Only three days after Champion Hill Grant had drawn his semicircle of
steel around Vicksburg and its thirty thousand men, and the navy in the
rivers completed the dead line.
Dick rode with Colonel Winchester and took the best view they could get
of Vicksburg, the little city which had suddenly become of such vast
military importance.
Now and then on the long, lower course of the Mississippi, bluffs rise,
although at far intervals. Memphis stands on one group and hundreds of
miles south Vicksburg stands on another. The Vicksburg plateau runs
southward to the Big Bayou, which curves around them on the south and
east, and the eastern slope of the uplift has been cut and gulleyed by
many torrents. So strong has been the effect of the rushing water upon
the soft soil that these cuts have become deep winding ravines, often
with perpendicular banks. One of the ravines is ten miles long. Another
cuts the plateau itself for six miles, and a permanent stream flows
through it.
The colonel and Dick saw everywhere rivers, brooks, bayous, hills,
marshes and thickets, the whole turned by the Southern engineers into
a vast and most difficult line of intrenchments.
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