The Fight for Devil’s Den – Ranger Scott Adrian

Gettysburg National Military Park posted this recording of a ranger-led battlefield walk in September 2014. Ranger Scott Adrian takes visitors through Devil’s Den, the jumble of granite boulders below Little Round Top where Confederate troops attacked late on 2 July 1863 and then held the ground for the rest of the battle.

Adrian sets the scene – the Wheatfield changing hands again and again, General Daniel Sickles moving his corps forward without orders, and Lee’s plan to strike the Union left – before following John Bell Hood’s division of about 7,400 men into the attack. He stops at the position of Captain James Smith’s 4th New York Independent Battery, leads the group down to the Triangular Field where Texas troops charged, and traces the fighting among the rocks between Union regiments from New York, Pennsylvania, Maine and Indiana and Confederates from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia. He closes by reading verse written in tribute to Smith’s battery.

Devil’s Den is the setting for one of Gettysburg’s best-known ghost stories – a ragged, barefoot soldier said to appear to visitors among the rocks – and the neighbouring Triangular Field is a fixture of ghost-tour lore. This ranger program says nothing about ghosts, which makes it the ideal companion: it explains exactly who fought here, how they died, and why this small patch of ground left such a mark.

The terrain also helps explain some reports: sound carries oddly among the boulders, and reenactors and visitors in period dress are common in the park. Note that the park bars commercial ghost tours inside its boundaries and closes after dark; for the National Park Service, the battlefield is first a memorial to real men.