VICKSBURG Chapter Nine

 

As early as 1743 French King Louis XV required settlers in his Louisiana colony to build levees to restrain the Mississippi River floods - from the French word "lever", meaning to "raise on top". By 1803, when the Americans paid $15 million for the colony, there were 1,000 miles of levees protecting individual towns and plantations. By the middle of that century that millage had doubled. And the greatest advocate for levees in the state of Mississippi was a 46 year old transplanted Illinois native, a Kentucky lawyer and an opportunistic politician, James Lusk Alcorn.

Assembled over 2 decades, Alcorn (above)'s "Mound Place" cotton plantation, just east of Friar's Point, Mississippi, was worked by 93 African-American slaves, and was valued in 1860 as being worth a quarter of a million dollars. He always kept his eye on the bottom line and biographers described Alcorn's politics as "a Whig up to 1859, a Union man in 1860, a secessionist in 1861, a fire-eater in 1862, (and) a peace-man in 1863..."  Protecting his plantation was The Great Levee. At 18 feet high and 100 feet thick, it was the largest levee in the state.  It had been built in 1856 by the state Levee District, using slaves contracted from Mr. Alcorn's plantation. And the President of the Levee District, the highest paid employee in the state, just happened to be Mr. James Lusk Alcorn.

This massive earthen structure, 8 miles downstream from Helena, Arkansas, had lowered the water level in the oxbow Moon Lake just behind it by 8 feet, offering up hundreds of new secure acres for Alcorn's cotton.  But it also slammed shut what had been the Yazoo Pass (above, below), a 14 mile long "... narrow, snag filled slough..." that led to the 115 circuitous miles of  the Coldwater River...

...and then to the Little Tallahatchie River.  About 250 miles below Moon Lake, the Tallahatchie River joined  the Yalobusha River to form the Yazoo River at the small community of Greenwood, Mississippi.  This was a back door used by small Mississippi delta farmers to avoid the markets in Vicksburg, and instead sell their cotton and produce to the upstream ports of Helena and Memphis, Tennessee  The Great Levee chocked off these small farmers, cementing the wealth of  James Alcorn, at their expense. Men such as Alcorn projected the image of slavery steeped in tradition. In reality, it was a short cut to power built on other men's labors, both white and black.

And this was where things sat in late January of 1863 when 43 year old Federal Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter (above) learned that the rebels were building 3 gunboats in Yazoo City, 330 miles up the Yazoo River and 80 road miles northeast of Vicksburg. The Yazoo construction yard, rescued from Memphis before its fall, included 5 saw and planning mills, carpenter, blacksmith and machinery shops, and,  reaching expectantly across the mud for the Yazoo River,  were three wooden ways, upon which were laboriously being built what would one day, hopefully,  be the wooden gunboats C.S.S. Yazoo, the C.S.S. Mobile, and a 310 foot long yet to be named ironclad, locally referred to as the Yazoo Monster.

Admiral Porter wanted to destroy that trio before they were finished. And since Pemberton was installing heavy guns atop Snyder's Bluff, closing the mouth of the Yazoo River to the Federals, Porter needed a back door.  Some 60 road miles north of Yazoo City (above) was Greenwood, at the head of the Yazoo River, and at the bottom of the Yazoo Pass. So, in late January Porter dispatched 27 year old Acting Naval Lieutenant George Washington Brown, to see if the back door at The Great Levee could be pried open again.

Brown's ship was the 155 foot long stern wheeler, the "Forest Rose" (above).  Pittsburgh built, she was a "tin-clad" gun boat, and in 2 years the U.S. Navy had bought, converted or built 60 of these "Brown Water" or "Mud Navy" ships to control the shallow and narrow bayous and backwaters of the Mississippi flood plain. The Rose's slopping wooden front was thick enough to absorb small arms fire. Her wood sides were reinforced with boiler-plate up to an inch thick. She carried two 30 pound rifled cannons and four 24 pound howitzers. With her two boilers, she could sail and maneuver at 6 knots in just 5 feet of water. After the Fort Hindman operation, the Rose had been stationed in Helena, to deal with partisan threats to the Federal supply line.  But on Monday, 2 February 1863, she steamed downstream to the Great Levee, accompanied by a 25 year old wunderkind, already a Lieutenant Colonel of Engineers, James Harrison Wilson and 400 "pioneers" - soldiers with shovels.

