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Plum Run (known after the Battle of Gettysburg as Bloody Run) flows roughly in a north-south direction from Culp's Hill to around the south flank of Round Top to where it joins Rock Creek. The little run, a by-product of the Ice Age, played a dynamic part in the formation of the area it now flows through. Fueled by meltwater and heavy rains at the end of the Ice Age, the run became a torrential stream (in spite of its docile appearance today), single-handedly cutting through the old red shale beds that covered the hardened magma chambers that became the Round Tops and Stoney Hill. The southern extremity of this rapidly eroded and widening streambed would come to be known on July 2, 1863, as the Valley of Death.
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At 5:30 p.m. on July 2, 1863, Confederate General Joseph B. Kershaw's brigade advanced across Emmitsburg Road, through the Rose Farm, and towards Stony Hill. His assault on Stony Hill would carry his brigade beyond the hill, across the Wheatfield, and to the west flank of the Valley of Death (Plum Run Valley). A little earlier, and still in progress, Confederate General John Bell Hood commenced with his push against Devils Den. Both of these assaults were part of a coordinated attack to crush "Sickles' Bulge," a salient in the Union line caused by Union General Daniel Sickles when he advanced his corps too far in front of the Union battleline formed along Cemetery Ridge.
While the Union's 4th New York Battery and Brigadier General Hobart Ward's brigade endeavored to stave off Hood's assault at the Den, Union General John Caldwell's Second Corps division charged across the Valley of Death to dislodge Kershaw whose troops had formed up along Houck's Ridge. The counter-attack pushed Kershaw all the way back through the Wheatfield and back over the hard-won Stony Hill. Caldwell was then subsequently counter-assaulted by the combined forces of Kershaw and those of Brigadier General Paul J. Semmes and Brigadier General William T. Wofford. This combined multi-brigade assault cleared the Union troops off Stony Hill and out of the Wheatfield and brought them to the brink of the Valley of Death along Houck's Ridge once again. In the meantime, Hood's troops had taken Devils Den, spilling over into the Slaughter Pen and the southern perimeter of the valley, and even to the crest of Round Top. Confederate troops from Hood's command tried repeatedly to assail Little Round Top from the "saddle" (the rift between the south slope of Little Round Top and the north slope of Big Round Top), finally giving up and withdrawing from their attacks to take the hill just as Union 20th Maine Colonel Joshua Chamberlain launched his much-taunted (but useless) bayonet charge (he had attacked the 15th Alabama, who had already been ordered off the hill just prior to his charge, recklessly endangering the Union left flank in the process). Hood's Texans tried to assail the west flank of Little Round Top from the southern area of the Valley of Death. The combined effect of Union artillery now in place on the crest of Little Round Top and a fierce and desperate counter-attack by the 140th New York, part of Union Brigadier General Stephen H. Weed's Brigade, drove the Texans back. Weed and the rest of his brigade arrived just in time for a Confederate sharpshooter to send a bullet through the general's body from shoulder to shoulder, severing his spinal cord. Ultimately, a charge across the Valley of Death by Union Colonel William McCandless' Brigade drove Kershaw, Semmes and Wofford back into the Wheatfield. McCandless' drive stalled at the edge of the Wheatfield, even after being reinforced by two other brigades. Hood's troops could not be dislodged from Devils Den nor the Slaughter Pen, and their sharpshooters and crack shots turned the Valley of Death into a deadly no man's land for Union officers, couriers and troops going to and from the Wheatfield line. Fighting in the Valley of Death generally ended after dark, although Confederates continued to fire at any moving target they could spot in the darkness. Thousands of dying and dead Union and Confederate soldiers littered the ground from Stony Hill to Triangular Field, across the Wheat Field, across the Valley of Death, amid the Slaughter Pen, and along the base and slopes of Little Round Top. |
| Copyright 2004 Catherine Curtis-Richard Fulton |
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