A couple of days ago, Jason and I visited Gettysburg. There was an exhibit in the Visitor's Center that we'd never seen there: a giant relief map on the floor, with little, colored light bulbs embedded throughout. The bulbs lit up as the 1/2-hour presentation was given, showing Confederate and Union troop movements during the 3-day battle that so affected our nation. Of all the fields and woods and ridges and hills in that scene, Little Round Top struck me as the best blend of geography, chance or Providence, and human choice/activity. Little Round Top was not the highest hill and wouldn't have afforded the best battlefield view but for the fact that the town's inhabitants had previously cleared it of trees. The Union Army ultimately attained that spot and was greatly advantaged.
Here is a picture Jason took of Brig. Gen. Warren's statue on Little Round Top. It was he who realized the key position needed defending and called for troop arrangement there. Then there's a shot of a canon pointed toward the big field of the famous Pickett's Charge.
These events and others of our country's early history I've had a hard time envisioning over my life, not being from this area. Nearly all the town names end in -ville, -town, or -burg. The peoples' accents are strange. The traffic guy on the radio lists off three hundred million highways, biways, freeways, and turnpikes like everybody can keep track of it all! But Jason grew up knowing these place names, hearing them in everyday language, and understanding how the geography and history all fits together. What's interesting is that he could never get a grasp on the westward expansion, which always made good sense to me, having grown up on the plains of Nebraska seeing displays of original covered wagons and old homesteads, and then northwest Montana, a place of cowboys and Indians, where the names of innumerable mountains and rivers bear witness to the native peoples and their lives and struggles there.
"Now the people spoke among themselves and agreed with what their leaders had said. They agreed to be known for the place where they first planted corn. Now they spoke of themselves to other people that way. 'We are Juniper Tree Stands Alone People,' they would say to them....You see, their names for themselves are really the names of their places....That is how they are still known, even though they have scattered and live now in many different states, some in cities far from here."
--Charles Henry, a member of the Western Apache tribe,
as quoted in the book Wisdom Sits in Places
