William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times by Albert Castel. 256 pp., hc, dj. Reprint of 1962 edition

William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times

By Albert Castel

This is the biography of a man who became and American legendñwho was both hero and renegade in his own timeñand who remains largely a legend still.

The Quantrill legend was born inevitably out of his own acts of savage violence which terrorized the Kansas-Missouri countryside. It was glamorized and romanticized by those sympathetic to his aims. And it took on the hazy outlines of a myth through the self-glorifying recollections of members of his band.

Yet the unvarnished truth about Quantrill and his men is gaudy enough, and this book tells the actual facts insofar as they can now be determined from first-hand, original sourced.

In vivid, on-the-spot detail it recreates Quantrillís rise to powerñfrom Ohio school teacher to Kansas Border Ruffian; from Confederate Army captain to lawless leader of ìthe most formidable band of revolver fighters the West ever knew.î

It described the frightful events of those five blood-stained yearsñ from the first outbreak of local civil war between Free Staters and Pro-Slavers on the Kansas-Missouri border, through the savage climaxes of the Lawrence Massacre and the vicious Centralia railroad slaughter, to the final tracking down of the Raiders at the end of the Civil War.

Quantrillís story is also the story of his Raidersñthe bushwhackersñwho began as tough, young farm boys defending their homes and revenging wrongs done their families meanwhile learning the reckless techniques of guerrilla warfare under a master, and ended as the most notorious gang of psychopathic killers and plundermad marauders who ever roamed the prairies.

Among them are to be found: ìBloody Billî Anderson, who became a maniacal killer when his womenfolk were accidentally executed while in Federal custody; Cole Younger, for whom the war became a personal affair when his sister was imprisoned and his mother driven from their burnt-out home by Union soldiers; George Todd, idol of the bushwhackers because he was the deadliest shot of them all, and who dared to challenge Quantrill in the end; ìLittle ArchieîClement, the blond 18-year-old whose special hobby was collecting Yankee scalps; and Frank and Jesse James, who got their first taste of mass bloodlettingñand their first training in bank robberyñunder William Clarke Quantrill.