so we're on the corinth pittsburgh landing road, having moved up from the hornet's nest capture area and the hornet's nest defensive perimeter to what was the final union position of the day on the first day known ever since as grant's last line. it's the last line of the first day's battle action. this is the line in which the divisions of sherman and mcclernand and hurlbut and the remnants of prentiss and will wallace will retire to. this is the line that the hornet's nest defenders cut off and would have sought safety but weren't able to reach. a number of troops present. grant had at least probably 25,000 men effective along the front. on his left flank in the river were the two gunboats, the lexington and tyler. with their big 8-inch guns that could fire three miles deep onto the plateau. so that anchored the left firmly at deal branch ravine which lay here in front of us. so this union's last line has a huge ravine just immediately to the south of the left flank portion of it, and then on the extreme right is that tillman branch that sherman and mcclernand backed up over at mid

pittsburgh landing and facing west. because the confederates believed that corinth is further west than it is south from pittsburgh landsing. they have a slight miscalculation in their understanding of the geography and their maps illustrate this. their maps show corinth twice as far from east to west, from pittsburgh landing than it is by miles north and south. we now know that the exact opposite is true. we know that corinth was twice as far north to south from pittsburgh landing than it was from east to west. that little terrain perspective, confederates are marching from the west, slightly north, but generally eastward, led the confederate high command into assuming the army faced west. the battle plan was to turn the union left first to cut off the retreat to the river. you would not, you would not logically, if you knew the federal army faced south, deploy with your army facing east, if your primary mission was to turn the union left first. that misunderstanding has a great deal to do with our understanding of why it's fought the way it is and why troops maneuver the way they do and why johnson brought so much of the

so what was shaping up here was an event yul clash at some point between between pittsburgh landing and corinth, which was going to involve basically green armies, men who had never experience experienced who had never experienced a shot fired in anger. a lot of people drive through shiloh today, you know, we lay roads out where the ground is easier to negotiate. so i think that misleads visitors today when they drive on to the battlefield, they don't get the sense of the topographical relief and the nature of the environment for which the battle is going to be fought upon if they don't get out of their cars and step into the woods and start exploring what that forest hides. what it enshrines as one historian would say, because the woods of shiloh are, in his terms, a shrine of american history. we step into the forest, we get a little bit more perspective on what was the common view for a soldier participating in the battle. and the confusion and chaos of combat now that you've got tens of thousands of muskets and dozens of cannons going off, producing all that black powder smoke, there isn't