This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [140]
He still had his original problem: how to get his army to a spot where it could attack Vicksburg with some chance of success. For a time it looked as if the answer might lie up the river.
Across the Mississippi from Helena, Arkansas, and just a few miles downstream — two hundred miles above Vicksburg, or thereabouts, as the winding river went — there was a lackadaisical chain of bayous, flooded swamps, and inconsequential streams known as Yazoo Pass which began just under the lee of the Mississippi levee and communicated at last with the Coldwater River, which fed into a stream known as the Tallahatchie, which in turn went into the Yalobusha, which finally, some 250 desolate miles later, went into the Yazoo. If the levee were cut, boats from the Mississippi could go down this intricate waterway. With any luck they could come out on dry ground a little distance above the mouth of the Yazoo — dead north of Vicksburg, where an army would have the option either of hitting the Chickasaw Bluffs which had stopped Sherman or of circling east and coming up to the fortress from the rear.
This was worth a try, and late in February an expedition got under way — twenty thousand infantry in transports, with a force of navy gunboats to clear the way. Army engineers blew up a mine to break the levee, a miniature Niagara went boiling through Yazoo Pass, and presently eight gunboats and two rams, followed by transports bearing the army’s advance guard, went hopefully into the waterway.
Naval officer in charge was Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith, and from the start he found himself mixed up in a sailor’s nightmare. The stream he was to follow wound and turned on itself interminably and was full of snags that could rip the bottom out of an incautiously piloted gunboat; there was a powerful current that made it impossible to steer properly, and when the flotilla made three miles a day it was doing well. Smith was a salt-water sailor, and here he was with a squadron of valuable warships navigating in waters where one of the hazards was the chance that the branches of overhanging trees would knock down his smokestacks. The stream was narrow, and artful Confederates swarmed all about, felling trees to clog the waterways. Between the navy and the army engineers, these obstructions were removed — young Colonel James H. Wilson of Grant’s staff would send an entire regiment ashore, tail them onto cables, and have them haul the felled trees out by sheer strength and awkwardness. It worked so well, he said, that he never afterward wondered how the Egyptians had hauled their great blocks of stone to build the pyramids — obviously they did it by everyday manpower. In one way and another, this amphibious expedition got deeper and deeper into the half-drowned country of the Yazoo Delta.4 March wore away, and the sailors and soldiers inched their way down toward the Yazoo River. They got, at last, after a good deal of pulling and hauling and worrying, to the place where the Yalobusha flowed into the Yazoo; and here, on the only bit of dry ground visible for miles around, the Confederates had built a stout little fort of cotton bales and scooped-up earth, which they called Fort Pemberton. It mounted very few guns, but as things worked out, these few were more than enough.
The river was narrow, and the gunboats could approach just one at a time, in line ahead. Of the eight gunboats, only two were proper ironclads, and these had been hastily and poorly built; when they steamed up for a duel, the Confederate gunners racked them, receiving little damage in return. The logical thing to do now was to land