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The Winnebago's turrets, being out of order, could not be turned, and consequently the guns could be brought to bear only by moving the helm; a circumstance which materially reduced her fire. The Chickasaw, however, was in better case.
De Soto decided to take up his winter quarters at Chickasaw, there to await the returning sun of spring. There appears to have been something senseless in the wild wanderings in which De Soto was now persisting, which have led some to suppose that care, exhaustion, and sorrow had brought on some degree of mental derangement.
I ordered the battalion of infantry under Colonel Hildebrand to disembark at Eastport, and with the other battalion proceeded to Chickasaw and landed. The battery at this point had evidently been abandoned some time, and consisted of the remains of an old Indian mound, partly washed away by the river, which had been fashioned into a two-gun battery, with a small magazine.
On reconnoitring the front in person, during the 27th and 28th, I became satisfied that General A. J. Smith could not cross the intervening obstacles under the heavy fire of the forts immediately in his front, and that the main bayou was impassable, except at two points one near the head of Chickasaw Bayou, in front of Morgan, and the other about a mile lower down, in front of M. L. Smith's division.
We made our way through the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, and then to Williamson county, in this state. We should have made a fine trip if we had taken care of all we got. "I had become a considerable libertine, and when I returned home I spent a few months rioting in all the luxuries of forbidden pleasures with the girls of my acquaintance.
It spread out by brigade and division and regiment and company, the men splashing and paddling through the Chickasaw and the swamps toward the bluffs. The Parrotts began to roar. A certain regiment, boldly led, crossed the bayou at a narrow place and swept resistless across the sodden fields to where the bank was steepest. The fire from the battery scorched the hair of their heads.
Before the Revolution a few restless emigrants had adopted this method of reaching Natchez; some of them made the long and perilous trip in safety, others were killed by the Chickamaugas or else foundered in the whirlpools, or on the shoals. II., p. 45: "JAMES COLBERT TO CHAS. STUART. "CHICKASAW NATION, May 25, 1779.
There our fleet turned square to the left, and proceeded up that stream. Near the mouth of the Chickasaw Bayou, the fleet landed on the left bank of the stream, the boats tied up for the night, we went on the shore and bivouacked there that night. It was quite a relief to get on solid ground, and where we could stretch our legs and stroll around a little.
We have seen already how the River War of '89 ended in a double failure of the Federal advance on Vicksburg: how Grant and Sherman, aided by the flanking force from Helena in Arkansas, failed to catch Pemberton along the Tallahatchie; and then how Sherman alone, moving down the Mississippi, was defeated by Pemberton at Chickasaw Bayou, just outside of Vicksburg.
Ours is not the purpose to follow further the details of the fight, but to go with Perkins in the Chickasaw and see things as he saw them on that stirring day, as gathered from his letters and as fortified from other sources.
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