Whittled Away: A Novel of the Alamo Rifles in the Civil War

The novel Whittled Away is the tale of Corporal Bain Gill and Private Jesús McDonald. In 1862, Bain and Jesús enlist in the Confederate army in San Antonio, Texas, joining fifty-six other Texans as soldiers in the Alamo Rifles-Company K of the Sixth Texas Infantry regiment. The two young friends, not yet twenty when they put on their first uniforms, grew up on ranches on the western edge of civilization, herding stubborn longhorns and always wary of Comanche raiders and rattlesnakes. Naïve,...