Imagine looking out the window I looked in to take this photo. Gazing across the valleys and low hills of your farm, you see your corn fields being destroyed by 25,000 swarming men and boys in blue and gray, shooting muskets and rifles. Dead bodies and dying moans are obscured by the smoke and blasts of a dozen canons. One prominent rise is so drenched with the former contents of the mens' veins, it will be permanently renamed Bloody Hill.Today, in 2010, the farm is as beautiful and peaceful as the day before that horrid scene, the first Civil War battle in the "the west," and, at the time, second only to the battle of Bunker Hill in casualties. The house still sits, 150 years later, simple, bright, cheerful, reflective.
Footnote: Where I come from (Virginia), Civil War battles were named after the locations: Appomattox Courthouse, Beaver Dam Creek, Fredericksburg. It's the other way around in Missouri. The city of Battlefield is named after this battle at nearby Wilson's Creek.
