John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[231] behind the city. Dana was somewhat doubtful of the plan, and asked several questions about bayous and swamps, but the majority prevailed and all went favorably so long as the route lay on the river-bank. The party trotted along merrily enough till it turned towards the camp. The new route lay through a dense forest, with thick patches of underbrush obstructed here and there by fallen logs, but it was easy to follow it by compass to a bayou which lay across it but looked impassable. It was ten or twelve feet deep and fifty or sixty feet wide, and although nearly all the water had run out of it its slopes and bed constituted a black and forbidding quagmire. It seemed impossible to go on, but as it was eight or ten miles to camp by the way the party had come, and only two or three miles across, one of the officers pushed to the front, dismounted the orderlies, and began the construction of a corduroy road over the mud to the hard ground beyond the creek. Dana at once grasped the situation and helped with all his strength to gather up and drag the drift-wood to the officer who was placing it in position. The work was soon completed, and while it was simple enough to experienced soldiers it was a revelation to city men. Within a half-hour the party was safely in camp, but Dana never ceased to speak of the incident as one of the most interesting connected with the siege.

A few days later, the army having settled down to a dead calm of hard work, marked by a cessation of actual fighting, Grant started on a trip by boat to an outlying detachment supposed to be intrenched at Satartia, some fifty or sixty miles above the mouth of the Yazoo. He took Dana and two young aides-de-camp with him, but had not gone far before he fell sick and was compelled to go to bed and give up the trip. Dana therefore took charge, turned the boat about, and brought the party back to camp, where it arrived after dark the next day. The actual facts of this