In the late summer of 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price led a last ditch attempt to liberate Missouri from Union occupation and brutal guerrilla warfare. Price’s invading army was like few others seen during the Civil War. It was an army of cavalry that lacked men, horses, weapons, and discipline. Its success depended entirely upon a native uprising of pro-Confederate Missourians. When that uprising never occurred, Price’s rag-tag army marched through the state seeking revenge, supplies and conscripts. It was a march that took too long and ultimately allowed Union forces to converge on Price and badly defeat him in a series of battles that ran from Kansas City to the Arkansas border. Three months and 1,400 miles after it had started, the longest sustained cavalry operation of the war had ended in disaster. The Last Hurrah is the story of Price’s invasion from its politically charged planning to its starving retreat. The Last Hurrah is also the story of what happened after the shooting stopped. Even as hundreds of Missourians followed Price out of the state and tried desperately to join his army, elements of the Union army visited retribution upon Confederate sympathizers while still others showed little regard for the lives of the prisoners they had captured. Many more would have to suffer and die long after Sterling Price had fled Missouri.

This 230 page atlas is divided into seven parts. Part I, Missouri's Divided Loyalties, and Part II, Missouri's Five Seasons, provide an overview of Missouri's history from the initial settlement of the Louisiana Purchase Territories through the opening years of the American Civil War. The remaining parts cover the Confederate plan, the Confederate movement into Missouri and the Union reaction, the Confederate retreat and Union pursuit into Kansas, and the final Confederate escape back into Arkansas. The atlas has a standard format with the map to left and the narrative to the right. Each narrative closes with two or more primary source vignettes. These vignettes provide an overview of the events shown on the map and discussed in the narrative from the perspective of persons who participated in the events. In most cases there are two vignettes with the first from a person loyal to the Union and the second from a person who supported the southern cause. A few narratives have two or more vignettes from only the Union side. This was done to emphasize disagreements and struggles among senior leaders to establish a common course of action. Map 25, Decision at the Little Blue River, is a good example and the three vignettes emphasize the disagreement between Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis and his subordinate, Maj. Gen. James Blunt on where to locate the Union defensive line.

In May 1804 Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery embarked on a seven-thousand-mile journey with instructions from President Thomas Jefferson to ascend the Missouri River to its source and continue on to the Pacific. They had spent five months in the St. Louis area preparing for the expedition that began with a six-hundred-mile, ten-week crossing of the future state of Missouri. Prior to this, the explorers had already seen about two hundred miles of Missouri landscape as they traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis in the autumn of 1803.

Indeed, the story of General Price -- as this account by Albert Castle shows -- is the story, in large part, of the Confederacy's struggle in the West. The author draws a fascinating portrait of Price the man -- vain, courageous, addicted to secrecy -- and produces insightful interpretations and much pertinent information about the Civil War in the West.

Accounts of military life of troops with General George Custer during his successful search for gold on Sioux lands in the Black Hills in Dakota territory.

The Atlas of Lewis and Clark in Missouri is a splendid re- creation of the natural landscape in the days when a vast western frontier was about to be explored. The Corps of Discovery's expedition began in territorial Missouri, and this book of computer-generated maps opens an extraordinary window onto the rivers, land, and settlement patterns of the period. This book is an intensive examination of the Missouri portion of the expedition through a series of twenty-seven maps developed by combining early-nineteenth-century U.S. General Land Office (GLO) survey documents with narratives of the trip derived from expedition journals. The maps are impeccable. The twenty-seven map plates--including twenty-three of the traveled route and four of the river corridor's historic vegetative land cover--depict the expedition's course and offer the first accurate rendering of travel distances and campsites. Some maps locate the campsites in relation to present-day landmarks. Journal descriptions accompany the map plates, which also include old geographic names; historical hydrography; contemporary towns, settlements, and forts; Indian campsites and villages; and territorial land grants from the French and Spanish governments. Geographers and historians will be fascinated by the maps' level of detail, especially the charting of the present course of the rivers alongside that of the early 1800s to show the landscape changes caused by the powerful waters of the Mississippi and Missouri. The result is a reconstruction of geo-referenced maps that give, for the first time, a detailed representation of the Corps of Discovery's course through Missouri, with geographic data as authentic and accurate as yesterday's available information and today's technology can produce. The maps allow readers to better understand changes in the land over time and why the landscape encountered by the expedition differs so radically from ours today.