JOHN PEPIN

Seven score and 19 years ago this week, three days of tremendous bloodletting, death and destruction occurred at a place where 10 roads intersected on the bucolic, green landscape of southern Pennsylvania, a place called Gettysburg.

Likely then as now, the summery skies over those beautiful, rolling hills were filled with the chattering and cheery sounds of yellow-breasted chats and indigo buntings.

Graceful, blue barn swallows, with their forked tails, would have bent and twisted as they swooped over the fields, even then.

Gettysburg is a beautiful place, even if you know what happened here.

The three days of fighting and bloodshed during the Civil War were not intended to occur here amid the rock boulder fences, from within an old peach orchard or a notable copse of trees.

Nor was the conflict intended to occur at other landmarks here like “The Devil’s Den,” a rocky place named for its presumed inhabitability to anyone but the devil himself.

Instead, Gen. Robert E. Lee wanted to engage the Union troops miles out of town where the topography would have afforded him better advantage.

Nonetheless, this is where the battles took place.

The fighting began on Wednesday, July 1, 1863, and ended two days later, after the Union defeated Pickett’s Charge – an attack comprised of 12,000 Confederate soldiers who rushed in attack across an open field.

After those dreadful events that July, Gettysburg would have new hideously named landmarks like “The Slaughter Pen,” and “The Wheatfield” where it was said a person could walk from one end to the other in ankle-deep blood atop the corpses of over 4,000 dead and wounded soldiers.

An intermittent creek here called Plum Run ran red with blood. The sound of wild pigs crunching the bones of the war dead drowned out the firing sounds of the rifles and the cannons, the fighting and the dying.

Over the three days of battle, only one resident of the town of Gettysburg itself was killed – a woman who was hit by a stray bullet.

Many people took shelter in their basements. Churches and other buildings were turned into makeshift hospitals. Amputations were common.

In total, there were 23,000 Union soldiers left dead, wounded, captured or missing, in addition to roughly 28,000 casualties for the Confederate army.

On Independence Day that year, Lee’s army began to retreat from Gettysburg.

Union Gen. George Meade had defeated Lee in his bid to strike a decisive battle blow in northern territory to end the war with a victory for the South.

After Gettysburg, the war was waged for two more years.

A few months after those three infamous July days, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery here, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, which today remains among the most famous speeches of all time.

Part of Lincoln’s text contained the following passages:

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

“That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

In 1938, 75 years after the battles of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s greatest speech, 1,800 Civil War veterans returned to Gettysburg to one of the battle sites to help dedicate a memorial to “Peace Eternal in a Nation United.”

The peace at Gettysburg today is found in the shade beneath the red oaks and white ash trees. The warm, winds still dance and swirl over the landscape, bringing only summertime sensations to mind, especially if you close your eyes.

In springtime, violets and Virginia bluebells bloom here. Now, in summertime, black-eyed Susan, asters and goldenrod pleasantly punctuate the landscape.

Turkey vultures circle in the sky, but not the way they did after the great carnage that took place here. Back then, vultures were drawn to the carcasses from miles away.

If you sit back to view the countryside and watch the fields, it’s not hard to imagine the soldiers moving over the undulating terrain.

Today at Gettysburg, I stood on the Union high ground at Little Round Top.

An old, gray man with a cane, who I presumed to be a grandfather, talked with a trio of young people who were likely in their late teens. He explained what the Civil War armies encountered here and offered his views on what he would have done.

A short distance away, a small girl younger than two, dressed in a frilly, pink dress, her hair bubbling in curls, pushed with her tiny hands against an inscription carved in a stone that detailed the bloody events here.

She smiled and laughed. Atop the rocks here visitors to the battlefield were taking pictures, mostly of the landscape. Some photographers posed with their friends and smiled.

The National Park Service maintains a gift shop here where a visitor can buy replica Confederate and Union folding money, a miniature copy of the Gettysburg Address rolled up inside a tiny, corked bottle or the Union and Confederate “play sets” of plastic toy soldiers likely made in China.

Great efforts have been undertaken here to help preserve the battlefield and the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a massive 360-degree painting of Pickett’s Charge, which was created in one year’s time and originally displayed in 1884.

A short introductory film titled “A New Birth of Freedom,” narrated by Morgan Freeman, is shown in a theater here to help orient visitors to the Gettysburg events of July 1863 before visiting the battlefields.

One tour guide said you could read all the books ever written about Gettysburg and still not know all there is to know. In a similar sense, the battlefield by its very existence and preservation is intended to speak to generations of people who have come here from every walk of life.

I have found that if you visit Gettysburg, it’s hard not to come away thinking for days, weeks and even months afterward about the great conflict of the Civil War.

I have also discovered this place said to be haunted by Confederate and Union ghosts to still be alive with stories to tell on several levels.

I have been to Gettysburg a few times now and will likely do so again. Something about this place has captured my imagination. I feel there are secrets to be revealed, messages to hear, stark lessons to learn and understand.

Certainly, there is more to be found for me in the great number of texts written about this place and the bloody battles that have defined this community since 1863.

I suspect the songbirds and the white oaks have tales they have passed down among themselves over these many years that have passed since those days of bloodshed.

In the spiral, rings of the tree trunks, there may be recorded signals of great disruption during that time, three days when America shook.

Would it be too hard to imagine that all of nature around Gettysburg was affected in some way by the astonishing events, maybe shockwaves even rolled out past our atmosphere and solar system and are still moving forward out there somewhere.

Time and history are linked together mysteriously. They work the same shifts, and they get off work at the same time.

Many people suggest that if given time, history will repeat itself. In some cases, this appears to be true, like in the case of fashion, music and fads.

Others recall and often repeat the quote of a Harvard professor named Santayana who said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Like the three million people who visit Gettysburg every year, I come back when I can. I think there is more here for me to learn. It feels like a place where I could receive some profound and eternal wisdom.

I find it powerful to experience the conflicting emotions and thoughts this place conjures up for me out of a cauldron of hell and hope.

I can smell the flowers, hear the birds and view the numerous monuments erected here to preserve the memories of those who fought here.

I can stand where President Lincoln did in November 1863 and pray, much as he did then, for a “new birth of freedom” for all of America’s people and “that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

In one sense, nothing has changed since those blue and gray days of the Civil War.

A house divided against itself still cannot stand.

Editor’s note: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.