There Is A Civil War Battlefield Wherever I Go

Even in Arkansas!

Actually, there are at least three proper Civil War battlefields in Arkansas. One of them, Prairie Grove (now a state park), is where one of my great-great-grandfathers fought... on the wrong side, sigh, because of course he did. 

Fun(?) Fact: Robert Shaver, the Commander of my great-great-grandfather's division, was, for a while, the most racist man in Arkansas. After the Civil War he became the supreme commander of the Arkansas division of the Ku Klux Klan (so great job there with that whole Reconstruction business, President Johnson!), and when authorities finally got around to charging him for some of the crimes he'd been committing he fled to British Honduras, where he lived for another four years. In 1872, one of his old lawyer buddies, Elisha Baxter, who was -ish on the Union side during the Civil War but not super fervently, was elected governor (I also just need to tell you that his political party was named the Minstrels, for god's sake, and he won thanks to committing a LOT of election fraud), and immediately got Shaver pardoned. So Shaver came back to Arkansas and was elected as county sheriff, because of course he was, and lived the rest of his life happily committing hate crimes. Baxter only lasted two years as governor, and Arkansas never wrenched free of the grip of racism and Lost Cause fantasies.

ANYWAY...

Although I do someday really want to visit Prairie Grove so that I can say, "WTF, Great-Great-Pappa?!?" in person, Prairie Grove doesn't give out national park passport stamps and Pea Ridge does.

So here we are!

To set the stage, you should remember that in the Civil War, Missouri was a border state, officially part of the Union (which is why none of their slaves got emancipated via the Emancipation Proclamation, ugh). Buuut this designation was highly contested, since Missouri did have slaveholders and tons of resources and infrastructure and rivers, etc., that the Confederacy really wanted. A militia formed in Missouri that was essentially a part of the Confederate army, and with support from Confederate forces from Arkansas and from Indian nations that also held slaves, they had the potential to do a lot of damage, possibly up to and including secession of the whole state.

So a Union Brigadier General, Samuel Curtis, was put in charge of driving the militia out of Missouri and down into Arkansas, where it would be safely out of the way of riling up Missouri.

And he did! Curtis pushed the Missouri State Guard out of Missouri and south into Arkansas just like he'd planned, and Curtis' forces chased them all the way, taking potshots and having little skirmishes and stretching out their Union supply line until finally Curtis needed to stop and take up a defensive position inside Confederate territory to give everyone time to catch up.

While the Union forces were essentially just hanging out in Northwest Arkansas, enjoying the scenery and the mountain air, a completely different Confederate commander, Major General Van Dorn, decided that this was an awesome chance to stage a counter-offensive strike. If he could actually knock out Curtis' Union army, then there would be nothing standing in the way of not just the Missouri State Guard, but the entire Confederate army from having free reign in southwest Missouri. He ran his troops up towards Curtis, making them travel so fast that he legendarily only permitted each soldier to carry one blanket, three days' rations, and a measly 40 rounds of ammunition. 

In the mountains. In March. I know Arkansas is a ball of burning hell-fire in the summer, but up in the Ozarks in early Spring it's still winter. Also, 40 rounds of ammunition is... not a lot.

Not that we care, because they were the baddies, but nevertheless!

And then, as if that wasn't reckless enough, Van Dorn decided that he wasn't even going to attack Curtis head-on, because it might give them the chance to retreat back to their reinforcements and eventually Missouri, but instead to sneak sneak around Curtis and come up on him from the rear. So the troops were half their strength, exhausted from three days of forced marching, out of food after eating their three days' worth of rations, and it was March in the Ozarks so of course it was sleeting.

Again, these are the bad guys, so it's fine.

The decision to try to come at Curtis from the north actually wasn't the worst idea, since Curtis genuinely wasn't expecting it--he was busy fortifying a position north of Sugar Creek, because he thought the Confederates would have to cross it to attack him from the south. But then his scouts and spies started coming to tell him that there was a Confederate army marching from the north, down Telegraph Road just a mile away:

United States War Department, 1895 {PD-US}} 

I tried to frame this Google Maps screenshot to cover approximately the same area as that battle illustration. The blue flag at the bottom indicates a spot where you can still see some of Curtis' original trenches on the north bank of Sugar Creek. The center blue flag is the visitor center for Pea Ridge National Battlefield. The top blue flag is Elkhorn Tavern. The road between the two is Telegraph Road (now National Park Drive), and you can follow it down to the highway, where it overlaps the highway as it runs southwest, then you can find it going south again just to the right of the Leetown label and follow it south to Sugar Creek.

