Kitty’s Conquest by Captain Charles King

No writer is better than Charles King—at the point when this novel was published a captain, but eventually a general—at bringing the reader more vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the wars with the plains Indians of the American West. Because of his personal experience of those wars, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.

In every novel he seems to add another aspect of those times that derives from his personal experience. In this one, instead of King’s usual fare of describing the Indian wars of the Wild West, we are taken into the Deep South in the awkward years after the Civil War, when animosities were often still blatant, feelings still bitter, wounds still fresh, and the emotional re-constitution of the republic was proceeding fitfully and slowly. Mr. King takes us into that period of time, into the midst of occupying forces from the North, and gives us a Romeo-and-Juliet type romance between an officer in blue and a stalwart partisan belle of the South just before the nation’s next conflict—with the plains Indians of the West—interrupts their lives with new dangers and separations.