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Memorial Day Weekend: Civil War Dispatches from Arizona
Picacho Peak is located on the west side of Interstate 10 about 45 miles north of Tucson. Drivers making the trip between Phoenix and Tucson, unless they visit Picacho Peak State Park, may not realize that Union and Confederate forces fought the westernmost skirmish of the Civil War in what was then the location of an isolated Butterfield stagecoach station.
Our loneliness … [was] indescribable. We were cut off from all communication with the civilized world, in a desert and inhospitable country. Ahead of us was an enemy of whose numbers we knew little, and behind a forbidding desert … To add still more to our loneliness, as the sound of the pick and shovel were heard, was the dismal howl of the wild coyote … The graves being dug, without a word or a prayer we rolled the bodies in their blankets and laid them to rest.”