Telegraph Road is actually really interesting, because once upon a time it had connected Forth Smith and St. Louis, two places that we'd actually been going back and forth between on this trip. I imagine it took them a lot longer than 4.5 hours to traverse that length in the 1800s, however! Telegraph Road was also a route for the Trail of Tears, bringing the forced migrants southwest from St. Louis. These fields that you can see from the visitor center window once hosted thousands of Cherokee who camped there, under military guard, along the way:

At this point, some of the Cherokee peoples turned due west, but others continued south to Fort Smith and then went west. 

Okay, so ANYWAY, Curtis found out that Confederates were approaching from the rear, which was a big deal because his own supply train and soldiers' campsites and all their comfy spaces, etc., were also to their rear, and he had to turn his entire army around to face the other way, WHICH IS NOT AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS! You can't just about-face! The guys who were told to be on the right still have to be on the right, but now it's the other right, and the guys who were told to be at the front still have to be at the front, but now the front is on the other side of a whole bunch of other guys, and there's cannons and shit that all have to be moved--it's a nightmare!

Also, although I mentioned it before, the temperature is below freezing.

Basically, this entire day preceding the official battle is taken up by a series of oopses and blunders as everyone rustles around and tries to get themselves settled--first Van Dorn blunders into a Union cavalry patrol, then a different Union force gets attacked by a different Confederate force that takes a bunch of them prisoner, but then yet another Union force accidentally bumps into that same Confederate force and rescues a bunch of the prisoners, meanwhile a completely different Confederate force got lost and wandered too far north and had to waste time marching all the way back, in the process just barely happening to miss blundering into yet another Union force, while that Union force had a different Confederate force bump into them, etc. The details aren't really important--just imagine a sped-up film of Confederate and Union soldiers running back and forth and bumping into each other and chasing each other while Yakety Sax plays.

It's all just so stupid, lol, although it would be a lot funnier if they weren't killing each other over one side's sick obsession with enslaving other humans.

So everybody wakes up on March 7, 1862, feeling frustrated and stupid. Curtis knows Van Dorn is coming, Van Dorn knows Curtis knows he's coming, and each of them sort of independently decides that the best place to make their stand is poor, innocent Elkhorn Tavern, local pub and stagecoach stop right on Telegraph Road. Because god forbid you have a battle that doesn't involve actively ruining the lives of civilians. 

And now all they have to do is get there!

I love a light-up map! This depicts part of the morning of March 7, with some of Curtis' troops moving up Telegraph Road to Elkhorn Tavern, some troops to the west where they're about to snipe some Confederates in Oberson's field, and those about-to-be-sniped Confederates moving south from Ford Road, distracted from their own goal of marching east to Elkhorn Tavern because they saw some Union soldiers they wanted to chase.

Van Dorn had split his troops up, the better to sneak around Curtis. Half the troops, headed by General Price, had made it to the spot along Telegraph Road north of Elkhorn Tavern where they'd planned to meet, but the other half, headed by General McCullough, was still way too far west. So Van Dorn told him to take a right at Twelve Corners Church (which is still there today!) and follow Ford Road southeast. Ford Road doesn't seem to still be there, but you can see it on the above map and on the below map you can kind of imagine a line between Twelve Corners Baptist Church southeast to kind of that Hwy 72 marker, then east to where it meets Telegraph Road just south of Elkhorn Tavern:

McCullough and all his half of the troops were busily doing that when they were spotted by Union troops. I mean, half an entire Confederate army is walking down a road--how could they NOT be spotted?!? They were walking east down Ford Road towards Elkhorn Tavern, approximately due north of that Leetown Battlefield flag, when three Union cannons started attacking them from the south. But there were SO many more Confederates--half of Van Dorn's army!--than soldiers in this spot, so the Confederates turned on them and overwhelmed them. 

artifacts from the museum in the visitor center

In the confusion, apparently nobody noticed that either the Confederate Cherokee troops (which is what most historians say) or the Texas troops (which is what some historians say) were actually murdering the fallen Union soldiers and scalping them. The scalping was proven, but the murders are assumed because the number of Union dead in that spot exceeded the number of Union wounded, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. Another issue is that some of the Confederates were also wearing blue (?!?), and so some historians also theorize there were some issues with friendly fire.

