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This is an expansive history of about sixty years, across a fair amount of space.

It’s also a fairly limited history, largely confined to what “white people” were doing. This is, in large part, man-vs-nature history, with strange people coming into a strange place and having all sorts of adventures. This is entirely about the early exploration and expansion of Anglo-American culture across four states of the US. Stone does take time to note that there’s just no written sources available from the Chinese who worked on the railroads being built through here. And that objection would also hold true for a lot of the previous inhabitants of the region. And this is a flowing narrative history, not in the least bit technical and willing to go into the weeds of population levels and other non-written evidence.

Certainly, there is a lot to cover here as it is. A good chunk of the book is dominated by the various discoveries of gold and silver that dominate the initial settlement of the region. Places where a few men found something valuable, and instantly, or so it would seem, towns sprang up. Many of the immediate places would go away again when the strikes ran out, but not all, and of course, the mineral wealth built other places as well, most notably San Francisco. The development of the Bay Area is one of several threads running through the entire book.

Later portions deal with the railroads, and the chokehold the Southern Pacific had on much of California’s economy. One of the more amusing chapters near the end deals with the Santa Fe finally gaining access to southern California, and the subsequent free-fall of passenger ticket prices from $100 to $25 (with a dip all the way down to $1).

Much of the earlier parts of course deal with problems of individual expeditions and bands of settlers trying to cross the region at all. It isn’t a coherent account of things like the Oregon Trail at all (that one especially, as Oregon is out of Stone’s scope). But there is enough to contextualize a lot of these early struggles.

Organizationally, it is interesting that Stone very much sets his book only in modern California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Events that take place outside these borders are barely touched on at all. The book is not formally divided up into these four states as well, but Stone does very much keep them in mind, and certainly groups things in accordance with those borders.

The main problem with study of the Mexican-American War is that it is severely overshadowed by the later Civil War. Instead of struggling against the problem, this book embraces it, tracing the careers of several prominent ACW generals through this earlier conflict. Unfortunately, there’s too little analysis here to say in just what ways their experiences were formative.

Worse, there’s a number of minor errors scattered throughout the book. My copy came from my dad, and there’s a number of penciled annotations of minor slip ups. A recurring one is Dugard’s uncertainty around artillery, seemingly confusing the various ways in which they were named. He also conflates metal percussion caps with metal cartridges (a very different animal). And there’s a couple of occasions where he seemingly confuses his own narrative and suddenly gives an unlikely location in the middle of things (talking about arrival in New Orleans… and then suddenly arriving in Saint Louis). And then there’s one huge error, where he correctly gives the transmission of yellow fever by mosquito, and then says it can become airborne after. It sounds like that may have been the theory in the 1840s, and Dugard did not read up actual transmission vectors.

Another problem is that its generally written at a popular history level, but people who don’t already know something of the principle characters of the book won’t get a whole lot out of this. So, it’s best for Civil War buffs looking to expand their horizons a bit.

Thankfully, that’s far from a rare breed, and there is a lot here. One of the best points of the book is that there are a number of good maps detailing much of the various battles covered. It is also the closest to being a military history of the three books on the war I’ve read recently.

The primary figure of the book is Grant. He was with one of the units that moved to become part of Zachary Taylor’s army at the start of the war, and was transferred to Winfield Scott’s army later, so he was present for almost all the major actions, and between his letters and and autobiography, left a fairly good record behind. Jefferson Davis is the second most prominent figure presented, then Lee, and Sherman is more of a footnote since his transfer to the Third Artillery got him to California… after everything had been settled there.

Plenty of other familiar names show up, and the introductory part is interesting for a view of the start of West Point, and filling out Grant’s early life. I’d known that he was originally named Hiram Ulysses Grant, and did not like the name. And that a ‘clerical error’ had him enrolled as Ulysses Simpson Grant, but I’d never seen anything on how that name came about, and Dugard gives the full story here.

Overall, I rather like The Training Ground better than A Country of Vast Designs and A Wicked War, despite the visible goofs causing concerns for ones I haven’t seen. It’s the only one of the three where the war itself comes in as a major focus, and describes the actions in it with far more detail than other two. But, it is again purely from the American point of view (Vast Designs does just a bit better there), and seems to get bored of the subject as it goes along, with far more detail given in the early parts and declining steadily later.

This book gave me a bad impression early on when the introduction states, “All the land taken from Mexico, historians now acknowledge, could have been acquired peacefully through diplomacy and deliberate negotiation of financial recompense.”

That’s a rather big pill to swallow. David M. Pletcher did indeed make this argument in a 1975 book (footnoted in this text), but I’m not sure how many people would agree with him, especially in 2012, when this book was written. And in fact, in the main part of the book, when Greenberg gets to it, she acknowledges that just paying Mexico for a huge swathe of its territory was pretty much impossible. Sadly, there’s also no direct engagement with the contention implied in A Country of Vast Designs that Polk was attempting to get a peaceable settlement by playing the same game of brinkmanship that he pulled off with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory. (Admittedly, the other only came out four years before this book, which would be a fairly short turn around time to talk directly to that idea.)

What we do have is an attempt to look at the Mexican-American War through the viewpoints of five people. The problem is only two were directly involved (one killed in action, and one forced through the treaty of Guadalupe Hildago), two peripherally involved, and while Polk was central to the war, he was also physically a long way away from it. So, if you want to understand the actions of the war itself, this book isn’t a great place to go, and when it is talking about that, it’s actually detracting from central parts of her book.

Greenberg is much more critical of James Polk than Merry’s Country of Vast Designs (fine enough), but you also don’t get to know nearly as much about him here, and she could really have used a better look at just how disruptive Buchanan’s actions in the cabinet were.

John Hardin is the surprise star of the book. He was a successful Illinois politician, who’s falling out with Lincoln could have permanently derailed Lincoln’s career. But he gave up his position to support patriotic fervor and went to war. His regiment was shot to pieces at Buena Vista, and he returned home for a state funeral.

Nicholas Trist pretty much single-handedly held the peace process together, and against Polk’s orders produced a treaty that no one could refuse. Merry’s book is longer and more detailed in general, so his treatment of Trist is similarly more detailed there, but there’s plenty here too.

Henry Clay’s involvement in the book is about as outsized as his entire career was. While there’s a lot of attention on the personal side, he’s also part of the political anti-war movement that Polk stirred up with his heavy-handed actions against Mexico. I would have liked to see a bit more coverage on that, though what we get is good.

Abraham Lincoln is the least present of the five people focused on in the book, despite being one of the three to make the cover blurb. There’s no accounting for fame. That said, the end of the book very much leans on him, presenting a speech from Clay that Lincoln attended on his slow way east to take his seat in the House of Representatives. Lincoln had generally stayed away from the subject of the Mexican-American War, and had concentrated his political energies on economic matters. But after this point, he becomes one of the more fiery anti-war persons in the House, making some fame with his “Spot Resolutions” (if Mexico attacked Taylor’s army on American soil, show me the spot on which it happened). The stance may well have sunk what few chances Lincoln had in politics in the short term, but also seems the start of the more morally involved career we see later.

In all, this does add up to a fairly good book. The parts do generally weave together well, and there’s a lot here, even if a lot of it doesn’t get very well developed. If you’re interested in the war itself, look elsewhere, but this shows a lot of the tensions the war generated in the United States.