Daniel gives a lot of time and pages to the Sunken Road in his book. In Timothy Smith's more recent works on Shiloh he has really began to convince others, including me, that the most important fighting of the day wasn't done on the Sunken Road but rather by McClernand and Sherman. Smith points at the records of the battle written by the commanders who largely overlooked/ignored the Sunken Road in the aftermath of the battle. He also states that the mass graves of Shiloh are all located elsewhere and not by the Sunken Road (meaning more fighting went on elsewhere). He argues that it wouldn't have made any sense to bury Confederate dead a half-mile or mile from where they fell and all the mass graves are located elsewhere. Even the burial pits of Union regiments were largely away from the Sunken Road. Smith interestingly paints a different Shiloh picture and believes the popular Shiloh interpretation stems from the first Park Service Historian, and Shiloh veteran, David W. Reed. Reed served in an Iowa regiment along the Sunken Road and may have purposefully made the role the Iowa units played a bit more crucial than they actually were. He also believes the guided tour rout, laid out by Reed back in the early 20th Century, was made to emphasize the importance of the Sunken Road as the crucial point on the field. Only in the past five years has the battlefield FINALLY re-routed the tour to include more of the fields around the Sunken Road to tell the full story of the fight put up by Sherman and McClernand.