Also, some of the Confederates were actually wearing white, because they hadn't had time to get their uniforms dyed, so they stuck out like albino deer in a field.

It was POURING during our driving tour (which is kind of funny, because it was sleeting during our first long-ago trip to Pea Ridge), so we did not even so much as get out of the car to check out the site of the Ford Road attack. I can easily visualize Union cannons and Confederates scalping people from the comfy, dry car!

Regardless, there were a bunch of scalping, blue- and white-wearing Confederates chasing Union soldiers and doing war crimes on them, but at least that chaos gave a different Union leader, Colonel Osterhaus, time to carefully position his own troops in the woods south of Oberson's Field (good thing it was only March so Oberson didn't lose a whole field of corn!). Eventually, McCullough and his troops ended up in the woods north of that same field. McCullough knew the Union troops were on the other side of the field and had a whole attack planned, but just to help him finalize it, he got on his horse and just poked his head out into Oberson's field to see if he could see the Union line from there.

poor Oberson's field!

east side of Oberson's field, with Union cannons

He could, and the Union line could also see him, because he was immediately sniped off his horse and fell down dead.

His second-in-command, McIntosh, seamlessly jumped right into command... for an entire fifteen minutes, until he, too, was sniped and fell down dead.

And that's basically a feature wrap on that whole set of Confederate troops! If there was a third in command, he didn't seem to know it, because the whole lot of them just sat around in the woods for the rest of the day. Osterhaus, expecting and expecting and expecting that surge of Confederates from the north and never getting it, was eventually like, "Okay.....", and moved off east to attack some different Confederates. 

Got my north and south confused here. I was trying to photograph the spots where McCullough and McIntosh got sniped, but instead I photographed where they got sniped from, I guess. My excuse is that although this battlefield is very well preserved, in my opinion it is NOT very well marked. At Gettysburg, anytime a person stood somewhere for more than two minutes somebody put a marker up about it!

Meanwhile, Price had made it down to Elkhorn Tavern--

--where the Union forces had managed to turn around and actually outnumbered the Confederates. Nevertheless, after a full day of fighting, including hours of cannon-fire from both sides--

--and a final infantry run, the Confederates did take Elkhorn Tavern from the Union, but not before the Union was able to rescue their supply train and move all their stuff south, so the Union soldiers got to have a proper dinner and lie-down and rest up for the next day. The Confederate soldiers, however, basically had to just drop in their tracks like dogs and cover up with their single blanket--they had no food, no extra gear, no ammunition or anything other than what they could loot from the dead. Also, although some of McCullough's abandoned troops eventually wandered up and joined with Price, a whole bunch of them... just left! The Confederate supply train had also retreated, so the Confederates literally had nothing.

Good!

First thing in the morning of March 8, one of the Union commanders, General Sigel, had soldiers place cannons in good spots across the center and top of that big field in the photo below:

That grey line that goes across the big field diagonally to the northwest from just about the Pea Ridge Federal Battlefield Line flag is all cannons. There are a few more cannons on the northeast side of that field next to Telegraph Road.

He then proceeded to shoot the absolute shit out of the Confederate soldiers, literally sniping individual targets with entire cannons. And when the Confederates started retreating, some of them ran up towards that top blue flag in the above picture, which is actually an interesting geologic formation of a bluff with a bunch of rocky bits sticking up from it, perfect for hiding behind... unless you're hiding from Sigel, that is! Because he then instructed the cannons to start shooting the shit out of the top of that bluff, as well, causing rocky bits and boulders and tree limbs and cannonballs to fall down inside the crevices where people were hiding, injuring and killing them more than if they'd just all been standing together in a field.

I'm standing directly on top of that spot, but you can't really see down into the crevices. I'm assuming you could hike there from the battlefield, but there's not an obvious path. A challenge for another time!

After a couple of hours of basically putting the entire Confederate army there through a meat tenderizer, Curtis finally ordered his Union infantry troops forward. Half the Confederate army, including both Van Dorn and Price, retreated, leaving the other half of the army just standing there without a commander. The ones with sense retreated north up Telegraph Road, and they at least managed to organize themselves a rear guard at Elkhorn Tavern to cover their escape. 

