Huntingdon Hero

Checked against the record. SOURCE UPGRADED from Wikipedia to two federal pages and one nineteenth-century biographical record, and the page gained more than it lost. CONFIRMED, from the Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of the Juniata Valley of 1897, which is in the project's own corpus: "David McMurtrie Gregg, born April 10, 1833, at Huntingdon; graduated at West Point, 1855 ... colonel Eighth Pennsylvania Cavalry in January, 1862; brigadier general of volunteers, November 29, 1862", and service through the Gettysburg campaign. The page had his birthplace and his rank right and can now date both. CONFIRMED at the National Park Service: on the afternoon of 3 July 1863, "United States cavalry under General David Gregg stopped Jeb Stuart's Confederates from turning the Federal flank and threatening Meade's rear." That is the site's claim that Stuart never got around behind the Union line, in the Park Service's own words. ADDED, all from the Park Service: Gregg was outnumbered; McIntosh's and Custer's 3,200 men attacked from three sides; the Union lost 254 men and the Confederates 450. And the Gregg Cavalry Shaft, erected in 1884, which the Park Service calls the only monument commemorating the services of both Union and Confederate cavalry at Gettysburg. A superlative, so it is carried as theirs and attributed rather than asserted here. TWO THINGS DROPPED for want of a source. "About three miles east of town" - no distance was found on any page opened. And "one of the most important cavalry actions of the war", which is a ranking claim and needs its own support; the casualty figures and the Park Service's own account of what Stuart failed to do carry the weight better than an adjective would. The hand-to-hand detail is left out for the same reason. It is very likely true and it is attributed in secondary accounts to a Confederate officer of Lee's Brigade, but that account was not opened here.