Gary E Joiner

What makes Shreveport's Oakland Cemetery so spooky might be the mass burial of 715 victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic. Another bone-chilling locale is the city's historic Municipal Auditorium, which according to local legends may have briefly served as a morgue under the watch of Dr. Willis P...

The Union inland navy that became the Mississippi Squadron is one of the greatest, yet least studied aspects of the Civil War. Without it, however, the war in the West may not have been won, and the war in the East might have lasted much longer and perhaps ended differently. The men who formed and c...

Navigating Louisiana's Red River in 1830 was an extremely treacherous task. Only after Captain Henry Miller Shreve removed "The Great Raft," the giant logjam clogging over one hundred miles of river, could the frontier outpost of Shreveport begin to thrive. Over the course of many decades, the city ...

The bloody and decisive two-day battle of Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862) changed the entire course of the American Civil War. The stunning Northern victory thrust Union commander Ulysses S. Grant into the national spotlight, claimed the life of Confederate commander Albert S. Johnston, and forever buried ...

In the rough-and-tumble days of the nineteenth century, Shreveport was on the very edge of the country's western frontier. It was a city struggling to tame lawlessness, and its streets were rocked by duels, lynchings and shootouts. A new century and Prohibition only brought a fresh wave of crime and...

Ulysses S. Grant’s ingenious campaign to capture the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River was one of the most decisive events of the Civil War and one of the most storied military expeditions in American history. The ultimate victory at Vicksburg effectively cut the Confederacy in tw...

The Red River Campaign of 1864 was a bold attempt to send large Union army and navy forces deep into the interior of Louisiana, seize the Rebel capital of the state, and defeat the Confederate army guarding the region enabling uninhibited access to Texas to the west. Through the Howling Wilderness e...

In the spring of 1864, as the armies of Grant and Lee waged a highly scrutinized and celebrated battle for the state of Virginia, a no- less important, but historically obscured engagement was being conducted in the pine barrens of northern Louisiana. In a year of stellar triumphs by Union armies ac...