Lieutenant Brown later said that he - meaning he, and Colonel Wilson and the pioneers - buried a 50 pound can of black powder in the levee, "It blew up immense quantities of earth, opening a passage for the water...We then sunk three more...and set them off simultaneously, completely shattering the mound...". Colonel Wilson reported that "The opening was 40 yards wide, and the water pouring through like nothing else I ever saw except Niagara Falls..." 

By Wednesday morning of 4 February the breech was 75 yards across, and the Forest Rose was able to enter Moon Lake 48 hours later. But it was already too late.

When the Rose tied up for the night at the junction of Moon Lake and the Head of the Pass, they captured 3 locals in a dugout canoe. They told Brown that for days a force of Confederate soldiers and 100 slaves had been chopping down trees to obstruct the Pass. In fact is was just 50 slaves under a Confederate naval Lieutenant, Francis Sheppered. 

Clearly, the move to re-open the Yazoo Pass had been anticipated by the rebels, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis (above). On Thursday, 29 January, the Mississippi native had telegraphed from Richmond, asking General Pemberton, "Has anything or can anything be done to obstruct the navigation from Yazoo Pass down?" Clearly the answer had to be "Yes."

There was a growing chorus of warning cries. In charge of the construction of the Yazoo City gunboats, 45 year old naval Commander Isaac Newton Brown (above), wrote to Pemberton, "...if the Yazoo Pass remains unobstructed it may at high water afford the enemy a passage for their gun boats...if the trees along its banks were felled from both sides across the channel, which is seldom 100 feet wide, they would offer serious impediments to its navigation."  And James Alcorn warned Pemberton when Yankee troops occupied his plantation the first week in February.  Of course, being a businessman, he also told the Yankees they should have no trouble using the Yazoo Pass. 

But it was not until Tuesday, 17 February that Pemberton dispatched all the help he could - 1,500 men and the 44 year old profane and disruptive one armed North Carolinian fire plug, Brigadier General William Wing Loring (above).

A correspondent for the Chicago Times noted later that, the Federals were assembling at Helena a powerful expedition - nine gunboats and twenty-seven transports containing over 3,000 infantrymen under 39 year old prickly General Leonard Fulton Ross, - all in the greatest possible secrecy . "A casual observer....can form no possible idea of the character or magnitude of this expedition," the Times wrote hopefully, "as he can see but one or two boats at a time...And on this I base my strongest hopes for the success of the movement." But it took 3 weeks before the Navy and the Army were ready to move.

On Sunday, 22 February, the Times correspondent accompanied the expedition into the Pass. finding the Coldwater River so narrow that it "...affords no opportunity for vessels moving in opposite directions to pass each other...." The writer noted, "On the eastern bank there are two or three fine plantations; but, with these exceptions, the surroundings are an unbroken forest... Wild ducks and geese abound here in profusion...The water being deep, cool, and comparatively clear, abounds with fish of all kinds."

It took another 3 weeks, in constant rain  to even approach Greenwood and the Yazoo River because the rebels had, "...filled the channel with logs, trees, stumps, and all manner of obstacles." This, was troubling because, as the Times warned "If we do not take the enemy by surprise,...God help us!" The fear was that partisans or rebel cavalry would block the Pass before and behind the fleet, trapping them strung out single file in the confines of the Coldwater or the equally narrow Little Tallahatchie River.  If that happened, warned the Times, "There will be no escape for any of us..."

What was awaiting the Federal Fleet in Greenwood was not the Yankee's worst nightmare. But it was almost as bad - a triangle of cotton bales covered in earth, optimistically called Fort Pemberton.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Eight

 

The way the story is usually told is that only after realizing his Desoto canal would not work, did Major General Ulysses Grant turn to the Lake Providence canal, 40 miles upstream from Young's Point. In fact, in early January Grant had dispatched a small battalion of engineers all across the region, seeking someway, anyway to get around or at Vicksburg. The Desoto canal was the just the most obvious choice. But it would have saved a lot of time and energy had those engineers known how the Mississippi River formed Lake Providence in the first place But that would have to wait a couple of generations for students of geology and fluviomorphology to learn their trade.

