In his Official Records report on Gettysburg, dated July 6th, 1863, Chamberlain claimed that some unnamed "officer from my center" alerted him to the fact that the Confederates were attempting to move around the regiment's left flank.
Yet in different report - dated the very same day - Chamberlain claimed credit for this discovery himself. A "heavy force" of the enemy was "moving rapidly but stealthily" behind the main Confederate line toward his left, according to Chamberlain, "with the intention, as I judged, of gaining our rear unperceived."
In an article from the August 2005 issue of Civil War Times, author Jeffrey Denman states that "These reports may not have been written on July 6 at all." In at least one of the reports, as explained by Denman, Chamberlain refers to Little Round Top by name - despite the fact that it was not known as Little Round Top in 1863.
There is a good reason for this. In another article on Chamberlain from North & South magazine (Volume 8, Number 4), author Glenn W. LaFantasie points out that Chamberlain's report reproduced in the Official Records was written in 1884 - twenty-one years after the fight on Little Round Top rather than four days. (LaFantasie credits historian Tom Desjardin for bringing this to his attention.)
Why is this so, and why is the report dated 1863 instead of 1884? When the Records were being assembled for publication in the 1880's, Chamberlain's report from Gettysburg could not be found. He was asked to submit a substitute report, which he proceeded to do, unaware that the original was in the Maine State Archives. No mention is made in the Records that Chamberlain's Gettysburg report is in fact a substitute - nearly twice as long as the original - written long after the war. More than a century would pass before this fact was finally uncovered, thanks to historian Tom Desjardin. (This information is taken from Glenn LaFantasie's article.)
After the war, Chamberlain named Lieutenant James H. Nichols as the officer who pointed out the Confederate flanking column; but at a dedication ceremony in 1889, after his own version of the fight on Little Round Top had been repeatedly called into question, he seemed to suggest that more than one officer was responsible for detecting the move without naming anyone at all.
To further complicate matters, Ellis Spear, captain of Company G at Gettysburg, claimed after the war that he was the one who called Chamberlain's attention to the flanking movement. "I went quickly over to [Chamberlain]," Spear would recall, "and advised him of the situation."
