two hundred feet high, rising almost out of
the stream, was unassailable from the river front. Farragut had, indeed,
in midsummer passed up and down before it with little damage from its
fire; but, in return, his own guns could no more do harm to its
batteries than they could have bombarded a fortress in the clouds.

When, by the middle of November, 1862, Grant was able to reunite
sufficient reinforcements, he started on a campaign directly southward
toward Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and sent Sherman, with an
expedition from Memphis, down the river to the mouth of the Yazoo,
hoping to unite these forces against Vicksburg. But before Grant reached
Grenada his railroad communications were cut by a Confederate raid, and
his great depot of supplies at Holly Springs captured and burned,
leaving him for two weeks without other provisions than such as he could
gather by foraging. The costly lesson proved a valuable experience to
him, which he soon put to use. Sherman's expedition also met disaster.
Landing at Milliken's Bend, on the west bank of the Mississippi, he
ventured a daring storming assault from the east bank of the Yazoo at
Haines's Bluff, ten miles north of Vicksburg, but met a bloody repulse.

Having abandoned his railroad advance, Grant next joined Sherman at
Milliken's Bend in January, 1863, where also Admiral Porter, with a
river squadron of seventy vessels, eleven of them ironclads, was added
to his force. For the next three months Grant kept his large army and
flotilla busy with four different experiments to gain a practicable
advance toward Vicksburg, until his fifth highly novel and, to other
minds, seemingly reckless and impossible plan secured him a brilliant
success and results of immense military advantage. One experiment was to
cut a canal across the tongue of land opposite Vicksburg, through which
the flotilla might pass out of range of the Vicksburg guns. A second was
to force the gunboats and transports up the tortuous and swampy Yazoo to
find a landing far north of Haines's Bluff. A third was for the flotilla
to enter through Yazoo Pass and Cold Water River, two hundred miles
above, and descend the Yazoo to a hoped-for landing. Still a fourth
project was to cut a canal into Lake Providence west of the Mississippi,
seventy miles above, find a practicable waterway through two hundred
miles of bayous and rivers, and establish communication with Banks and
Farragut, who were engaged in an effor