You're standing WHERE?

Years ago, my marido David Anderson told me about research he did for his college thesis.  In it, he looked at perspective of the viewer.  Who, exactly, is seeing the monument? Where are they looking when they see it? How does that affect the nature of our interpretation of the monument?

He was looking at carved stone monuments in Maya sites.  And it poses an interesting question - what is the ruler looking at while the subjects are looking at him?  

I just didn't expect to be asking the same question in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The image above is taken from across the street - at the local Taco Casa - on Pemberton Avenue.  Lieutenant General John Pemberton was the commander of the forces in Vicksburg during the siege, and there are a number of places in town that are named in his honor.  The picture is not terribly clear, so I will provide a close-up of what you see from the street when you drive by the bronze plaque.

That's right.  The plaque is intended to be read from the other side.

Also in the grassy area between the Newk's parking lot (a McAlister's deli kind of sandwich shop) and the beloved Taco Casa (replete with its Ty-D-Bowl blue fountain out front) is a slight rise, with a circle of carved monuments and obelisks.

You can just make out the circle of monuments in the grassy area.
The yellow pin at the top shows the location of the bronze plaque.

None of them - not the monuments nor the cenotaph -  are visible from any convenient area.

This is the point in the narrative where the hero has an opportunity to discuss the personal risks taken
to get the picture.  Pemberton is a crazy place to be a pedestrian.  Traffic is not well regulated by the lights, and passes pretty quickly as people travel in a hurry from Home Despot to Wal-Mart.  And NOBODY expects someone to actually try to cross it on foot.

But because I care about y'all, I braved it.

The cenotaph is for Iowa.

Iowa, 20th Infantry, 1st Brigade, Herron's Division, Sharpshooters line
June 24 - July 4 1863, about 750 yards in front of marker.

Wait, what?  The plaque is commemorating a group that were located at a secondary location?  I had to check it out.  Opening GoogleEarth...

Aerial view of the monument at the bottom.
And the point, 750 yards in front of the monument,
where the sharpshooters would have been.

Measured 750 yards at the rough declension of the angle of the monument, expecting for it to reference a location in a parking lot.  Nope.  

It is across the road, across the parking lot, across the interstate (both directions), across an open field, over another road, and almost to the windy Confederate Avenue that parallels the other side of the Interstate 20.  It is not even CLOSE to the location of the marker.

Was it even close enough to be hit by a Civil War sniper?

The two rifles most often used in the Civil war were the Enfield Rifle and the Springfield.  Both had a limit of about 500 yards (Realistically, though, hitting anything beyond 500 yards was mostly a matter of luck). The Whitworth, apparently, was able to send a hexagonal bullet 1,000 yards, and was favored by Confederate snipers.

OK, so it is possible. 

But why would you put the marker so far away?