Dig into the mud of the of Lower Mississippi and beneath 35 feet of river deposits you will find 50 feet and more of yellow sand, the bottom of the 400 mile long Mississippi Embayment, an arm of the ancient Tethys Ocean, which followed the crack of the New Madrid rift valley into the very center of North America, as far north as present day Cairo, Illinois. Over most the last 100 million years this was a backwater, while American's most powerful rivers, like the Teays in Ohio and Indiana and the New River of Virginia, flowed northwest from the Himalayan heights of the Appalachian Mountains to the Arctic Sea. Then, 2.5 million years ago the first of the Laurentide glaciers blocked those rivers, forcing them south and into the embayment,

About 8,000 years ago, the glacial river Warren breached the last of the ice dams at what is today the Wisconsin Dells, and blazed a path which the Illinois River followed, southward, joining the ancient Ohio in filling the 450 mile bay with that 35 feet of river sediments.

Flowing across this ancient silted up bay, Old Man river meanders at an average speed of one and one-half miles an hour, losing just 3 tenths of a vertical inch for every horizontal mile south. With such a slow current, any minor impediment will magnify current variations. Where the current is slightly faster, it eats into the bank. Where the current is a little slower it drops sediments, building up the bank. Over time this creates a curving meander, with the stronger current shifting from the inside at the base of the curve to the outside at its height.

But the current eventually cuts across the base of these meanders, isolating each as an oxbow lake. Each spring flood piles more sediments against the abandoned meander. By 1863, when the

Scottish minister's son and 40 year old artilleryman, Lieutenant Colonel William Latimer Duff arrived to investigate, Lake Providence was a six mile long oxbow, a full mile from the river's new course, and usually 8 feet lower. So a mile long canal, 100 feet wide and 5 feet deep, connecting the Mississippi to Lake Providence would get Grant's army 7 miles inland away from the Mississippi.

And from there, said Lt. Colonel Duff, who had made the trip, it was relatively easy. From Lake Providence it was another short mile to the Bushy Bayou, (above) which connected to the sinuous Baxter Bayou, which connected to the 6 mile long Bayou Macon which passed through a cypress swamp. Trees would have to be cleared here, but the swamp fed the Tensas River, which split into the Ouachita River before flowing into the Black River, which flowed into the Red River of the South which finally rejoined the Mississippi River 400 miles south, just below Natchez, Mississippi. As Private and hospital steward Charles Allaire, noted , it seemed, "a long way around 'Robin Hood's Barn'," But such was Grant's desperation to get to Vicksburg.

The new operation began on Tuesday, 3 February, 1863, when Colonel, soon to be Brigadier General, 36 year old George Washington Deitzler was given the task of starting the Lake Providence canal. Shortly there after the 32,000 men of the 17th Crops of the Army of Tennessee under 34 year old General James Birdseye McPherson, were brought in to begin deepening and widening Bushy and Baxter Bayous. Colonel Deitzler, thought it would take no more than 6 days to dig the first mile long canal. After that, "I do not think that we will have any considerable difficulty in finding a passage for gunboats and small stern-wheel boats through Baxter Bayou and Bayou Macon, a distance of from 10 to 15 miles...it will only be necessary to cut a few trees...Once in Bayou Macon, we shall have a clear coast to (the) Red River." He optimistically figured the entire effort would take no more than 3 weeks.

Amazingly the causality rate for the 17th Corps never approached that of its less fortunate comrades working on the Desoto canal. Partly this was because McPherson's camps were on high ground, a mile away from the river, and they were well "policed", meaning clean. But mostly it was because the actual effort back in Bushy and Baxter Bayous was preformed by freed slaves. They were paid for their work, and fed a standard army diet, which was far better than their slave food.  But no one thought them important enough to record their death rates. The soldiers spent their time drilling, playing baseball, and raiding the surrounding plantations for food and souvenirs.

And in this place the February floods worked in the army's favor. The river was now 15 higher than Lake Providence, and when the coffer dam at the head of the canal was breached on Tuesday, 17 March (above), the water gushed into the lake, even sweeping away a small town on the Mississippi's banks. By Monday, 23 March the lake had so over flowed its banks, as to eliminate the need for a connecting canal to Bushy Bayou.

