The steamer _Grey Hawk_ cast off from the New Madrid landing at dawn of
day.
The years just preceding the Civil War and the years of the war were the
great days of steamboating on the Mississippi and its tributaries.
Hundreds of boats, large and small, ran on the main stream, on the Ohio,
the Missouri, the Illinois, the Minnesota and other rivers of the great
Mississippi basin. The average life time of a Mississippi steamer was
only five years, because countless snags, ice, fires, and other dangers
were the bad medicine to navigation on all the streams. None of them
were improved, none had any system of lights or signs; the pilots had to
know the rivers, whose currents and sandbars and snags were constantly
shifting. But the business was so profitable that the trips of one
season often paid for the boat. Settlers were rushing into the western
country and they and all their goods went by steamboat, for no railroads
had yet crossed the Mississippi. On the turbulent Missouri the steamers
ran to the mouth of the Yellowstone and beyond, taking up settlers,
soldiers, general freight and goods for the Indian trade, and bringing
back loads of buffalo-skins and other fur from the Rocky Mountain
country. On the Minnesota small steamers ran two hundred miles beyond
St. Paul into the newly opened Sioux country to market the first wheat
of the new settlers. A few small boats plied on the upper Mississippi
above St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the lumber industry and
flour-mills were just developing.
The Civil War proved a fatal blow to river traffic. Both the Federal and
the Confederate government commandeered a large number of vessels for
war purposes, and many of those were wrecked and sunk or burnt in
battle.
Immediately after the war, railroads began to parallel the Mississippi
and its navigable tributaries. The steamboat traffic lingered for a
number of years, but it never again attained its former glory, and soon
sank into its present insignificance.
Moreover, the great movement of traffic in North America is east and
west, while the trend of our great navigable river system is north and
south.
Barker and Tatanka, as well as the boys, found life on a Mississippi
steamer very attractive.
The broad main channel and bayous, sloughs and oxbow lakes; the high
bluffs and the lowland forests, had all in turn lured them on to much
hard traveling and many interesting side-trips. But just now they all
felt that they had had enough of traveling by birch-bark, enough of
camping wherever a good place invited them, and enough of eating
whatever they could secure.
Below Cairo the low lands widen. There are no distinct hills or bluffs
on the west side, while the Chickasaw Bluffs which stretch from Cairo to
Memphis are in places ten miles from the river.
A long time ago the Gulf of Mexico extended probably as far north as
Cairo, and the great flood-plain from Cairo to the Gulf is land, which
was made by the Mississippi. From the Alleghenies, from the Rocky
Mountains, from the Black Hills, the Ozarks, and the prairies of
Minnesota, the streams are ever bringing down fine, fertile soil into
the Mississippi, which spreads it at times of high water over fields,
forests, and swamps and carries some of it into the gulf. So great is
the amount of fine soil carried by the great river that every year it
would make a vast block a square mile in area and four hundred feet
high.
Of all the travelers on the _Grey Hawk_, Tatanka took the keenest
interest in everything around him; for he had, before this trip, never
seen the Mississippi farther south than La Crosse in Wisconsin. "Why do
the white people need so many ships?" he wondered. "What will they do
with all the big guns they have, and where are all the soldiers going to
fight!"
"My friend," Barker told him, "wait till we reach Vicksburg. There you
will see soldiers and guns."
"Where do all the black people live?" he asked. "Do they live in the
woods and come out to work in the fields of cotton that we have seen?
"If our young men could have seen all the soldiers and ships and guns
and towns of the white people, they never would have made war against
them."
The second day on the boat was a Sunday and the pastry-cook did his best
to furnish a wonderful collection of cakes, pies, and jellies.
Barker and the boys could not help being amused at the way Tatanka
looked furtively at the sumptuous Sunday dinner. The variously colored
jellies served in tall glasses, especially excited his-curiosity and
suspicion.
"Is it medicine or is it to eat?" he whispered to Barker.
"It's all to be eaten," Barker informed him. "Don't think again of bad
medicine on this boat."
"If the Sioux chiefs were here," Tatanka remarked with a smile, "they
would have to carry away many glasses of food, for it is the custom of
the Indians to take away with them whatever they cannot eat at a feast.
"Captain Banks must be very rich to have so many dishes on his ship."
The pilot of the _Grey Hawk_ did not know the river well enough to run
after dark, so the passengers saw the whole distance by daylight.
At night a group of colored deck-hands appeared as minstrels for the
entertainment of the passengers.
"The black men have big white teeth and big white eyes, and they can
sing and dance," Tatanka remarked, "but they couldn't give the Sioux
war-whoop."
About the 20th of June the steamer tied up at Haynes Bluff on the Yazoo
River.
Tatanka, who had wondered at the soldiers and ships at New Madrid, was
here simply bewildered. Ships, teams, mule-teams, ox-teams, horse-teams,
and soldiers and more soldiers everywhere; infantry, cavalry, and
terrible artillery. Tatanka, with the observant eyes of an Indian scout,
saw everything, but hardly spoke a word all day.
Grant had by this time about 70,000 men, an army about ten times as
large as the whole Sioux nation. From Haynes Bluff southward his lines
were stretched out and entrenched over a distance of fifteen miles.
