For our June program, Arnold Schofield will be talking about the Battle of Palmito Ranch, fought on May 12-13 near Brownsville, Texas. It was the last battle of the American Civil War and took place more than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

Here's a link to the article.

This article was written by Tom Zoellner and appears on the Texas Observer website. An excerpt ...

"War is full of ironies, not the least of which is that infantrymen are asked to spill blood for the sake of occupying a piece of earth that wouldn’t be worth a glance on any other day.

"'We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name,' complains a captain marching off to war in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 'To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it.'

"So it was with an unremarkable patch of salt prairie to the east of Brownsville, where on May 12 and 13, 1865, a Union advance was beaten back by Confederate artillery fire. About 800 troops were involved at what came to be called the Battle of Palmito Ranch."