Three Comanche emissaries, after several years of war and a major smallpox epidemic, enter San Antonio and ask for peace on January 10, 1840, offering to send a large contingent of their leaders in twenty-three days to secure a new peace.

They return a white boy as a show of sincerity.

Colonel Karnes receives them, listens to their story, and agrees, but admonishes them by saying that a lasting peace can be negotiated only when the Comanches give up the Anglo captives that they hold, estimated at thirteen.

Albert Sidney Johnston, the Texas Secretary of War, has ordered San Antonio officials to take the Comanche delegates as hostages if they fail to deliver all captives

In March, Mukwooru, a powerful eastern Comanche chief, leads sixty-five Comanches, including women and children, to San Antonio for peace talks.

At this time, the Comanche people are not a unified nation.

There are at least twelve divisions of the Comanche, with as many as thirty-five independent roaming bands, also known as rancherías or villages.

Although bound together in various ways, both cultural and political, the bands are not responsible to any formalized unified authority.

The absence of a central authority means that one band cannot force another band to return their captives.

Chiefs Buffalo Hump and Peta Nocona have never agreed to return any captives to the Texian settlers.

Captives are often assimilated into the society and adopt into families, and the Comanche make little distinction between people born Comanche and those adopted.

The Comanche practice of taking captives dates back to at least the early eighteenth century with raids into Spanish New Mexico.

Women and children are preferred, and in a significant number of cases, young captives had been raised as Comanches and doid not wish to leave.

On January 10, 1840, a

Because the delegation had not brought the expected number of captives, the members are taken to the local jail.

The talks are held at the Council House, a one-story stone building adjoining the jail on the corner of Main Plaza and Calabosa (Market) Street.

During the council, the Comanche warriors sit on the floor, as is their custom, while the Texians sit on chairs on a platform facing them.

The Texians demand to know where the other captives are.

The Penateka spokesman, Chief Mukwooru, responds that the other prisoners are held by various other bands of Comanche.

He assures the Texians that he feels the other captives will be able to be ransomed, but that it will be in exchange for a great deal of supplies, including ammunition and blankets.

He then finishes his speech with the comment "How do you like that answer?"

The Texian militia enters the courtroom and positions themselves at intervals along the walls.

When the Comanches will not, or cannot, promise to return all captives immediately, the Texas officials say that the chiefs will be held hostage until the white captives are released.

The interpreter warns the Texian officials that if he delivers this message the Comanches will attempt to escape by fighting.

He is instructed to relay the message anyway and leaves the room as soon as he finishes translating.

After learning that they are being held hostage, the Comanches attempt to fight their way out of the Council House using arrows and knives.

The Texian soldiers open fire at point-blank range, killing both Indians and whites.

The Comanche women and children waiting outdoors begin loosing arrows after hearing the commotion inside.

At least one Texian spectator is killed.

When a small number of warriors manages to escape from the Council House, all of the Comanche begin to flee.

The soldiers who pursue them again open fire, killing and wounding both Comanche and Texians.

Armed civilians also join the battle but, claiming they could not always differentiate between warriors and women and children, since all of the Comanche were fighting, shoot at them indiscriminately.

The Comanches arrive in San Antonio on March 19.

Expecting a council of peace, the twelve chiefs have brought women and children as well as warriors.

They are dressed in finery with their faces painted.

The delegation hopes to negotiate a recognition of the Comancheria as the sovereign land of the Comanche.

One chief who does not attend is Buffalo Hump, the Comanche war chief who will lead the Great Raid of 1840 in retaliation for the killings to come.

The Comanche chiefs have brought to the meeting only one white captive, Matilda Lockhart, a sixteen-year-old girl who had been held prisoner for over a year and a half, as well as several Mexican children who had been captured separately.

Mukwooru refuses to deliver more captives on the grounds that they are held in the rancherías of other chiefs over whom he has no authority.

The region called Deseret by its Mormon settlers had passed to U.S. sovereignty and become a territory in 1850 after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) .

President James Buchanan, believing the Mormons to be in a state of open rebellion, orders some twenty-five hundred soldiers to Utah in 1857 to replace Brigham Young, who had served as governor during the early years of Mormon occupation.

General Albert Sidney Johnston's troops march through Salt Lake City to establish Camp Floyd west of Utah Lake.

Although no armed clashes occur, this episode is referred to as the Utah War (1857-1858).

The Utah Expedition leaves Fort Leavenworth on July 18, 1857, effectively beginning the Utah War.

The Utah Expedition had begun to gather as early as May under orders from General Winfield Scott.

The troops were originally to be led by Gen. William S. Harney.

However, affairs in "Bleeding Kansas" had forced Harney to remain behind to deal with skirmishes between pro-slavery and free-soiler militants.

The Expedition's cavalry, the 2nd Dragoons, is kept in Kansas for the same reason.

Because of Harney's unavailability, Colonel Edmund Alexander is charged with the first detachment of troops headed for Utah.

However, overall command is assigned to Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who will not leave Kansas until much later.

As it is, July is already far into the campaigning season, and the army and their supply train are unprepared for winter in the Rocky Mountains.

The army is not given instructions on how to react in case of resistance.

U.S. Army Captain Stewart Van Vliet, an assistant quartermaster, and a small escort are ordered to proceed directly from Kansas to Salt Lake City, ahead of the main body of troops.

Van Vliet carries a letter to Young from General Harney ordering Brigham Young to make arrangements for the citizens of Utah to accommodate and supply the troops once they arrive.

However, Harney's letter doers not mention that Young has been replaced as governor, nor does it detail what the mission of the troops will be once they arrive, and these omissions will spark even greater distrust among the Saints.

On the Confederate side, General Albert Sidney Johnston commands all forces from Arkansas to the Cumberland Gap.

He is faced with the problem of defending a broad front with numerically inferior forces, but he has an excellent system of lateral communications, permitting him to move troops rapidly where they are needed, and he has two able subordinates, Polk and Major General William J. Hardee.

Johnston also gains political support from secessionists in central and western counties of Kentucky via a new Confederate capital at Bowling Green, set up by the Russellville Convention.

The Confederates make a surprise attack in the Battle of Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing) in Tennessee in April 1862 that pushes Union forces against the river as night falls.

Overnight, the Navy lands additional reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacks.

Grant and the Union win a decisive victory—the first battle with the high casualty rates that will repeat over and over.

The Confederates lose Albert Sidney Johnston, considered their finest general before the emergence of Lee.

The Union military command in the West, however, suffers from a lack of unified command, organized by November into three separate departments: the Department of Kansas, under Major General David Hunter, the Department of the Missouri, under Major General Henry Halleck, and the Department of the Ohio, under Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell (who had replaced Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman).

By January 1862, this disunity of command is apparent because no strategy for operations in the Western theater can be agreed upon.

Buell, under political pressure to invade and hold pro-Union East Tennessee, moves slowly in the direction of Nashville, but achieves nothing more substantial toward his goal than minor victories at Middle Creek (January 10, 1862) under Colonel James A. Garfield and Mill Springs (January 19) under Brig. Gen. George Henry Thomas. (Mill Springs is a significant victory in a strategic sense because it breaks the end of the Confederate Western defensive line and opens the Cumberland Gap to East Tennessee, but it gets Buell no closer to Nashville.)

Kentucky's alternative government is recognized by the Confederate government, which had admitted Kentucky into the Confederacy in December 1861.

Using the rail system resources of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, General Leonidas Polk has been able to quickly fortify and equip the Confederate base at Columbus.