Mississippi
September 17, 2009
You may be surprised to see another POTR so soon after the last one came out. But as I somewhat indicated in the last POTR I have seen so much lately that I am having a hard time keeping up. I am behind in the writing that I do and taking care of filing the pictures that I have been taking. One of my main objectives is to keep this POTR up to date. I have made that promise to several people.
Vicksburg National Military Park lays claim to being the most monumented battlefield in the world. I read one place that there are over 1,500 monuments and markers scattered across the area which would surpass Gettysburg's 1,400 monuments and markers. The siege of Vicksburg lasted for three months ending on July 4th, 1863, one day after the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. There were only 7,782 deaths during the siege, which is a small number for that length of battle. Abraham Lincoln considered the control of the Mississippi River essential to the success of the Union cause. Vicksburg was the final obstacle to Union control of the river which split the Confederate armies in half and cut off supplies to the soldiers. When Vicksburg was taken Lincoln was quoted as saying, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." At the end of the siege 50,000 rifles and 172 cannon were surrendered with the nearly 30,000 Confederate soldiers who were sent home on parole after they pledged not to return to battle. Paroling soldiers was not an uncommon practice during the Civil war in spite of the fact that many of the soldiers did return to battle. Tradition has it that the people of Vicksburg did not celebrate the American Independence Holiday for 81 years or until WWII because it was a Union holiday.
ONE OF THE LARGEST MONUMENT IS TO THE ILLINOIS SOLDIERS OF THE UNION
The ironclad gun boats of the Union and the Confederates were huge. I always figured that they were fairly large but until I stood next to the USS Cairo I did not realize just how large they were. The most famous of the ironclads were the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, which is commonly called the Merrimack. The USS Merrimack was a Union ship being repaired in the naval yards in Norfolk Virginia when Virginia seceded from the Union. To prevent Confederates usage it was burned and sunk by the retreating Union troops. It was salvaged by the Confederates and used as the base for an ironclad ship called the CSS Virginia. USS Cairo was the first of seven city class ironclads, named for cities along the Mississippi, that were built for the Union. The ship was 175 feet long, 51 feet wide, weighting 512 tons, with a draft of 6 feet. It's armor was either 2.5" or 3.5" thick depending on location backed by a two foot thickness of white oak timber to absorb the shock of impacting shells. It had 13 modern guns plus small arms. Its total crew was 274 men. It would burn almost a ton of coal an hour in two steam engines with five boilers. Because it was considered vulnerable without power the boilers were fired 24 hours a day. During the siege of Vicksburg the Cairo was sunk by the Confederates. It has the distinction of being the first armored warship ever sunk with an electrically detonated mine, called a torpedo at the time. Many of the torpedoes failed to detonate, so were not considered a serious threat. The torpedo was a five gallon glass demijohn filled with forty pounds of gunpowder, attached to a wooden float and anchored to the bottom of the river. It was connected by copper wires to a telegraph battery on the shore, and detonated by hidden soldiers on shore. The Cairo was rocked by two explosions in quick order and sunk in eight to fifteen minutes (estimates varied according to witness accounts) with no loss of life of any person on board. The location of the Cairo was discovered in 1956 and raised from the silt of the Yazoo River in 1977 to become a part of the Vicksburg Military Park. Its cannon are the only actual period pieces found in the entire park. Its steam plant is also considered the best preserved of its type in the world. "Ghost parts" show how the original looked.
THE SALVAGED "CITY CLASS" IRONCLAD GUNBOAT USS CAIRO
Did you know that there is a petrified forest east of the Rocky Mountains? If you said "No" you would be in the same category as most people, including me until about a year ago. Until a week ago I did not realize how close to Vicksburg and Jackson Mississippi it is located. The petrified forests of Colorado and Arizona were created when living forests were covered by silt mudflows or buried by volcanic dust. In Mississippi thirty six million years ago there was an event which felled a large number of trees. The trees were caught in a massive flood and carried miles downstream to a point that a logjam was formed. The trees were covered by sand and silt which excluded oxygen thus preventing rot and started the process of replacing the cellular construction of the logs with mineral content. After hundred of thousands of years the conversion of the logs was complete. As the geologic strata moved the logs were broken into sections that are five to ten foot in length. The sections stayed aligned in a fashion to show that at one time the trees were as tall as a hundred foot and had a diameter of twelve to fifteen foot. They may have been over a thousand years old while they were still living. These trees were bigger than anything that is growing in the State of Mississippi in modern time. This is the only location of a petrified forest that is east of the Rocky Mountains. This area has also been called the Grand Canyon of Mississippi. While there are many logs that are exposed there is a large amount of undisturbed land which will reveal more logs as nature removes the soil which hides them, unless as it is doing in some cases covers them back up.
A SECTION OF PETRIFIED LOG IN THE MISSISSIPPI PETRIFIED FOREST
We are now in Willis, Texas. We have been in this area two times before but there is much to see nearby. I also think it is time to relax a bit and do some of the things that I am behind in doing.
Till Later This Is Doug Of
Peace On The Road
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