The story of General Nathaniel Lyon, whom the author aptly calls a "Missouri Yankee," is a drama of stirring political-military events breaking on the Western Border in the spring of 1861. In exactly 90 days, Missouri was forever lost to the Confederacy. The Lyon story is high tragedy staged at the sanguine second battle of the American Civil War--Wilson's Creek. Colonel Hans Christian Adamson in Rebellion in Missouri combines all the necessary elements in the dramatic story. He expertly re-examines Lyon's generalship of the Union Army of the West. He ably reflects upon the significance of the Battle of Wilson's Creek now, a century later, in the light of all the evidence. Moreover, he brings to us, during the centennial year of Lyon's death, a monumental biography of Lyon. The others are eulogistic and written in the stilted and artificial speech of the eighteen sixties.