bloc left Congress, the free-labor version of continental expansion moved faster than peacetime politics ever allowed.
That reframing unsettles me a little, honestly. I was trained in Civil War history. I came up reading about emancipation as a revolutionary moment, and I still believe it was. But I've become less certain that it was the center of the story rather than one strand within a larger one.
The longer arc
Here's what I think was happening. Two economic systems, one built on enslaved labor and one on free labor and wage work, were competing for control of continental expansion. Not over whether to expand, not over whether Indigenous land would be taken, but over how. Under whose labor system. For whose profit. Within what kind of political economy.
The war resolved that competition. More than that, it accelerated the winning side's version of continental expansion. What followed, the period we call Reconstruction, wasn't only about the South. The same federal authority being asserted over former Confederate states was simultaneously being asserted over Indigenous nations across the West. Same army. Same bureaucracy. Same period. Different targets, different methods, but the same assertion of centralized power over territories the government intended to integrate on its own terms.
"Redemption," the term historians use for white Southerners overthrowing Reconstruction governments, looks different when you widen the frame. It stops looking like the failure of a democratic experiment. It starts looking like a consolidation.
The internal crisis that was the Civil War was over. Slavery capitalism had been defeated, and free labor capitalism emerged triumphant. The continental project didn't resume at its pre-war pace; it had already been accelerated by wartime authority, and now it could consolidate without opposition. The system didn't fail. It stabilized.
What this opens up
If that frame holds, then events that look unrelated start rhyming. The Bear River Massacre of 1863. The Memphis Massacre of 1866, where white mobs killed forty-six Black residents over three days. The Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles in 1871, when a mob murdered eighteen Chinese men and boys.
Different populations, different geographies, different immediate causes. But the same structural pattern: provocation, massacre, official disavowal, and then consolidation of the territory or resource that was at stake.
I'm not saying these events are identical. They aren't. The mechanisms differ. What the government wanted from Black labor was different from what it wanted from Indigenous land, which was different from what it wanted from Chinese workers.
But they were all happening inside the same project, governed by the same Congress, enforced by the same army, during the same decades. Treating them as separate stories is a choice, and it's a choice that makes the project less visible as a project.
What I don't know yet
I don't have this figured out. I'm not sure where the financial architecture fits, how the bond markets and railroad speculation and the greenback debates connect to the violence on the ground. I'm not sure how to write about Indigenous sovereignty in a way that doesn't flatten dozens of distinct nations into a single category of victimhood.
I'm not sure this framework holds up equally well in every region, or whether the patterns I'm seeing in Utah Territory and California look the same in Kansas or Minnesota.
This site is where I work those questions out. Some of what I post here will be polished arguments. Some of it will be me following a thread in the archive and not knowing where it leads. The uncertainty is part of the project.