Mississippi River Journey Part 2-- Vicksburg

A long cruise of some five hundred miles from Collinsville, IL takes you into Vicksburg, MS where a friendly Country Kitchen will serve you down-home biscuits with your meatloaf and mash. Get the spiced apples for one of your sides and you have a nice dessert.

Bright and early we were at the Mational Military Park for a driving tour of one of the most awesome of Civil War battle sites. You stick a tape or CD in you car player and get a personalized tour that stops and starts on your command. The information is so impossibly bloody that you find it hard to place the events within the quiet green meadows and woodlands that stretch out before you.

Time to raise the flag.


Monument to black participants in the battle


Detail from the Ohio monument


The Illinois Memorial is truly moving.


Each place various state regiments encamped there is a monument. Here is the one from Illinois. We had no idea how many Illinois sons participated in the Vicksburg campaign. The upriver states had strong reasons for keeping the waterway open to Union commercial and war traffic.