This view from the bluff is directly over the place where hiding Confederates were slaughtered via rockfall and shrapnel. Out of sight to the left is Elkhorn Tavern, and the Union cannons were in the field on the right.

And that was it! Afterward, a lot of Van Dorn's soldiers deserted, and the rest were reassigned to Tennessee. Curtis continued to fight his way across Arkansas, pillaging as he went in a manner that accurately presaged Sherman's later march to the sea. The battle at Pea Ridge was middlingly famous for a bit, both because people liked to Monday morning quarterback Van Dorn's many boneheaded maneuvers, and because word of those scalpings got out. Newspapers back then LOVED themselves a good scalping story!

As for us, we got back in the car wet to the skin and stayed wet to the skin for for our hour-long trip to the site I was MOST excited to see.

We were going to George Washington Carver's house! And if you haven't heard me monologuing about George Washington Carver and how awesome he is and all the amazing things he did, then, well... get ready, I guess! Because it's coming!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

If You See Someone Crying on a Civil War Battlefield It's Me. Or I Guess It Could Also Be a Ghost.

If you see TWO people crying on a Civil War battlefield, then it's me AND a ghost!

In some ways, I'm finding this second school year of a completely empty nest to be easier than the first. I'm not sobbing in the shower every day, and I'm definitely not in that baffling state of mourning humans who are very much alive and well that seems specific to early days empty nesters. Yes, I maaaaaybe cried on a Civil War battlefield, but 1) I'd just finished dropping off the second kid less than 24 hours prior and wouldn't see her again until Fall Break, and 2) Civil War battlefields are sad! So many people died!

I've got my little autistic daily to-do list that I make for myself that keeps me busy all day, every day, both with productive things like, you know, work, and with less helpful things like painting that last damn family room wall that the entire family convinced me not to paint over the summer because it was too much hassle and didn't need to be done. Well, jokes on them, because when 2/3 of the people telling me not to do something moved out, I did it anyway! 

And when the years start looming over my head and I remember that my job, while fun and intellectually rewarding, is tenuous and also high-key evil, and I wonder what on earth people are supposed to be DOING with their lives when they don't have, like, some kind of noble calling or pursuit or whatever to dedicate themselves to, I just shove those thoughts back down where they came from and see what's next on my little autistic to-do list. Ooh, I need to scoop the litter boxes!

ANYWAY, look at this sweet little moth that stopped to rest on my partner's hand at Harpers Ferry:

You can tell it's a moth because it holds its wings flat while it's resting.

Just between us, I wasn't real revved up about visiting either Harpers Ferry or Antietam, but my deluxe national parks passport book is just another kind of little autistic to-do list, so obviously I've got to visit every national park site I can make an excuse to get to. AND back in May I bought myself a whole entire America the Beautiful pass so now I'm obsessed with getting my money's worth from it, and that means detouring to find all the national park sites that have entrance fees.

I saved forty bucks in entrance fees on this trip, and you don't need to ask how much I spent on gas or a hotel, because it's none of my business!

Harpers Ferry wasn't quite at Grand Canyon levels of crowded, but it was a LOT more crowded than I thought it would be, considering how not super revved up I, personally, was about it. I mean, just last year the big kid and I were literally the only visitors to Johnstown Flood National Memorial when we were there, and Johnstown Flood is objectively AMAZING!

To be fair, it turns out that Harpers Ferry is amazing, too, so I am SUPER glad that my little autistic to-do list brought me there!

And there actually IS a ferry! Or, at least, a bus that ferries you from the parking lot/visitor center down to the historic old town. If I'd had the whole day there we would have walked, but the plan was to hit up Antietam in the afternoon, so ferried by bus it was!

I sometimes wheedle my partner into reminiscing about a particular family road trip he took when he was a kid. He describes the trip as hot and muggy, and mostly consisting of battlefields, many of which he refused to get out of the car to look at. It's hilarious getting him to tell all the things he actually remembers from the trip, especially when you make him separate out the memories solely about baseball cards and road snacks and fighting with his brother from the memories of actual sightseeing.

