ish him with food and ammunition.
This last alternative appears to have been the one towards which
the government leaned, as far as its intentions can be gathered,
yet Banks could only have accepted it by sacrificing his communications,
putting New Orleans in imminent peril, and creating irreparable
and almost inevitable disaster as a price of a remote chance of
achieving a great success. In point of fact, in the early days of
January, McClernand, accompanied by Sherman as a corps commander,
was moving toward the White River and the brilliant adventure of
Arkansas Post. After capturing this place on the 11th, McClernand
meant to go straight to Little Rock, but Grant rose to the occasion
and peremptorily recalled the troops to Milliken's Bend. "This
wild-goose chase," as Grant not inaptly termed it, cost McClernand
his new-fledged honors as commander of "The Army of the Mississippi,"
and brought him to Sherman's side as a commander of one of his own
corps; a bitter draught of the same medicine he had so recently
administered to Sherman.

Had Banks marched against Vicksburg at the same time that McClernand
was moving on Little Rock, with Grant cut off somewhere in northern
Mississippi, the Confederate commanders must have been dull and
slow indeed had they failed to seize with promptitude so rare an
opportunity for resuming, at a sweep, the complete mastery of the
river, ruining their adversary's campaign, and eliminating 100,000
of his soldiers.

Thus, almost at the first step, the two great expeditions were
brought to a standstill. They could neither act together nor
advance separately. The generals began to look about them for a
new way.

CHAPTER VII.
MORE WAYS THAN ONE.

Since Port Hudson could neither be successfully attacked nor safely
disregarded, the problem now presented to Banks was to find a way
around the obstacle without sacrificing or putting in peril his
communications. The Atchafalaya was the key to the puzzle, and to
that quarter attention was early directed, yet for a long time the
difficulties encountered in finding a way to the Atchafalaya seemed
well-nigh insuperable. The rising waters were expected to render
the largest of the bayous that connect the Atchafalaya and the
Mississippi navigable for steamboats of small size and light draught.
Of these there were, indeed, but few, so that the work of transporting
troops from the one line to the other must have been, at the best,
slow and