If there was any man qualified to write a history of the bloody state of Kansas in the 1860s, it was Sam Crawford. He lived an extraordinary life as a Kansas legislator, a general in the American Civil War, and 3rd governor of the State of Kansas.

Anyone who includes a subheading of “Farming with Dynamite” in their book has our vote.

Crawford was a fervently “free-state” Kansas man, opposing slavery entirely and its introduction into Kansas. Bleeding Kansas was a flash-point that moved the country toward civil war.