Grant took over a lake shore mansion in early March to inspect the effort. And while he was duly impressed with the progress,  he told Washington that, "...there was scarcely a chance of this ever becoming a practicable route for moving troops through an enemy's country." On those narrow bayous, just felling a few trees could chock off the entire army. But more importantly there was the problem of what happened if and when Grant's army reached Natchez. Because there Grant would face an even greater threat than presented by the Illinois political General, John Alexander McClernand - the very, very ambitious politician, 46 year old Major General Nathaniel Prentiss Banks.

Nathaniel Banks (above) was an actual self-made man, having started as a bobbin boy in a Massachusetts textile mill and risen by his own initiative until, at 34 years of age, he was elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and at 46, Governor of Massachusetts. While in that office Banks made compromises with the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party, and in 1860 this cost him support when he briefly contested Lincoln for the Presidential nomination. Banks' dominant characteristic was his ambition, which burned with such a flame that it often snuffed out every other spark within him.

With the start of the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Banks a Major General of Volunteers, because of his ability to inspire Protestant New England men to enlist. And it was General Nathaniel Banks who brought rebellious Baltimore under control, and kept Maryland in the union during the most dangerous year of 1861. So, despite concerns from West Point trained officers, in February of 1862 Banks was sent to clear out the rebels from the southern Shenandoah Valley. Instead, by the end of May, rebel general "Stonewall" Jackson had driven Bank's army completely out of the Valley.

Banks managed to avoid any blame for that disaster, and was given command of an entire wing of the short lived Federal Army of Virginia, under the pompous General John Pope. On Saturday, 9 August, 1862, left isolated in northern Virginia, and facing a much larger rebel force, again under Jackson, Banks attacked at Cedar Mountain (above). His audacity caught Jackson off guard, and he damn near drove "Stonewall" from the field. But the rebels rallied and at the end of the day it was Banks who was forced to retreat. One of his West Point trained officers described the battle, "...as great a piece of folly as I have ever witnessed on the part of an incompetent general." And for an officer in the sad and misused eastern armies, that was saying quite a bit.

Luckily Banks was slightly wounded in the engagement, and a brief hospitalization allowed his superiors to replace him. Then, in November, Lincoln turned to Nathaniel Banks again to recruit 30,000 new soldiers to form the new Army of the Gulf. Before the men had even began their training they and their commander were dispatched to New Orleans, to replace the even more incompetent political Major General, Benjamin Butler.

Banks was under orders to, as soon as possible, attack and capture the rebel fortress of Fort Hudson, just 20 miles north of the Yankee lines at Baton Rouge, and to then to advance on Vicksburg to assist Major General Grant. But Banks' little Army of the Gulf needed time to complete their training, and their equipment was slow in following them. Besides, the faster Banks moved north, the sooner he would fall under Grant's command. And his ego would not let him do that.

Still, he did lead 12,000 men out of Baton Rouge toward Fort Hudson, on the unfortunate date of Friday, the 13th of March, 1863. The effort was a "Mud March" without the mud. It failed before it ever got within sight of the fort because of bad maps and bad communications with Admiral Farragut's ships, which were supposed to provide artillery support. And, of course, Nathaniel Banks could see no political advantage in helping someone else win a battle.

Perhaps it was this minor fiasco which convinced Grant that risking the maze of the Louisiana swamps just to meet up with Banks, was not a likely way to capture Vicksburg. Besides, he still had other options. On the same day when Grant had ordered work to begin on the Lake Providence Canal, further up the Mississippi River, 400 Federal soldiers were dismantling a levee at a place called the "Yazoo Pass", on the Coldwater River (below).

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VICKSBURG Chapter Seven "A"

 

Ulysses Grant(above)  had tried to avoid the Mississippi River. In November of 1862 he made his first attempt to capture Vicksburg high and dry 200 miles inland from the Big Muddy. The Tennessee and the Cumberland rivers had solid ground on either bank, offering highways to out flank the rebels and support an advance all the way to Oxford, Mississippi. But then had come the raid at Holly Springs, forcing Grant to retreat 80 miles. And then in Memphis, Tennessee, the rival McClernand appeared. To control him Grant was forced to return to the river and solve the Gordian Knot of its meanders.

