y the vessels entered the Coldwater. Here the
stream was wider and the current slacker, the trees rarely meeting
overhead; but the channel was nearly as crooked, and accidents almost
as frequent. Six days were consumed in advancing thirty miles through
an almost unbroken wilderness. The stream widened and the country
became more promising in the lower part of the Coldwater and the upper
part of the Tallahatchie, into which the vessels steamed on the
evening of the 6th in a sorely damaged condition. The Petrel had lost
her wheel and was wholly disabled; both smoke-stacks of the Romeo were
gone; the Chillicothe had run upon the stump of a tree and started a
plank in her bottom, which was now kept in place by being shored down
from the beams of the deck above; and though none, except the Petrel,
were unfit for fighting, all had suffered greatly in hull and upper
works. The transports, which had joined with 6,000 troops, were yet
more roughly handled.

The lower part of the Tallahatchie again became narrow and crooked,
and for forty or fifty miles no break appeared in a wild and
forbidding wilderness until they began to draw near Fort Pemberton,
when the stream grew to a fair size. Tokens of the enemy now were seen
in burning piles of cotton, and a Confederate steamer, which was
picking up what she could, was so closely pressed as to be burned by
her crew. The position of the Confederates had been chosen but a few
days before, and the works were only partially up. The Tallahatchie
here sweeps sharply to the east, and then returns again, forming a
horseshoe bend thirteen miles long, the two parts of the stream
approaching each other so closely that the neck of the enclosed
peninsula is less than a quarter of a mile wide. It is in this bend
that the Yallabusha enters, the river then taking the name of Yazoo;
so that the works erected across the neck were said to be between the
Tallahatchie and Yazoo, though the stream is one. The fort, which was
called Pemberton, was built of cotton and earth; in front of it was a
deep slough, and on its right flank the river was barricaded by a raft
and the hull of the ocean steamer Star of the West, which, after
drawing the first shots fired in the war, when the batteries in
Charleston stopped her from reinforcing Fort Sumter in January, 1861,
had passed by some chance to New Orleans, where she was seized by the
Government of Louisiana when that State seceded. When Farragut took
New Orlean