Dr. Albert Castel, one of
my favorite historians, passed away on November 14, 2014 at age eighty-six. A
prolific writer, he penned several books and articles relating to the
trans-Mississippi. This is certainly fitting since he was from Wichita, Kansas.
His trans-Mississippi titles include his first book, A Frontier State at War: Kansas, 1861-1865 (1958), William Clark Quantrill: His Life and Times (1962),
General Sterling Price and the Civil War
in the West (1968), and, co-authored with Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life
of a Civil War Guerrilla (2006).
His first book, a revision
of his dissertation, was retitled Civil
War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind when it was reprinted in 1997. His
preface to this edition is autobiographical, and those of you who have done
historical research will appreciate the following excerpt:
“I did most of the
research…at the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka during the autumn of
1954. Every morning, Monday through Saturday, I left my room at the YMCA, ate
breakfast at a nearby restaurant, and then walked the short distance to the
Historical Society where I waited for the front door to open at 8 A. M. Once
inside, I worked without pause…until the society closed at 5 P. M…. Usually I
spent evenings sorting notes before going to bed where I would fall asleep
while listening to a portable radio….Because photocopying machines had not yet
come into being, I had to write hundreds of notes and transcribe long passages
from sources with pen or pencil….Sometimes, after a day of reading the small
print of old newspapers on microfilm, I literally was half-blind while groping
my way back to the YMCA” (pages ix-x).
