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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.”
Our country does not want war, it wants peace. It has not decreed this memorial season as an honor to war, with its terrible waste and attendant train of suffering and hardship which reaches onward into the years of peace. Yet war is not the worst of evils, and these days have been set apart to do honor to all those, now gone, who made the cause of America their supreme choice. Some fell with the word of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” almost ringing in their ears. Some heard that word across the intervening generations and were still obedient to its call. It is to the spirit of those men, exhibited in all our wars, to the spirit that places the devotion to freedom and truth above the devotion to life, that the nation pays its ever enduring mark of reverence and respect.