He has no memories of whether or not he went to Antietam on this trip (although he must have--it's right there!), but he remembers exactly one thing about Harpers Ferry: there was a sign that showed you the heights of a bunch of old floods.

Here, then, is the only memorable thing about Harpers Ferry if you're a ten-year-old kid on a road trip across the Great Battlefields of America:

1985 was already on the sign by the time he visited, assuming they engrave their flood dates in a timely manner, but those 1996s are certainly new:

There's plenty of room for new floods in the middle, but if something happens that exceeds the big flood of 1936 they're going to have to add a new board!

Here's why they get so many floods:

Harpers Ferry is at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and there's not much of a riparian buffer zone between the rivers and the old part of the town. But that does mean that you can stroll along right next to the water, and it's especially pleasant on a bright summer morning:

Here's a nice view of the piers of an old bridge in the foreground, then the original site of Robert Harper's actually ferry, then a railroad bridge and a pedestrian bridge that's also part of the Appalachian Trail. 

We kept to the outskirts of the old town, checking out the fire engine house where John Brown and his followers barricaded themselves during their raid:

Here's my partner embodying the mentality of domestic terrorism for a righteous cause:

That's not its original spot, though, because the "fort" went on something of a national tour for a few decades, and while it was gone the railroad built up the site where it had been located into an embankment. But you can climb the embankment to the original location of the armory and find a monument marking where the fort was when John Brown used it:

I was trying to get a shot of the monument in the foreground and the fort in the background, when this group of youths arrived and started picnicking across half my photo. They looked so cheerful and wholesome that I bet they were Girl Scouts.

There's another lovely view over the river from the armory site:

We checked out the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, then sort of sideswiped the edge of town to hit the Appalachian Trail for a bit. 

This is a very picturesque rock overlooking a picturesque view that was apparently written about by Thomas Jefferson:

I'm looking at the website right now, where it tells me very firmly NOT to climb this rock, but in my own defense, there was zero guidance, either written or verbal, about this at the site, and also everyone else was doing it.

Anyway, it IS a really pretty view if you stand exactly where you're not supposed to:

I really wanted to walk the Appalachian Trail in the other direction for a bit, too, mostly because you get to go on this pedestrian bridge right next to a working railroad bridge across the Potomac and it looked like it led right into a super creepy tunnel where there are definitely zombies (I later learned that the pedestrians don't get to go through the tunnel so I'm glad I didn't blow up our afternoon plans for it)--

--but the afternoon was already wearing on, and we had to make time to go here!

As always, Visitor Center (and the gift shop and passport stamps) first!

The museum inside the Visitor Center was just two rooms and most of the artifacts were off display, but as someone coming in cold, with only my AP US History knowledge of the Civil War (great for the politics and economics and human geography aspects, but not so much for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when), it was a super helpful grounding, with actually a lot more context than I thought I'd get:

I thought that this explanation of the two sides of the slavery issue as evidenced by two Maryland citizens was an insightful way to approach the conversation:

And this display piece simply cracked me up:

Okay, NOW it's time for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when!

I don't usually love the start and stop, hop in and out of the car style of battlefield tours, but Antietam is so thoughtfully preserved and restored that it drew me in immediately. There's the self-guided tour with the specifics of who did what where, of course, but my favorite thing by far was the placement of structures that tell the story at an almost sensorial level. For example, wherever you see a split rail fence, that represents where an actual fence was on the day of the battle. And there are 30 acres of corn planted there on the site of the Millers' 30-acre cornfield where the bloodiest fight of the bloodiest day of the Civil War occurred:

Conveniently, the existence of the cornfield and the surrounding fencing probably keeps people from traipsing all over that spot and hunting for artifacts. There were a couple of volunteer docents staged at a few sites around the tour, and I sort of wondered if they were positioned at the spots most vulnerable to artifact poaching. 

Cannons, like the one here at West Woods, are placed on the sites where actual cannons were placed during the battle:

The barrels of the cannons are also from the Civil War. 

The West Woods itself is in the long-term process of being reforested to look more like it did during the battle, but you can hike into it kind of at the front of where the Confederate line was:

It's crazy, though, to think that on the day of the battle, the only trails in these woods would have been ones made by deer, and so everyone would have been dodging and hiding behind trees and the visibility would have been so low. I don't know if this would have been an old-growth forest at the time, though, so they may or may not have also been getting tangled up in every type of underbrush and briar. The woods on my property was partly cleared and farmed once upon a time a 100+ years ago, and it's still got a lot of tangly undergrowth around the slower-growing trees. 

