Excerpt from Three Years and a Half, in the Army: Or History of the Second Colorados In the summer of eighteen hundred and sixty, to any one taking a bird's-eye view of the differ ent mining districts of Colorado, it bore much the appearance of a bee-hive. The mountains were perforated with holes in which were at work a countless number of men. And as they moved in and out they resembled the busy insect. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Having been born and raised on the Missouri River at Atchison, Kansas, and having the ghosts of the Civil War about me constantly, I have been passionately interested in the Civil War as long as I can remember. The Victorian and antebellum homes with servant quarters still behind them, the wooded bluffs and caves where escaped slaves were hidden, and the mystique of the Missouri River area itself have maintained this feeling of the war for me. My mothers immediate family was from the Missouri River bottoms on the Missouri side and my fathers immediate family was from rural Atchison on the Kansas side. From my incomplete and somewhat misinformed family and formal history education, I assumed for most of my life that my mothers family was Confederate in its leanings and that my fathers family was Union. I was unaware that the town and countys namesake, Sen. David Rice Atchison, was from Missouri and had much Pro-Slavery activity. No effort has ever been made to change the towns name since the war. No Confederate tie to him was taught in any of my classes in school.