The soldiers breathed a huge sigh of relief. She was safe and unharmed. Slightly dazed and numb, even traumatized. But who wasn’t traumatized at that moment? After all, they had just come through the bloodiest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere.

But Sallie wasn’t a combatant. She didn’t carry a gun or wear a uniform. Yet when the fighting was ferocious, she was right there on the battlefield. When things grew grim, she didn’t turn tail and run. Instead, she displayed a heroic dedication deeper than words can express. At last, she was reunited with the people who meant the world to her.

All that was off in the future one morning in May 1861 when she first met the boys of the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War’s earliest days. The regiment was training at West Chester, Pennsylvania’s fairgrounds. A local resident showed up bearing a special gift for the troops. As Colonel Richard Coulter later recalled, “It was a brindle bull terrier puppy of a fine breed” who “showed marks of her blood.”

It was love at first sight. The soldiers were crazy about the puppy, and she was equally infatuated with them. They christened her Sallie Ann Jarrett, the first two names being inspired by a young lady the men admired, and the last name coming from the unit’s first commander Phaon Jarrett.

Soon, she was just Sallie.

When the 11th went to the front, Sallie went with them. She was no fireside mascot. Sallie accompanied the infantrymen on their drills, marched with them in parades (passing twice before Abraham Lincoln), and becoming such a prominent personality the regiment gained the nickname “Dick Coulter’s Dog.”

She was also on the frontlines in the thick of the fighting, barking at the enemy like crazy as muskets and cannons roared around her on some of the bloodiest battlefields in American history: Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville.

Sallie made the long march back to Pennsylvania as Robert E. Lee’s troops headed there in the summer of 1863. She was with her boys on the morning of July 1 as a wall of gray swept out of the hills and shattered the Union lines. As the regiment retreating toward the town and on to Cemetery Ridge, Sallie became lost. The men fretted she had been killed. When Lee’s battered army finally retreated a few days later, the 11th hurried back to Oak Ridge where they had last seen her amid the smoke and confusion of battle.

And that’s where they found her, standing guard over their wounded comrades still bleeding on the ground in the brutal summer heat. Sallie’s devotion never faltered. There was a happy reunion in camp that night.

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