nth of December its attempt to carry the Chickasaw Bluffs,
just north of Vicksburg, was completely frustrated by Pemberton; for
Sherman could not deploy into line on the few causeways that stood
above the flooded ground.

On the eleventh of January this first campaign along the Mississippi
was ended by the capture of Arkansas Post. McClernand was the senior
there. But Sherman did the work ashore as D. D. Porter did afloat.

Meanwhile Bragg had brought the campaign to a close among the eastern
tributaries by a daring, though abortive, march on Nashville. Rosecrans,
now commanding the army of the Cumberland, stopped and defeated him
at Stone's River on New Year's Eve.

The "War in the West," that is, in those parts of the Southwest
which lay beyond the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi system,
was even more futile at the time and absolutely null in the end.
Its scene of action, which practically consisted of inland Texas,
New Mexico, and Arizona, was not in itself important enough to be
a great determining factor in the actual clash of arms. But Texas
supplied many good men to the Southern ranks; and the Southern
commissariat missed the Texan cattle after the fall of Vicksburg
in '63. New Mexico might also have been a good deal more important
than it actually was if it could have been made the base of a real,
instead of an abortive, invasion of California, the El Dorado of
Confederate finance.

We have already seen what happened on February 15, 1861, when General
Twiggs handed over to the State authorities all the army posts in
Texas. On the first of the following August Captain John R. Baylor,
who had been forming a little Confederate army under pretext of a
big buffalo hunt, proclaimed himself Governor of New Mexico (south
of 34 deg.) and established his capital at Mesilla. In the meantime the
Confederate Government itself had appointed General H. H. Sibley
to the command of a brigade for the conquest of all New Mexico.
Not ten thousand men were engaged in this campaign, Federals and
Confederates, whites and Indians, all together; but a decisive
Confederate success might have been pregnant of future victories
farther west. Some Indians fought on one side, some on the other;
and some of the wilder tribes, delighted to see the encroaching
whites at loggerheads, gave trouble to both.

On February 21, 1862, Sibley defeated Colonel E. R. S. Canby at
Valverde near Fort Craig. But his further advance was hindere