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.

During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains—and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the “fire brigade” of the Trans-Mississippi Theater—a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains’ history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains.

The world was without hope for many of Colorado's young men in 1933. Youth unemployment was 25 percent and another 29 percent were working only part-time. Many quit school before graduation to work odd jobs to support their families. Others took to hitching rides on railroad cars desperate for a new opportunity. Even young men who finished their schooling were without work as they had no job experience or training. Then, in 1933, with the beginning of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) young men could go to work in Colorado's national parks, state parks, national forests and other public lands. They no longer worried where their next meal would come from. Now they could learn new job skills. In Colorado CCC boys planted trees, erected fences and telephone lines and put out forest fires. Today we still use the roads and trails they built. CCC work was made to last. At the program's end in 1942 over 30,000 Colorado men served at over one hundred twenty camps. And work was completed in nearly every county in the state. Robert W. "Bob" Audretsch retired as a National Park Service ranger at Grand Canyon in 2009 after nearly 20 years of service. Since then, he has devoted himself full time to research and writing about the Civilian Conservations Corps (CCC). Bob grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and attended Wayne State University where he received a BA in history and a MS in library science. Prior to his work as a ranger, he was a librarian in Michigan, Ohio, and Colorado. Bob has a lifelong interest in history, nature, books, and art and has written numerous publications in the fields of library science, sports, and history. Bob is the author of Grand Canyon's Phantom Ranch (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), Shaping the Park and Saving the Boys: The Civilian Conservation Corps at Grand Canyon, 1933-1942 (Dog Ear Publishing, 2011), We Still Walk in Their Footprint: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Northern Arizona, 1933-1942 (Dog Ear Publishing, 2013), Selected Grand Canyon Area Hiking Routes, Including the Little Colorado River and Great Thumb (Dog Ear Publishing, June, 2014) and, with Sharon Hunt, The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona (Images of America) (Arcadia Publishing). He resides in Lakewood, Colorado.

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