The canyon floor where lodges burned and where Mackenzie’s troops controlled the field is now the floor where families camp and ride bikes and hike.

This layering — the contemporary recreational use of a landscape where something significant and violent and consequential happened — is characteristic of many American historical landscapes.

The beauty of the place does not erase what happened there.

The history does not negate the beauty.

The Strategy That Worked

Philip Sheridan had watched, from the Civil War, what happened when an army abandoned the assumption that battles and campaigns must be decided by pitched military engagement.

In the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, Sheridan had implemented a deliberate scorched-earth policy — burning crops, destroying livestock, eliminating the economic base that supported Confederate forces in the valley.