Ariz. park is called a threatened battlefield

Picacho Peak stands apart from the rest. The state park is scheduled to close June 3 because of budget cuts.

On April 12, 1862, Lieutenant James Barrett led Union cavalry to the rocky spire 50 miles northwest of Tucson and skirmished with Confederate Rangers. While Barrett was killed and the Union army retreated, Union forces from California eventually moved on to Tucson and snuffed out a Confederate settlement.

The battle, while a footnote in history, still attracts annual visits by re-enactors.

“A lot of people who come from the East use it as a vacation,’’ Ellen Bilbrey, a spokeswoman for Arizona State Parks, said of the Civil War reenactors.

A fund drive launched in nearby Eloy, Ariz., is attempting to keep the park open, and the inclusion by the trust in its annual endangered list is a boost to that effort, she said.

“Any attention, of course, is going to assist people who are trying to keep that park open,’’ she said.

Called History Under Siege, the most-endangered list is intended to highlight threats to what the trust calls “tangible links to our shared history.’’

With the nation about to mark 150 years since the start of the Civil War, the 2010 installment was released with the support of Jeff Shaara, a member of the trust’s board and author of “Gods and Generals,’’ among other books on the Civil War.

“Nothing creates an emotional connection between present and past like walking in the footsteps of our Civil War soldiers,’’ Shaara said in remarks prepared for the formal release of the list yesterday in Washington.

His father, Michael Shaara, wrote “The Killer Angels,’’ a historical novel on Gettysburg. The battlefield where 160,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fought in the summer of 1863 is on the endangered list because of a second attempt to bring casino gambling within one-half mile of Gettysburg National Military Park.