Over hills, through ravines, through woods and cane-brakes ran the sheer
endless line of rifle-pits, trenches, parapets, and batteries. And in
front of the Union works, rose in grim defiance the lines and pits and
batteries of the Confederates. The lines of the two armies ran about
three miles east of Vicksburg over wooded hills which rise about two
hundred feet above the river. For one month since the 19th of May the
Confederate army under General John C. Pemberton and the city of
Vicksburg had been besieged, by the Union army, while the Union fleets
held the river above and below the city.
General Pemberton, now in command at Vicksburg, was the same man, who
two years ago had taken his battery from Fort Ridgely to La Crosse on
the _Fanny Harris_.
Grant had at first attempted to take the city by assault, but had found
that the Confederates were so strongly entrenched and defended their
lines so stubbornly that the Northern army had to settle down to a
regular siege with the object of starving their opponents into
surrender.
Many Northern people came to visit their friends in Grant's army. They
brought with them turkeys and chickens and ducks as gifts to the Boys in
Blue, but for once the soldiers did not appreciate these delicacies.
While they were maneuvering and fighting to get into their present
position on the hills in the rear of Vicksburg, Grant had boldly cut
loose from his base of supplies. Foraging parties had scoured the
plantations for anything they could find, and the army had largely
existed on poultry.
"Give us bacon and bread!" was now the cry. "We are sick of anything
that crows or quacks or gobbles; we are sick of all meat with wings.
Give us bacon and bread!"
Once while Grant was riding along the lines, a soldier recognizing him
called in a low voice, "Hardtack." In a moment the cry ran along the
whole line, "Hardtack! Hardtack!" Grant assured the men that a road had
been built for the distribution of regular commissary supplies such as
bread, hardtack, coffee, sugar, bacon, and salt meat. The men at once
gave a ringing cheer, and on the next day full rations were issued to
the whole army.
The four travelers from the North had plenty of opportunity to watch the
operations of a great siege, and Barker met several men whom he had
known in Indiana and Minnesota.
There was little fighting now, but much digging of pits and trenches and
some mining and counter-mining.
"We are just camping here," an old acquaintance told Barker, "and the
digging is good. No rocks in these hills as in the hills of New England
and New York.
"If the Johnnies weren't camping so blasted close to us, it would be a
fine life. As it is, the man who shows his head above the parapets is
done for. The sharpshooters get him.
"I just got through digging and sitting in a pit twenty-four hours.
"Three men from our company were detailed to dig an advance rifle-pit.
We started after dark with picks and shovels. Two men with picks
scratched up the dirt, the third man threw it out. We made no noise; a
mole couldn't have worked more silently. Heavens, how we scratched and
dug! By daylight, our pit was deep enough to shelter us. It had to be or
we wouldn't have come back. But it was not deep enough for us to stand
up. All day we sat and lay in that hole. At noon the sun almost roasted
us brown, although we crouched against the shaded wall.
"In the afternoon it began to rain and some of our dirt washed back into
the pit.
"'Mike,' I said to my Irish fellow-digger, 'I guess we'll have to swim
or surrender.'
"'By me faith,' Mike replied, 'I'll wait till the water runs over me
gun-muzzle. We can't surrender because our shirts are too dirty for
white flags.'
"We agreed that Mike was right, and sitting in the sticky mud, we ate
the rest of our bread and bacon before the rain could spoil it.
"After the rain was over, some sharpshooters began to practice on our
pit. They couldn't hit us, and we were right glad that they gave us
something to think and talk about.
"After dark three other men relieved us and we had a chance to stretch
our bones."
"What did these men have to do?" the boys wanted to know.
"Deepen the pit," the soldier told them, "and widen it to right and left
in the direction of two other rifle-pits. You see in that way we push
our lines closer and closer to the enemy.
"In many places we are so close now that the men can talk to each
other."
Quite often the Union soldiers who were short of tobacco would barter
bacon or bread for tobacco, because the Confederates at this time were
beginning to feel the shortage of food.
All through the Civil War the men in both armies showed a fine spirit of
chivalry to the enemy, whenever duty and the stern law of war would
permit acts of courtesy and kindness.
At one time in the Vicksburg siege a dead mule between the lines became
unbearably offensive to the Confederates.
"Heh, Yanks!" a soldier shouted, "we've got to bury that mule. He's
smelling us out."
"All right," the Yankee boys replied. "We smelled him yesterday. Send
out three men, and we'll send three. Say, Johnnies, better stick up a
white rag, when you're coming out, so our boys don't make a mistake!"
The mule was covered with dirt. The The soldiers exchanged various
little articles and swapped some yarns and jokes.
"Yanks, when are you coming to town?" the Southerners asked.
"We'll be there on the Fourth. By that time your grub will be gone."
"Like thunder you will," the Boys in Grey returned the banter. "Why,
men, we've got enough grub to last till winter. If you Yanks stick
around long enough, we'll invite you to a Christmas pudding."
"Many thanks," the Northerners came back; "you can't fool us on
mule-meat and river-soup. We'll bring our own rations when we come in."
A moment later the men had returned to their lines.
"Look out for your heads," the call rang out. "We're going to shoot."
The men who had just enjoyed a friendly visit, were again facing each
other in the life-and-death struggle for the control of the Mississippi.
Tatanka and the boys were just having the time of their lives with all
the new and exciting things they heard and saw. Barker was as much
interested, but he kept his eyes open for the one enemy he must either
elude or defeat. He felt sure that if Hicks were still alive he was not
far from Haynes Bluff and the Union lines.