Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne

A thoughtful meditation on the connectedness of history and the possibilities of recovering and understanding the past, this book reveals as much about Corder’s literary and historiographical preoccupations as it does about the life of his subject: a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant casualty of the American war with Mexico in 1846.

On May 9, 1846, Second Lieutenant Theodore Lincoln Chadbourne, United States Army, fell in the battle of Resaca de la Palma during the war with Mexico. Dead at twenty-three in a remote desert, his promise outweighing his accomplishments, Chadbourne slid into obscurity. But his lapse was not immediate, nor was it complete; clues to Chadbourne lay scattered about the historical landscape. Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne is Jim W. Corder’s account of his obsessive search for information about this soldier, whose name he first read on a historical marker beside a highway in Texas. A thoughtful meditation on the connectedness of history and the possibilities of recovering and understanding the past, the book reveals as much about Corder’s literary and historiographical preoccupations as it does about the life of his subject. Rather than order his material into a linear, chronological narrative, Corder presents it in much the same sequence and form as it came to him. The effect is to dramatize the historical process and allow the very details that Corder collects to reveal Chadbourne to the reader. Who was Chadbourne, and can we ever really know? If Corder has any answers, they lie in his subtext of uncertainty.