Gettysburg Self-Guided Tour: Walk America's Turning Point

Stand where the first shots of the Battle of Gettysburg were fired on the morning of July 1, 1863. Brigadier General John Buford's Union cavalry dismounted and held this ridge against a much larger Confederate force, buying crucial hours for the rest of the army to arrive. His decision to fight rather than retreat shaped the entire three-day battle.

for both armies during the first day's fighting. Union General John Reynolds was killed nearby while directing his troops — the highest-ranking officer killed at Gettysburg. The seminary later became a Confederate field hospital overflowing with wounded from both sides.

by veterans from both sides as a symbol of reconciliation. An eternal flame burns atop the monument, and elderly former enemies shook hands across the stone wall at its dedication — a moment of healing seventy-five years in the making.

Robert E. Lee sits astride his horse Traveller atop the largest Confederate monument on the battlefield, gazing across the mile of open ground his soldiers would cross during Pickett's Charge. Seminary Ridge served as the Confederate main line for the final two days of battle — Lee's headquarters lay just behind this position.

Walk among massive boulders where sharpshooters hid and close-quarters combat raged unlike anywhere else on the battlefield. Confederate soldiers clambered over house-sized rocks while Union marksmen fired from concealed positions above in a chaotic, three-dimensional fight that defied conventional Civil War tactics.

Climb the rocky hill where Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine launched a desperate bayonet charge downhill that saved the Union left flank in one of the war's most dramatic moments. Out of ammunition and facing annihilation, Chamberlain ordered the charge that has become the stuff of American legend.

over four thousand casualties as waves of attackers and defenders surged back and forth in some of the most confused and savage fighting of the entire war. The wheat was trampled into bloody mud by nightfall.

rly lost the battle for the Union and cost him his leg to a cannonball. Sickles later had the leg bone displayed at the Army Medical Museum in Washington and reportedly visited it every year on the anniversary of the amputation.

The largest monument on the battlefield, this domed granite memorial lists the name of every Pennsylvania soldier who fought at Gettysburg — over 34,000 names engraved in bronze tablets. Climb to the observation deck for a sweeping panoramic view of the battlefield's central positions.