The Siege of Vicksburg

Vicksburg, Missisippi. Yeah...it's like coming home...

....if you live in a high-crime area. In the visitors' center parking lot, we arrived just in time for some police action. That's one of the local casinos looming in the background.

Historic downtown Vicksburg.

One of many homes turned into a bed and breakfast inn.

That's Louisiana over there.

And it's raining here...in Vicksburg. Haven't we had enough?

What would Mark Twain say about all the riverfront casinos?

This one looks like a riverboat. Our RV park was part of a casino complex. Nice spot (even in the rain) and only $23 a night, plus we were given a free full buffet breakfast in the casino. A buffet that would rival anything that Vegas serves up.

We know the casino provides free food to get you in to spend money at the slot machines. But as seasoned travelers we're much too smart for that. However, with a full belly you have to walk through the casino past all the slot machines and what the heck, what's one quarter? Well, a half-hour and sixty dollars lighter later, these seasoned travelers learned yet another lesson of the road. Steer clear of these damn places and spend your time, not money, at the battlefield where the Siege of Vicksburg took place for 43 long days in 1863.

You do meet some interesting people along the way, like this fellow at the battlefield whose first name was Bufort or Cletus or Clovis or something like that. He complained about the park charging an eight-dollar admission fee. He said, "Why, hell, when I was a boy before the federal government took it over, you could just walk in, kick around, find Civil War souvenirs and for laughs we'd stick fireworks down the barrels of the old cannons and what a noise that would make."

M-80s, Bufort's weapon of choice.

Outside of a few concessions to the modern, this is a very impressive site where more than 30,000 young men, Union and Confederate, lost their lives. And what a noise that must have made.

Of the 1300 monuments dotting the landscape, the largest is dedicated to troops from Illinois who suffered the greatest losses. It's hard to imagine with everything quiet and sanitized what a hellish place this must have been in 1863.

The only original structure on the battlefield still standing is this old farmhouse that the Park Service has plans to refurbish and open to the public.

The U.S.S. Cairo, an iron-clad gunboat, turned out to be the most impressive part of the battlefield, outside of the guy with the M-80s. The Cairo's claim to fame: it was the first United States boat to be "torpedoed". Confederate soldiers remotely detonated a mine near the bow of the Cairo and down it went in 1862. Although iron-clad, it was no match for a mine, which were called "torpedoes" at the time. What's remarkable is that no one on the ship was killed--everyone survived the big blast. The Cairo sat on the bottom of the Yazoo River (which runs into the Mississippi) until 1964, when it was raised, refurbished and put on display.

Emphasizing the horror this must have been, this is the national cemetery at Vicksburg containing the graves of 17,000 Union dead, 13,000 of whom are unknown. The Confederate dead were mostly buried in cemeteries in their home towns close by.

This monument is dedicated to the freed black men fighting on the side of the Union.

Then you could only top that with another trip to WalMart. And until you've been to one in Mississippi, you ain't lived.