Although there's a lot of more contemporary wayside signage, if you want a real deep-dive into exactly who did exactly what exactly where and exactly when, there are also these VERY thorough signs strewn around the battlefield:

They were created within the same generation as the Civil War, the brainchild of a Union general who was so interested in getting every exact detail that he essentially created a letter-writing campaign to survey all the surviving soldiers. He was only interested in the tactics and so didn't do anything interesting with the other stories they told him about the tragedies and horrors of war, BUT the circumstance of the correspondence alone worked to get those extraneous stories they told into the public record. 

I liked this view from the West Woods, in which you can see the Millers house and their cornfield. The Confederate survivors from the cornfield ran this way into the West Woods, and Union troops followed them, but what the Union soldiers didn't know was that there was another whole group of fresh Confederates coming into the woods from the south. They outflanked the Union soldiers and it got so chaotic that Union soldiers were literally shooting at each other as well as at the Confederates:

Meanwhile, just southeast of the cornfield and the West Woods was a farm lane that went along between two properties and led from the turnpike to the west to a gristmill over by the creek. Generations of wagons full of grain and flour had worn down the level of the lane so it was a few feet lower than the surrounding land, kind of like a buffalo trace only wider. on both sides, there was more corn--

--and more fencing:

In a strategy reminiscent of the following generation's trench warfare, Confederate soldiers were stationed here to "hold the line." But as the Union soldiers in the West Woods were being massacred, more Union soldiers came in from the northeast to attack the Confederates holding the Sunken Lane, and there was a simultaneous massacre of Confederates.

Eventually, the Union soldiers captured the lane and the Confederates retreated to a nearby farm. The Union followed them but couldn't take the farm so they retreated, too. At the end of the day there was essentially no gain of ground by either side, but in the process over 5,000 people were wounded or killed just from that set of skirmishes. 

Here's where I was all, "Wait, WHAT are they all doing right here?!? Was Antietam a major supply depot? It wasn't a port city. Did some famous politicians set up shop here?" I finally figured out that it was all because Confederate General Robert E. Lee was trying to invade Maryland, and Union General McClellan was chasing him down, so this was basically just the spot that Lee picked to stop and try to kill off his pursuers. So all these skirmishes aren't even necessarily *about* gaining ground or whatever--these two armies were literally just trying to kill each other. It's really easy to get lost in the weeds when you're touring a Civil War battlefield!

Meanwhile, in a completely different spot south way southeast of all of this, Confederate troops were holding this one bridge that spanned Antietam Creek and kept the Union forces coming from the east away from the town of Sharpsburg and the rest of the battle:

This is from the Union side.

There weren't a lot of them, but the lay of the land and the relatively narrow bridge crossing meant that they held the line for a few hours, slaughtering any Union soldiers who tried to cross:

Eventually, though, some Union soldiers finally got the idea to try crossing downstream from the bridge where the Confederate weapons couldn't reach them, and the Confederate soldiers were starting to run low on ammunition, anyway:

This is looking downstream.

So when the Confederates got outflanked AND outgunned they finally retreated, but they'd held the line so long that more Confederate reinforcements, marching up from their battle at Harpers Ferry, had time to get to them.

This sycamore by the bridge is famous because there's photos of it as a little sycamore in the aftermath of the battle:

There were a couple more spots on the driving tour, but as we were navigating to the next one we got turned around a little, and then we were all, "Hey, is that a WINERY right next to the battlefield?!?"

It WAS!

So, since we figured we knew how the Civil War ended, and since the afternoon was getting on and pretty soon we'd have to head out on the rest of the drive to our overnight spot well west of here, we decided to close out our tour of Antietam with a shared flight of wine:

In conclusion, Antietam was kind of a stupid battle and I can't believe they killed or wounded over 23,000 people over it, and then left a huge mountain of rotting corpses for the innocent citizens of Sharpsburg and the surrounding countryside to deal with.

P.S. Come find me over on my Facebook page, where I often talk about my adventures, experiments, misadventures, and yet more misadventures as I'm doing them!