Along with others who migrated to the Rocky Mountain West during the mid-nineteenth century, former Union and Confederate soldiers mixed in remote western locales like the mountains and valleys of Idaho. Miners settled land and panned for gold in Idaho as early as 1860, and in July 1866, a group of friends led by Frank Barney Sharkey found gold along Napias Creek, a tributary of the Salmon River. The news spread quickly, and other prospectors rushed to the region. By August, neighbors in Bannock, Idaho reported being “quite unprepared for the stampede that set in… for the Lemhi Valley.” The new community of prospectors included veterans from both sides of the Civil War, and they soon found themselves having one last “battle,” but over the name of the community. Unable to reconcile, the pioneers settled for having two names for two communities in the one town—Grantsville named for Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Leesburg for Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The Leesburg–Grantsville compromise was short-lived. Grantsville never managed to claim more than 500 residents of its own, but Leesburg’s population swelled into the thousands. On top of that, the town’s streets were continuous and provided no clear border. Eventually people used the Leesburg name to refer to the overall community, and the Grantsville name was forgotten. Two thousand miles away from Appomattox, for at least a handful of Civil War veterans, Lee managed to get in the last word.  While post-Civil War Reconstruction led to extensive violence in the south, Leesburg remained fairly calm. Observers called the camp “unusually quiet for a mining camp and free from fights and disturbances.” The website Western Mining History speculates the Leesburgers may have been too busy surviving to waste time on fights. After all, a twelve-man team took a month-and-a-half to clear a path through the deep snows of the winter of 1866–1867 so that a pack train could bring food relief in March, saving Leesburg from starvation. After surviving that first winter, Leesburg’s population went through a rapid boom and bust. Thousands came in search of gold, and at the rush’s height some 3,000 people lived in Leesburg, including both white Americans and Chinese migrants from the West Coast. Leesburg hosted a one-room school and a hundred business firms, and its main street was a mile long. However, miners soon became unsatisfied with their returns, and interest declined. The population plummeted to 180 people by 1870 and less than sixty by 1895. Yet the allure of gold kept drawing interest back to Leesburg. In 1926, Idahoans built a small monument in Leesburg to commemorate Sharkey’s discovery of gold sixty years earlier. Meanwhile, industrial hydraulic mining and dragline mining intermittently extracted more gold out of the Leesburg area from 1926 to 1942, though these operations also did not last. Leesburg joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and today only a few cabins still stand. Few traces remain of the ghost town’s Southern migrants and Confederate veterans except for the name—their one last victory over Grant and his Union soldiers.

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The Veterans of Indian Wars Memorial, located on the southwest corner of the intersection of 500 West and Center Street in Provo, UT, was constructed by the Sons of the Utah Pioneers and unveiled July 24, 1909. The memorial is dedicated to the original settlers of Provo and residents who fought in Utah's Indian Wars from 1850 to 1868. These wars included the Walker War, the Battle of Provo River, and other conflicts. The northeast plaque lists twenty-eight individuals and thirteen families as original settlers of Provo in 1849. The southeast, southwest, and northwest plaques list 121 veterans of the Indian Wars.

There is a story in circulation that a New England company mass produced stock Civil War memorial statues in 1908 in preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the war in 1911 and that the statue on top of the Provo Indian Wars Memorial is one of these (a statue of a Union soldier). However, this rumor is untrue. "Victory," the statue that rests atop the memorial, was sculpted by Cyrus Edwin Dallin, renowned sculptor, native of Springville, and creator of The Angel Moroni statue that was placed on the LDS Salt Lake Temple spire.

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It was 5:30 a.m. on the morning of June 24, 1957 when second-lieutenant Thomas H. Saffer knelt in a trench at the Nevada Nuclear Testing Site. He and his fellow service-men had been assigned to experience the full effects of a nuclear explosion as part of the Plumbbob series. Saffer had been told that kneeling in the trench just two miles away from ground zero would protect him from the gamma rays because they only traveled in a horizontal direction. All he needed to do was kneel down, cover his eyes with his arm, and brace himself. An inter-com announced the count-down: Three, two, one . . .

"At zero, I heard a loud click. Immediately, I felt an intense heat on the back of my neck. A brilliant flash accompanied the heat, and I was shocked when, with my eyes tightly closed, I could see my bones in my forearms as though I were examining a red x-ray . . . I had been bounced helplessly around in the trench for ten to twelve seconds that seemed like an eternity. I felt as though I had been attacked and savagely beaten by a gang of toughs who hammered on my helmet and tore at my clothing from all sides. I was alive but dazed. No one had prepared me for what I had experienced. Had something gone wrong or was my encounter typical of a nuclear explosion?"

Saffer’s experience actually was typical for the thousands of soldiers who participated in the nuclear testing from 1945 to 1963. Later, he discovered that he was not the only veteran to develop serious health problems due to the heavy doses of radiation released during the nuclear explosions. An estimated 250,000 defense personnel were exposed to radiation during the United States nuclear weapons tests. For some, it meant cancer and premature death. Over the years, soldiers realized the effects of their service on their lives and fought for reparations.

In 1979, Orville E. Kelly organized the NAAV or the National Association of Atomic Veterans “for the purposes of allowing the U.S. Atomic Veteran Community to speak, with a single voice, to their inability to get a fair hearing related to their developing (radiogenic) health issues.” He was the first Atomic Veteran to be awarded compensation by the Veterans Association for the effects of radiation. In 1996, the Repeal of Nuclear Radiation and Secrecy Agreements Law allowed veterans to share their experiences during nuclear testing. The Compensation Act of 1988, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, and the 1995 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments all acknowledged the mistake of the federal government to not inform soldiers and citizens of the dangers of nuclear testing.

The government performed the tests in the name of national security, but in the end its own citizens were harmed. While the atomic bomb is often debated in the terms of war, it is important to acknowledge the costs at home.

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