Samuel Chamberlain's "My Confession" is a classic, ribald tale of nineteenth-century life. Perhaps the best written account of a soldier's adventures and misadventures in the Mexican War and its aftermath, this unexpurgated edition is now available for the first time, complete with over 150 of Chamberlain's wonderful textual illustrations reproduced in full color. If you enjoyed the Chamberlain paintings assembled in Sam Chamberlain's "Mexican War: The San Jacinto Museum of History Paintings," you will be fascinated by the tale in "My Confession" that goes with it and beyond it into Chamberlain's adventures with the scalp-hunting Glanton Gang (the story that Cormac McCarthy used as the basis for his celebrated novel "Blood Meridian").

"My Confession" is the story of Samuel Chamberlain, a Boston boy who hoped to be a theological student but could not control his amorous and pugilistic inclinations and so left for the West. According to his "Confession," he seduced countless women in the U.S. and Mexico, never missed a fandango, fought gallantly against Mexican guerrillas, and rode with the First Dragoons into the Battle of Buena Vista. His remarkable story is pure melodrama, but Goetzmann has proven by his painstaking research that much of it is true.

The editor's annotations are a valuable contribution to an account that virtually every historian of the Mexican War has used.