Early Battlefield History

[harpskiddie]

Diane:

The votes are in and my voice is for war, I mean garbage, or as Jonathan Winters used to say, and I still do, Garbaaaje .

I'm sure that Scott and Fox, and anyone else who is married to the 28 dead in Deep Ravine [as opposed to A deep ravine] has all sorts of theories of where those bodies must be, since they could find no trace [NO TRACE!!] of them in any of the 11 backhoe trenches dug, the more than 200 boreholes augered, the digging into promising-looking "lumps" and the metal detector searches and even dowsings.

And nothing else either, except, if memory serves, a broken knife blade. I remember seeing, I think for the second time, a Fox and Scott reconstruction of the fight [including testing the various weapons and etc], in which Fox took the interviewer along the rim of Deep Ravine, explaining how the warriors stood there firing down into the fleeing troopers, and also chasing them along the floor of the ravine, killing them as they ran.

It was very dramatic, and would have been made even more so by Fox producing some of the expended cartridges found along the rim during the detector sweeps and digs, or some of the bullets found during the exploration of the ravine floor. Unfortunately, so far as I know, nothing of the sort was found.

The "one of the walls of the ravine" that Scott mentioned to you was probably what is called the slump area, in the upper part of the ravine, where a part of the wall had come down some time ago . Holes were augered near this area, in 1989, it was swept by the detector wielders in 1984, and a trench was dug just above it, in 1985. Nothing was found.

Apparently the water table is too high at the slump area to permit digging into it. Go figure.

Gordie,
nothing from nothing leaves nothing.....nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free..................

[Jas. Watson]

Gordie,
Then I take it you are of the 'cemetery ravine' school of thought?
Me I don't know, nor do I have a preference (except to find out the truth of a situation), but seems to me that there must be a batch of bodies in some ravine somewhere. There are enough accounts.

As for seeding the field, the account of Luce bringing his superintendent from Yellowstone back in the 1940's and 'just happening' to find three top shelf artifacts ( a canteen, a belt buckle, and a cap insignia) had always smacked of seeding to me. Amazing when your boss gets to find cool stuff isn't it? Especially when you are trying to convince him of something. Beats a couple corroded shell casings any day.

Jas~

[harpskiddie]

Jas:

I think that, with certain modifications [i.e. weeding out the spurious], the markers mark the burial places within the battlefield fence. I don't believe that there are any to be accounted for, at least not any great number.

There are, as you say, lots of accounts - none of which do anything but mention a deep ravine, and the early maps are merely hearsay as to Deep Ravine. Nobody has found anything in there.

It's like saying that there were 210 men killed, and here is where the 210 men are buried, but there are an additional 18-28-30 [pick a number] in a deep ravine.

Gordie,
it's just another ordinary miracle today.......................................................................