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    Steampunk Soldiers: The American Frontier
    Steampunk Soldiers: The American Frontier
    Steampunk Soldiers: The American Frontier
    Ebook105 pages38 minutes

    Steampunk Soldiers: The American Frontier

    By Philip Smith, Joseph A. McCullough and Mark Stacey

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    About this ebook

    Even as the discovery and exploitation of hephaestium helped bring the Civil War to its close in 1869, the arms race it engendered resulted in a cold war just as bitter and violent as the open hostilities had been. With neither side willing to rely solely upon the talents of their scientific establishments, saboteurs, double-agents, and assassins found ample employment. Against this backdrop of suspicion and fear, thousands of Americans – Northerners and Southerners alike – headed west. Some to escape the legacies of the war, some to find their own land, some for the lure of that great undiscovered strike of hephaestium that would make them rich, and some simply to escape the law. Ahead of these pioneers stood the native tribes, behind them followed the forces of two governments, while to the north and south, foreign powers watched closely for their own opportunities. This newly unearthed collection of the works of Miles Vandercroft fills a considerable gap in our knowledge of the travels of that remarkable individual, and also provides a fascinating guide to the costume and equipment of the forces active in the great drive westwards.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMay 19, 2016
    ISBN9781472815125
    Steampunk Soldiers: The American Frontier
    Author

    Philip Smith

    Philip Smith is the former managing editor of GQ and an artist whose works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among many others. He lives in Miami. 

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    Book preview

    Steampunk Soldiers - Philip Smith

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    THE UNION

    THE CONFEDERACY

    THE DISPUTED TERRITORIES

    CANADA AND ALASKA

    MEXICO

    THE MANIFEST DESTINED

    INTRODUCTION

    In 2014, Osprey Publishing stunned the military history community with the release of Steampunk Soldiers: Uniforms & Weapons from the Age of Steam. This wide-reaching collection of military artwork by Miles Vandercroft challenged many of the commonly held assumptions about warfare in the Victorian era, and, in many cases, provided the only contemporary visual evidence for specific weapons created during that time. The book went on to win the coveted Windrow Award for Military History, the Fraser Prize, and a special ‘Service to Military History’ citation from the European Society of Nineteenth-Century Warfare.

    Unsurprisingly, in the months after release, Osprey received numerous letters, emails, and phone calls from people claiming to have found similar collections. This included no fewer than 37 people purporting to own other lost works by Miles Vandercroft. While most of these claims were quickly dismissed as the works of tricksters, attention-seekers, and even a couple of low-grade forgers, it still left several cases that demanded further attention. We made several trips to remote parts of Britain, and even one to the Continent to examine artwork collections. Although we saw some beautiful collections, most were obviously not created by Miles Vandercroft. Only in one case were we ever in doubt. This was a small collection of military figure drawings uncovered in Cornwall. The artwork style was similar, but there was no text accompanying the pieces. Artwork experts were brought in and, after several weeks, we concluded that, unfortunately, the works were not created by Vandercroft. So, after months of furious activity, nothing more had been discovered, and there the matter rested.

    A few months later, the Osprey office received a phone call from Reginald Foster Highgate, the great-great nephew of the famous newspaper publisher. Instead of making the wild pronouncements we were by then used to hearing, Mr Highgate suggested that he might be in possession of another collection of works by Miles Vandercroft. Soon after, Mr Highgate emailed a few photos of the works in question, and two things were immediately noticeable. First, the paintings looked very similar in style to Vandercroft’s known works, and second, and more crucially, they were accompanied by written notes in a very familiar handwriting. This discovery was especially exciting as, unlike the paintings, Vandercroft’s handwriting did not appear in the book, and had never been made public.

    Eagerly, we made plans to visit Mr Highgate in California, in the hopes that the collection was indeed a legitimate find. Landing in Los Angeles, we rented a car and drove to Pasadena to meet Mr Highgate face-to-face and examine the paintings. Although it would be several months before the artistic experts confirmed it, we knew right away that the collection was authentic.

    Mr Highgate knew very little of the origins of the collection. He had found it in his parents’ attic after their deaths. As far as he remembered, he had never seen it before and his parents had never spoken about it. How it came into their possession will likely never be known. Because of this, Mr Highgate had no particular attachment to the collection and allowed us to take it away with an eye towards publication.

    The collection you hold in your hands is essentially the same as the one that we first saw in Mr Highgate’s living room. We have cleaned up a bit of Miles Vandercroft’s wandering punctuation, and made a few assumptions where there were missing or indecipherable words but, wherever possible, we have left the text as Vandercroft wrote it. The artwork has

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