The first thousand miles of the Upper Mississippi River above Cairo, Illinois was the barely mature child of glaciers, still reasonably straight and clear in its intent. But the thousand miles of the Lower Mississippi, especially the delta,  was the Old Man River, "meandering through sub-tropical swamps and forests..." at the center of a 100 mile wide flood plain, scattered with the detritus of forgotten inundations and abandoned alluvial choices. About midway in that thousand mile corkscrews, where high bluffs touched the river's banks on both shores, was Vicksburg, Mississippi.

As if tying a shoestring, 460 miles above New Orleans, at the Eagle Loop, the river twisted north, coming to within 30 yards of cutting its own "Terrapin Neck". 

The Big Muddy came out of this constriction flowing south again, the faster currents carving a graceful 6 mile long arch of Millikin's bend on the western shore. Five miles south the river widened slightly, dropping sediments close to the Louisiana bank, forming the mile long Paw Paw Island, named after small fruit trees which grew in abundance there.  The river then made a slight right westward bend, opposite Duckport landing. Just south of Duckport, on the eastern shore, was the mouth of the Yazoo River. Then at the left hand Tucsumbia Bend the Mississippi gathered its strength for a tight 180 degree bend as it...

...squeezed between the encroaching 125 foot high limestone and shale bluffs of the start of the Walnut Hills on the east and the western 80 foot high pinnacle on the Desotto peninsula.

Staring down at the apex of that hairpin corner from 80 feet above the eastern river bank, where any Yankee  boats heading northward or south would have to slow to make the turn, was the first of Vicksburg's immediate defenses, the Water Battery - three 32 pound rifled cannons, a single smooth bore 32 pound cannon and one 10 inch cast iron Colombiad cannon. The latter could throw a 128 pound shell 4,000 yards, or a solid shot cannon ball 5,600 yards, making it particularly useful against even ironclad warships at this narrow range.

Behind the Water Battery and 25 feet higher, was Fort Hill. It offered an even more imposing view of the bend, and provided plunging fire from three 10 inch and one 8 inch Columbiads, a 32 pound rifled cannon, and two breach loading English built rifled cannons firing 12 pound shells, a 3 inch Armstrong and a 2.7 inch Whitworth. Rifled cannon were more accurate over a longer range, but the grooved barrels also slowed re-loading. 

Running for half a mile south from Fort Hill, along the Yazoo City Road, were 7 more river front batteries. By the winter of 1863 the city could boast a total of 37 heavy guns in 13 batteries, plus 13 mobile field artillery guns.  

At the northern border of the town itself, The Glass Bayou cut a 45 degree angled ravine through the yellow packed Loess soil, crimping Vicksburg's most infamous neighborhood...

... the cramped crowded six square blocks of rundown boarding houses, bordellos, disreputable bars and gambling parlors, called the Kangaroo district (above).  It had almost completely burned down in the 1830's, but its economic productivity defied morality and it was quickly rebuilt.

Along the waterfront were the long row of docks and commercial warehouses, divided 7 blocks south of the Glass Bayou by the Southern Railroad line's yard and depot. Vicksburg in 1860 was home to 4,500 souls in some 500 structures, drawn initially by the riverboat trade. It is difficult, 200 years later, to appreciate the value of steamboats to the Confederacy. 

 A wagon drawn by a 2 horse team might pull a ton over the appalling roads of Mississippi at a speed of perhaps 2 miles an hour or less, for maybe 20 miles on a good day. The latest technology, the steam locomotive, could pull up to 150 tons at 10 to 25 miles an hour, depending on the quality of the iron rails. But a side or stern paddle wheel steamboat could carry up to 1,700 tons of cotton or wheat, can goods or cattle at 4 miles an hour against the river's current. 

The combination of these two steam technologies, rail and ship, was the reason for Vicksburg's value to the defenders of slavery.

There were 2 iron foundries in Vicksburg, making and repairing boilers and machinery, boat construction ways, lumber mills, a canning factory and a molasses refinery. Moving inland from the business districts were the residential neighborhoods, with each block away from the river climbing another step up the bluffs. 

At the peak, 8 blocks and 80 feet above the river, were St. Paul's Catholic Church and the Warren County Courthouse (above). This "Gibraltar of the Confederacy", the most heavily defended town in the rebel south, had cast most of its votes in the 1860 Presidential election for the pro-slavery unionist Democrat, 39 year old Kentuckian John Cabell Breckinridge. 

