loves a good scenic description

In the cold dawn, it started to rain.

Grant started to insist that only officers could take their horses with them but then he reflected: "I take it that most of the men in the ranks are small farmers, and as the country has been so raided by the two armies, it is doubtful whether they will be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter without the aid of the horses they are now riding."

But, as a concession, he said he would allow Southern officers to keep their swords and horses. Lee replied, "This will have a very happy effect on my army" and then added, "The cavalrymen and artillerists own their own horses in our army. Its organization in this respect differs from the United States."

Next day, the Fourth of July, in pouring rain, Lee started the retreat to Virginia.

Right on they move, as with one soul, in perfect order, without impediment of ditch, or wall or stream, over ridge and slope, through orchard and meadow, and cornfield, magnificent, grim, irresistible.

The hills are so honeycombed with caves that the streets look like avenues in a cemetery.

Citizens burrowed deep into the clay for shelter.

Over two days in September 1862 Lee and McClellan slugged it out across the little town of Sharpsburg, Maryland – in rolling farmland, along a stubborn road, and across Antietam creek.

The Unionists rallied and there was bitter fighting in a peach orchard, with pink blossoms raining down in the hail of bullets.

Weighed down with ridiculously heavy packs, the troops kept breaking ranks to pick blackberries or get water.

Two months later he got his first sight of the nation's capital: Hurrah we are in Washington and what a city! Mud, pigs, geese, Negroes, palaces, shanties everywhere. (...)"

Kansas descended into anarchy – as Edward Bridgman, a new settler scribbled to a relative in Massachusetts in May 1856: "In some small towns the men are called up nearly every night to hold themselves in readiness to meet the worst scouting parties of Alabamians, Georgians and Missourians are around continually, plundering clothes yards, horses and cattle, and everything they can lay hold of."

Wood floors rather than dirt; a plaster ceiling instead of insect-ridden thatch; and an iron stove, not an open fire in a smoke-filled room.

Once ashore, many wandered around aimlessly – dodging the pigs and rabid dogs that roamed the streets – until they ended up, penniless, in the city almshouse.

Then Marshall pulled a rag from his pocket and showed Sutter some bits of yellow ore he had found in the mill race.

On a rainy afternoon in January 1848 James Marshall, who was building a sawmill for Sutter, called by.

What William Clayton took from afar to be a fertile valley was actually an arid plateau, rainless for half the year; the water at its center was the Great Salt Lake.