On Gettysburg Anniversary, Remains Of War Victim To Receive Proper Burial

GETTYSBURG, Pa. - Before sunset one March evening last year, a traveler from Oregon was walking across the Civil War battlefield here when he saw something sticking from the ground.

The area was known as "the railroad cut" - an unfinished track bed where young men from Pennsylvania and New York regiments collided with Confederate soldiers from Mississippi and North Carolina on July 1, 1863.

The traveler looked hard at what he saw in the flat light - something brown and broken. "It appeared to be bones of some kind," recalled Curt Johnson, 52, a National Park Service ranger at Fort Clatsop, Ore.

Johnson had stumbled upon a Civil War soldier - the first discovered in 56 years on a battleground where 3,200 men from the North and 3,900 from the South lay slain.

On the battle anniversary tomorrow, the bones Johnson found - fragments of a skull, lower jaw and teeth, shoulder blade, backbone, pelvis, ribs, arms, a lower leg, a foot - will be buried at the national cemetery where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address.

The soldier may have been a Yankee or a rebel. Either way, he was an American, and so will be buried with the fullest honors the U.S. military can give.

Princeton University historian James McPherson, who will speak at the ceremony, noted that each year thousands of Americans re-enact battles of the Civil War. It's one thing to do a re-enactment, he said. It's quite another to attend a funeral for a Gettysburg casualty.