V'sburg

By Ed Piper

Before our trip to Vicksburg, a major battle site in the Civil War, I remember asking Art Miley if you could look up from the Mississippi River to the heights in the city.

"I only remember looking down from above," said Art, a good friend who enjoys blogs and the Civil War. He had visited the city with his wife Babs years before.

Art was the first one to inform me that there was a Civil War battle site as far west as New Mexico.

Well, before traveling to the Deep South two months ago, I had an image in my head--conjured up through reading and musing about the war over the years--that had me positioned down on the river or river shore, looking up to the city of Vicksburg far above. I don't think it was an image formed from viewing photos; more from reading Shelby Foote (who I'm re-reading now), James McPherson, and others.

The actual view in Vicksburg, as you might expect, is totally different from the mental image I carried in advance. For one, rangers at Vicksburg informed me that the river has taken a different course. It changed course in 1878 or so after jumping its confines. In addition, Army Corps engineers undertook a project that moved the Mississippi on a different tack.

For another, thousands of trees have been planted on the park site since the Civil War. So the view of the river below is completely blocked. The greenery makes for a beautiful park; no so great for picturing the siege of the city historically accurately.

Dianna and I tooled around on the shore of the Yazoo River (a delightful name), which now runs in front of the area below the city. Grant's Canal is listed on the websites as a Civil War-related site. But when I asked a local where that might be, when we trekked south of the city to Navy Point, another demarcated location, he laughed and said, "I don't think there's much to see. It's back up north." He discounted it as a destination to go seek out.

Grant's Canal refers to General Grant's attempt, among others, to construct another route past Vicksburg that wouldn't involve passing within range of the Confederate batteries mounted above the Mississippi. This attempt of Grant didn't work, as did several other attempts. The place was just a mess, as far as rain, bayous, swamps, and muck, to try to pass soldiers through and establish some kind of foothold to attack the "Gibraltar of the Mississippi", which held a formidable position.

Probably the highlight of our four-night stay in Vicksburg, besides eating blackened chicken and Mississippi Lava chocolate dessert at Rusty's near the shore, was finding a Native American piece shaped by the ancient Poverty Point Indians in northeastern Louisiana at a second-hand store for our grandson. The finder, a restaurant owner in Vicksburg, said that he found it on a jaunt across state lines. What was even more fun was chatting with Lyle, a paleontology/archaeology buff who told us most likely the shaped stone was a point for an atlatl, a spear propelled by a band the hunter would hold on his hand to snap the atlatl forward. Our grandson was thrilled to get it.