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By Maureen Belt

Megan Kate Nelson holds a copy of her award-winning book at Lincoln’s iconic Ponyhenge.

It was a little after 1 p.m. on Friday, June 11, and Megan Kate Nelson was sitting in her Lincoln kitchen direct-messaging a friend as Columbia University broadcast a livestream of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize ceremony.

Nelson and her correspondent each had an entry for the esteemed award that recognizes excellence in American journalism, literature and music, and were sharing witty color commentary for each announcement as if they were watching the Oscars. “We didn’t have any expectations of any awards or prizes, ” she said. 

Nelson’s husband Dan was upstairs working from home and their Siamese/ragdoll cats, G-Ball and Ding-Dong, were chilling in the living room. The livestream announced the candidates for the prize in history, the category for which Nelson’s publisher submitted her 2020 work, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.

“I knew Scribner submitted the book,” Nelson said. “That was all I knew.”

The prize went to Marcia Chaitlain for her book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Then followed the announcement of two other finalists, or writers whose work the prestigious jury deemed Pulitzer-worthy. Megan Kate Nelson was one of them.

“I screamed,” Nelson recalled. “I screamed so loud that my cats just took off. They ran upstairs and ran under the guest bed. I just kept screaming and screaming and my husband came down. He didn’t think I was being murdered, but he was like, ‘What? What happened?’ It was all very dramatic.

“I was still DM-ing with my friend and I was like, maybe I had a fever dream.” 

This was no dream. Like the content of her book, it was reality verified by a quick online search. Nelson was indeed named a Pulitzer finalist, and the organization’s website dedicates a full page to accolades about her research, writing, and scholarship. 

“A lively and well-crafted Civil War narrative that expands understanding of the conflict’s Western theaters, where pivotal struggles for land, resources and influence presaged the direction of the country as a whole,” the Pulitzer committee wrote about her book.

A week after the big reveal, Nelson is still wrapping her head around it. The good news hadn’t completely sunk in, even after receiving of a congratulatory letter on official Columbia University stationery. 

“I’m not going to believe it until I see it,” she said via a Zoom interview with the Lincoln Squirrel. 

Following her passion

Nelson has taught at local universities including Harvard and MIT, and Dan is a lawyer in Boston. But in 2014, she said she “took a leap of faith” (or some might call it, “followed her passion”) and left a tenure-track university position to write full time. 

“I just decided I wanted to write,” Nelson said. “Writing is what I love to do most — writing and researching.”

She hitched a bike to the back of her BMW 3 series and drove from Lincoln, where she and Dan have lived since 2009, to Littleton, Colorado, where the two attended high school together. (They met as high school seniors who were both accepted into Harvard’s Class of 1994, and began dating when he was in law school and she in graduate school.) 

Based at her parents’ house, Nelson worked every day poring over archives, diaries, letters, and rare book collections at public, university, and manuscript libraries. She compiled research into her blog, Historista, and then journeyed south to learn more about Civil War soldiers, Native Americans, and other historical figures.

Nelson rode her bike along the Rio Grande and other routes that would have taken a toll on the BMW. “You see so much more on a bike,” she said, adding cycling also helped offset the flavorful and filling local cuisine.

She even connected with the manager of Ted Turner’s ranch. The Valverde battlefield and the ruins of the Union Army’s Fort Craig are deep in the rugged terrain of the cable mogul’s Armendaris Ranch, which spans 923 square miles in southern New Mexico. The ranch manager had little faith the sedan could handle the terrain and suggested she try again another time.

Nelson chose to tell the little-known history of the Western theater of the Civil War though the eyes of nine players, some major and others with lesser-known supporting roles. One is John R. Baylor, a Texas legislature and officer in the Confederate Army. Another is Louisa Canby, the wife of Union Army Col. Richard Canby and a nurse who tended both Confederate and Union soldiers. A third is Apache chief Mangas Coloradas, whose request for peace was met with brutal betrayal.  

Much of the history of New Mexico Territory (what is now New Mexico and Arizona) and its importance in the Civil War did not make it into standard-issue textbooks or the growing plethora of thick hardcovers devoted to the minutia of Bull Run and Gettysburg. What little is known was shared locally, and even then, mostly to kids on school field trips.

“If you are a Civil War history nerd, you’re not going to go to New Mexico,” Nelson said.  “The Western theater of the war was functionally erased.”

Nelson, who grew up in the area and received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Iowa, was astonished to learn that soldiers from Colorado were called up by the Union Army to New Mexico Territory to fight Native Americans as well as Confederates . 

“Whenever you find out something you don’t know, It’s like, ‘How did I not know about this?’” Nelson said. She attributes the omissions in U.S. history accounts to military historians who focused primarily on the Eastern theater of war “because that’s where the action was.”

In 1861, both the Confederate and Union armies had their eyes on New Mexico Territory. Northerners wanted to keep the region free of slavery and knew that securing it would be a win President Lincoln. The Southerners planned to expand slavery and grow profits by exporting cotton from Western ports. 

“That was what was at stake — control over the entire region,” Nelson said.  

Both sides recognized the benefits of a major thoroughfare to California’s gold mines and were equally eager to eliminate or remove Native Americans, Nelson added. Southerners planned to enslave them while northerners planned to imprison them on reservations. 

“People don’t want to hear that part of the story,” Nelson said. “It’s why people don’t like to talk about it. It’s a hard truth.”

History has always been a side interest of Nelson’s, but her true devotion is to “unloved and strange places.” It was her research on one such place — the largest blackwater swamp in North America — that put Nelson on an indirect path to Civil War’s Western theater.

Nelson spent the early aughts researching the impact of human interaction on culture, habitat, the environment, and industry at the Okefenokee Swamp. She was captivated by the ruins, some dating back to the 1700s, that she found surrounding the swamp along the Florida-Georgia line. 

“And what creates the most ruins in the American landscape? The Civil War.” She followed this new passion for ruins to the lesser-known battle fields in the American West, and the rest is Pulitzer history. 

Nelson isn’t sure if Pulitzer finalists receive the gold medal designed by Concord native Daniel Chester French, or if she and Dan get to attend the awards gala at Columbia University this fall. “I would absolutely go if I was invited,” she assured.

Meanwhile, her new literary distinction is making headlines among noted historians. Just this week, Doris Kearns Goodwin personally persuaded Nelson to participate in a documentary. Scribner is updating the covers of not just The Three-Cornered War, but the upcoming book it inspired: This Strange Country: Yellowstone and the Reconstruction of America. New jacket covers for her earlier books, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012), and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (2005), will also tout the honor.

Nelson is just one of several award-winning historians and novelists in Lincoln — see the exhibit on the second floor of the Town Hall to learn more. Her books are available at the Lincoln Public Library, though there is currently a long waitlist for The Three-Cornered War. They can also be purchased at the Concord Book Shop and Amazon.com.