My Story

What does it mean to grow up with America itself? Anson Mills was born in 1834, when the republic was still a wild experiment, and lived to see it become a world power. This memoir traces that extraordinary arc: a boyhood on the western frontier, a young man thrust into the bloodiest conflict in American history, and a career that carried him from the chaos of Civil War battlefields to the lonely outposts of the Indian Wars. Mills writes with the plainspoken honesty of a man who saw much and regrets little, offering us an unvarnished look at the military life that shaped, and was shaped by, a nation tearing itself apart and then remaking itself. Here is history not from textbooks but from the saddle, the camp, and the long march westward.