Leander Stillwell

Leander Stillwell (1843-1934) was born on a farm in Jersey County, Illinois, and enlisted in the Union army at eighteen, serving three years and eight months in the Western theater with the 61st Illinois and finishing as a second lieutenant. He took a law degree at Albany Law School in 1867 and the following spring settled at Erie, Kansas, where he was one of the town's first two attorneys. He went on to sit as judge of the Seventh District Court of Kansas from 1883 to 1907, served in the Kansas legislature, and later worked as a deputy commissioner of the federal Bureau of Pensions. He wrote his war recollections in his seventies, printing them at Erie in 1917 and issuing a revised second edition in 1920, and that book is the work he is remembered for.