The story of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg seems almost an anachronism in this nineteenth century. It carries one back to the heroic ages with a suggestion of the Iliad or of the Spartans at Thermopylæ. Its truly modern phase is the matter-of-fact manner in which our military historians pass it by with barest mention as a mere tactical incident of a wholesale battle-field, and the consequent ignorance of the American public concerning one of the most romantic incidents of our history. Minnesota was too young in those days to have many native sons, and her generous quota of volunteers was filled with scions of that truest American Aristocracy, the Commonwealth Founders whose motto is "Westward Ho!" Out of Eastern homes, scattered all the way from Maine to Michigan, these bold spirits had come to the North Star State to carve careers for themselves, and their country's call to arms met with quick and whole-souled response. The First Minnesota regiment was fortunate in its commanders. Three colonels had risen from it to the command of brigades, two of them regular army officers under whose rigid schooling the regiment gained a high reputation for discipline and efficiency. But Colville who commanded at Gettysburg, was a typical Westerner, tall, ungainly, with strong and homely face of the Lincoln stamp. It is said that when his turn for promotion came he at first refused, thinking himself unfit; but the moment of supreme trial showed his mistaken modesty. Perhaps you have seen a thunder-cloud lie black and threatening in the west on a sultry summer day. Slowly it masses its lurid bulk, while you ask yourself anxiously where and when it will strike. So Meade and his generals, unprepared as yet with their scattered corps slowly arriving, watched Lee's army on the second of July, the really decisive day of Gettysburg; for Pickett's grand charge on the morrow was but a last desperate attempt to retrieve an already lost cause. About four o'clock in the afternoon the marshalled storm marched forth roaring in the fury of Longstreet's tremendous assault upon the exposed line of our Third Corps, and from then until dark, along the Emmettsburgh Road, in the Peach Orchard, about Throstle's farm-house, amid the Rocks of the Devil's Den, up and over Round Top, to and fro through the bloody Wheat Field such a combat raged as the world had not seen since Waterloo. Away at the rear, a mile behind the battle's outmost edge, on the slope of that ridge against which the storm spent itself at last, Battery C, Fourth United States Artillery, goes into position, and the First Minnesota, weakened now by the detachment of two companies for other duty, is ordered to its support. The eight companies number two hundred and sixty-two men: a slender battalion, for their dead and wounded have been left behind on a score of hard-fought fields.