16/07/2023
Sallie ... keeping watch through eternity over the spirits of her boys, just as she did so many years ago during all of the battles they shared. — Monument to the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry, Gettysburg
Sallie wasn’t lost — she was watching over the wounded and dead of her regiment...
1861: The new 11th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment was still in their first month of training, when a stranger from town brought to the captain a puppy, barely four or five weeks old, and presented it to the regiment. She was a pug-nosed brindle bull terrier that soon won the admiration of all the men in the unit. She was cute, and the men named her “Sallie” after one of the local beauties in West Chester, PA, the site of their training.
1863: On the first day's fighting at Gettysburg, the 11th PA was driven back from Oak Ridge and into town. During the chaos, Sallie became lost and three days later was found by a member of the 12th Mass. at the original position of her regiment when the fighting broke out. Sallie had found her way back and was now standing guard over the wounded and dead of her regiment. Neither hunger nor thirst swayed Sallie from her duty those hot summer days. Weak from lack of food, her comrades successfully nursed her back to health, to again serve with her regiment for nearly two more years.
Sadly, just two months before the war's end, Sallie was killed at Hatcher's Run, VA. As the battle raged around them, under “murderous fire” the weeping men of the 11th PA buried their loyal friend and comrade on the field where she fell.
In 1890, when the surviving members of the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry erected their monument, they could not forget their little companion who so bravely and so faithfully served by their sides throughout the war. There on Oak Ridge, looking out over the fields in the direction from which the rebels came, at the base of the statue is a bronze likeness of a little dog. It is Sallie ... keeping watch through eternity over the spirits of her boys, just as she did so many years ago during all of the battles they shared. A dog so loyal and so full of love for her men that they insisted she be remembered on their monument, for all time.