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To: Virginia Ridgerunner
Were you to make a list of "haunted ground" locations, the Bloody Angle at Spottsylvania and Custer Hill at the Little Big Horn should be included as well.

I was at Antietam at High Noon in the spring, and the Cornfield was just sprouting well, so I probably missed something.

Out in Montana, however, it was just stretching into dusk, and the sage was actually turning purple. To see the ragged track of headstones trailing off down toward the river...

Then, to see photos of those Code Pinkos, I'm troubled by VERY un-Christian, unpeaceful urges.

51 posted on 09/17/2008 8:05:38 AM PDT by jonascord (Hurray! for the Bonny Blue Flag that bears the Single Star!)
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To: jonascord
The Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania is one of my favorite places to visit, since a Confederate Regiment that I have done a lot of research on, the 37th Virginia Volunteer Infantry of Steuart's Brigade, was surrounded and captured on the far right side of the Mule Shoe.

I've never been to Custer Hill though.

52 posted on 09/17/2008 8:16:28 AM PDT by Virginia Ridgerunner (Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left!)
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To: jonascord; Virginia Ridgerunner; MissMagnolia; super7man; lovesdogs
I toured some of the Civil War battlefields a few years ago. The two places that touched me in a way I can still feel today were Burnside's Bridge at Antietam and Bloody Angle. It was dusk when I reached Bloody Angle, I had the place to myself. There was a bird singing a two note song over and over. I sat down and just let the place speak to me. The contrast between the bloody history of the place and the current beauty and calmness still touches me today.

I will also second the Custer Battlefield as a place where you can feel history around you. There are two parts to the Custer Battlefield, the area where Custer's men died, and the hill where the Reno and Benteen and their men dug in to survive. I don't know which is more haunting. Custer's men were initially buried where they fell and small white crosses mark those positions. They died in small groups scattered along the hillside. Sometimes, when you walk along the trails marked 'Watch out for Rattlesnakes', you see a lone cross, where only one man died and you wonder what he was thinking? Did he know he was going to die? Was he charging or fleeing? It is a haunting place.
65 posted on 09/17/2008 9:47:52 AM PDT by goldfinch
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To: jonascord

Speaking of Montana, the Bears Paw battlefield south of Chinook is worth visiting, although out of the way. It’s where Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Indians made their last stand before surrendering in 1877. Chief Joseph’s statement of why he had decided to surrender is very moving and often quoted. It’s a desolate and evocative place.


67 posted on 09/17/2008 10:04:15 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: jonascord
Custer Hill at the Little Big Horn should be included as well.

Oh, yeah. I was there for the first time last autumn after reading about it all my life. That place is genuinely weird and I'm not especially sensitive to that sort of thing. A lot of the locals will tell you the same.

Different feeling at Gettysburg altogether, a sort of sadness and grandeur where Pickett's men fell. At Sharpsburg, though, Burnside's Bridge - that's what the signs call it these days - did carry that sort of eerie feeling, but more to the point it's still obvious that it funneled infantry into a narrow kill zone dominated by high ground on the other side. Like the Custer hill it's hard to describe but easy to imagine when you're actually onsite. The Rebs must have thought it fish in a barrel. I did think that fording the river looked a little more difficult to my amateur eye than the books have related but it's been a century and a half. It sure would have beat trying to cross that bridge under fire.

Comparing the Sunken Road to the old pictures was another case in point of you have to be there. It seems a little more open these days - well-tended, and for good reason. Throw a little more growth on either side and you can see why the battle was drawn there. These guys were shooting field artillery at massed troops at a range of 30 yards. Good God.

I haven't visited Cold Harbor yet but someone above mentioned it as haunted ground. Maybe next summer...

69 posted on 09/17/2008 10:28:51 AM PDT by Billthedrill
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