Day 22

 Day 22-Wednesday, May 12

The battle was named for the Shiloh Methodist church, a simple log cabin where some of the fiercest fighting took place on April 6-7,1862.

Not exactly Notre Dame de Paris.

Shiloh is Hebrew for “place of peace”.   

A place of peace this was not.

Pittsburg Landing, on the west bank of the Tennessee River, where the Union troops crossed.

To put some perspective on the death toll at Shiloh, more men died at Shiloh than the combined total of all battles in American history at that time. 

A replica of a battery of 31 Union cannons that fired upon approaching Confederate infantry.

Casualties for the two days exceeded 23,000, and during one skirmish 75% of the men from Mississippi regiment were killed.

The human loss at Shiloh was best summarized by General Grant who stated, “there were so many dead bodies on this field, if you walked across it in any direction you would never step on the ground.”

 I’ve wanted to visit the Shiloh battlefield for five years, and today I finally did.  The magnitude and emotional impact of Shiloh can perhaps only be compared to Gettysburg.  

 The drive to the Shiloh Battlefield from our campsite at the Pickwick Dam State Park was a short one, only 16 miles.  When we got out of our van and started toward the center another tourist came up to us and said, “be sure you watch the movie!”  We did, and of all the Civil War visitors’ center films we have watched in the last five years,  this one did the best job explaining why the battle took place, and  how it was fought, and what was it like to be a participant.

When the film ended, we stopped in the park’s bookstore and picked up an audio tour CD which guided us through the park’s battle’s key locations for the next three hours.  There were 20 stops on this audio tour, if you wanted to read every plague along the way you could have stopped 60 times.  The weather could not have been better; blue skies,  a light breeze, and temps in the mid 60’s, and eventhough the visitors’ center was crowded, the auto tour route was not, so we thoroughly enjoyed our leisurely paced visit to this sacred ground.  

If I spend another day in Tennessee I'm going to have to buy some overalls!

 We left the park around 4 PM; we could easily spend another day here, there is so much to see, but despite the beauty of the park, it is also depressing, so we returned to our campsite.  I went for a bike ride along the Tennessee River and Joni researched our sites for tomorrow.  

The Outpost general store near Pickwick Dam

We dined on scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast and enjoyed a campfire as we listened to the Red Sox lose their 4th game in a row.