After the Civil War, young men whose lives had been forever changed by the battle at Pea Ridge began returning to its bullet-shattered forests and blood-soaked fields to mourn lost comrades and reflect on the meaning of their trial by fire. Confederate veterans raised an 1887 obelisk just 25 years after the fight, one of the first monuments in the nation to mark a Civil War battlefield, mourning the southern generals McCulloch, McIntosh, and Slack who were lost there. The 1889 Pea Ridge reunion was the first to include veterans from both armies, and their marble monument to “A United Soldiery” honored both “the untarnished Blue” and “the unsullied Grey.” In 1914 veterans began calling for preservation of the battlefield as sacred ground, and their descendants sought national recognition again in 1924, 1928, 1936, and 1939 until President Eisenhower signed the law in 1956 creating Pea Ridge National Military Park.