As the United States steadily expanded west acquiring new territory by buying it and war, the overarching question regarding slavery in these territories sowed the seeds of the civil war. When the south seceded and war broke out, fighting was not limited to the Eastern and Western theatres, but even in the territories of present day Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Native American tribes that had been steadily pushed westward tried to navigate the messy politics of North and South in order to preserve their lands. To help explain this complicated theatre of the war, we interview Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, she received her BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She has taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014. She has written several articles and books including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West and is currently writing This Strange Country: Yellowstone and the Reconstruction of America which will be published in 2022.