"I will tell you a story about Texas. Up until about the early 1960s the archives were open to the public. People just came in and poked around and took what they wanted as souvineers. Bring your scissors and clip of a famous signature and discard the rest. No one cared about that stuff way back then. Just so much dusty junk paper."

Have you ever seen a grown man cry? The thought of all that history being trashed just tears my heart out. My wife is under standing orders to donate all my Civil War documents and files to the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies when I do the high kick-off. That way I know they'll be preserved and made available to serious researchers. In the meantime, I'm transcribing and posting it little by little, putting transcriptions, at least, in the hands of those who are interested. I figure with a combination of clean living, fancy footwork and a little luck, I may have a good 10 or 15 years left to transcribe and post the bulk of it.

You're right about the high cost of Confederate documents. I actually possess only few original documents -- mostly from the 3rd Arkansas Regiment -- which is about all I could afford. Fortunately, I have tons of photocopies of documents which other researchers have shared with me over the years. With just a few exceptions, the owners of the originals have allowed me to share them with others with virtually no restrictions. I have a photocopy of a wartime diary and photocopies of a collection of letters which were sent to me to decipher. There's gold in them thar documents, and I have tried without success to get the owners to let me share them with other researchers. I even offered to ghost-edit books, giving them all the credit, in order to get the documents out there. All to no avail. For some reason, the owners are protecting them like they would their virgin sister and simply won't budge.