But whatever its resident's ambivalence toward the war, after 2 years of bloodshed they would suffer or triumph as rebels.

Three blocks south of the mouth of The Glass Bayou was an artillery battery near the Vicksburg Whig newspaper office - a 10 inch Columbiad and three 32 pound rifles. Near the railroad depot was a single 10 inch Columbiad (above). 

And where the rail line turned inland was a third city battery, called, obviously enough, the Railroad Battery - a single 18 pound gun nicknamed "Whistling Dick" (above). 

A quarter mile beyond the southern edge of the city, 2 miles south of Fort Hill, atop another high bluff and next to a charity hospital built for river sailors was the Marine Hospital Battery - Three smooth bore cannon throwing 42 pound shots, two 32 pound cannon and two 32 pound rifles.

Due west of the Vicksburg docks, across the 900 foot wide, 140 foot deep Mississippi River, was the ferry port on De Soto Point, (above)  where the Louisiana and Texas railroad met the river from the west. The current midstream here was just one and one-half miles an hour.

The current was so slow because although the river still had 400 miles to go before it reached the Gulf of Mexico, it had just 47 feet of altitude to lose - one foot fall for every 9 1/2 miles south. This was the Old Man River, changing his mind as often as the weather. And although it was true that , "He don't say nothin'", it was also true, "He must know somethin'", and he would share that knowledge for a heavy price.

You may remember that in mid-May of 1862 Admiral Farragut's deep draft blue water fleet had steamed up the river to Vicksburg, and demanded it's surrender. But the Confederates had scoffed at the navy's big guns, confident the Yankees dare not stay for fear the ebbing river would strand their ships on its snags and sandbars. But Farragut was a sailor and he knew about tides and river fluctuations. And he had dispatched soldiers under a regular army general to simply force the river to submit to the Federal Government.

The Old Man River's new student was General Thomas R. Williams, a 39 year old Michigander - his father had been the first American Mayor of Detroit, At the end of June 1862, under direct orders from President Abraham Lincoln,   Williams set 3,000 soldiers and half again as many freed slaves to digging a canal across the base of the Desoto Peninsula. 

It seemed logical. The river wanted to get to the Gulf by the quickest route possible. A canal would bypass that hairpin turn, isolate Vicksburg, make irrelevant its great guns, and cut the River's path to the Gulf by a couple of miles. Once the breach was open, the current would carve the rest. But nothing to do with the Mississippi was ever that easy,.

William's men began by cutting a 3 mile long corridor through the trees, then digging out the stumps and pulling out the stubborn roots, and then finally, moving the heavy wet soil aside a spade full at a time. All of this was done under clouds of mosquitoes, surrounded by poisonous snakes and snapping turtles, who did not like being disturbed, and all endeavored in the stifling heat and humidity of a Mississippi July. One or two men seeking relief in the water, were even attacked by alligators. But the great killers were malaria, yellow fever, and diphtheria. Men also died of sun stroke and exhaustion. And there was always diarrhea - which killed far more men during the war than bullets. The work crews were decimated.

After four weeks of back breaking soul draining effort they had created a ditch, 13 feet deep and 18 feet wide, clear across the base of the peninsula. Only earthen plugs at both ends needed to be breached to open the canal. Except...Old Man River was now running 15 feet lower than it was a month earlier. The would-be canal was nothing more than a ditch to nowhere. Before August , General Williams and what was left of his men would be retreating down the river along with Farragut's ships. That month General Williams and more of his men would die defending the Federal outpost at Baton Rouge, the failed canal their only monument at Vicksburg.

Four months later, General Ulysses Grant faced with the same problem as General Williams, and not surprisingly initially chose the same solution. He set his men to work to deepen the canal William's men had started. But the truth was the Mississippi could not be defeated so easily.

Thirty years earlier, an entrepreneur had attempted to cut off the Eagle Loop with a canal across the Terrapin Neck. Heat, disease and bankruptcy had defeated that effort as well. 

And forty years after the war, Scientific American Magazine would explain why success might have been worse than defeat, at least as far as canal shortcuts were concerned, pointing out that "...the cutoffs that have occurred from time to time...have been defeated by the creation of rapids, which form an obstacle to navigation greater than the former loops." If Williams had been successful, or worse, if Grant had, he might have blocked the river for a generation.

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