The steamer Grey Hawk cast off from the New Madrid landing at dawn of day.

The years just preceding the Civil War and the years of the war were the great days of steamboating on the Mississippi and its tributaries.

Hundreds of boats, large and small, ran on the main stream, on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Minnesota and other rivers of the great Mississippi basin. The average life time of a Mississippi steamer was only five years, because countless snags, ice, fires, and other dangers were the bad medicine to navigation on all the streams. None of them were improved, none had any system of lights or signs; the pilots had to know the rivers, whose currents and sandbars and snags were constantly shifting. But the business was so profitable that the trips of one season often paid for the boat. Settlers were rushing into the western country and they and all their goods went by steamboat, for no railroads had yet crossed the Mississippi. On the turbulent Missouri the steamers ran to the mouth of the Yellowstone and beyond, taking up settlers, soldiers, general freight and goods for the Indian trade, and bringing back loads of buffalo-skins and other fur from the Rocky Mountain country. On the Minnesota small steamers ran two hundred miles beyond St. Paul into the newly opened Sioux country to market the first wheat of the new settlers. A few small boats plied on the upper Mississippi above St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the lumber industry and flour-mills were just developing.

The Civil War proved a fatal blow to river traffic. Both the Federal and the Confederate government commandeered a large number of vessels for war purposes, and many of those were wrecked and sunk or burnt in battle.

Immediately after the war, railroads began to parallel the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries. The steamboat traffic lingered for a number of years, but it never again attained its former glory, and soon sank into its present insignificance.

Moreover, the great movement of traffic in North America is east and west, while the trend of our great navigable river system is north and south.

Barker and Tatanka, as well as the boys, found life on a Mississippi steamer very attractive.

The broad main channel and bayous, sloughs and oxbow lakes; the high bluffs and the lowland forests, had all in turn lured them on to much hard traveling and many interesting side-trips. But just now they all felt that they had had enough of traveling by birch-bark, enough of camping wherever a good place invited them, and enough of eating whatever they could secure.

Below Cairo the low lands widen. There are no distinct hills or bluffs on the west side, while the Chickasaw Bluffs which stretch from Cairo to Memphis are in places ten miles from the river.

A long time ago the Gulf of Mexico extended probably as far north as Cairo, and the great flood-plain from Cairo to the Gulf is land, which was made by the Mississippi. From the Alleghenies, from the Rocky Mountains, from the Black Hills, the Ozarks, and the prairies of Minnesota, the streams are ever bringing down fine, fertile soil into the Mississippi, which spreads it at times of high water over fields, forests, and swamps and carries some of it into the gulf. So great is the amount of fine soil carried by the great river that every year it would make a vast block a square mile in area and four hundred feet high.

Of all the travelers on the Grey Hawk, Tatanka took the keenest interest in everything around him; for he had, before this trip, never seen the Mississippi farther south than La Crosse in Wisconsin. “Why do the white people need so many ships?” he wondered. “What will they do with all the big guns they have, and where are all the soldiers going to fight!”

“My friend,” Barker told him, “wait till we reach Vicksburg. There you will see soldiers and guns.”

“Where do all the black people live?” he asked. “Do they live in the woods and come out to work in the fields of cotton that we have seen?

“If our young men could have seen all the soldiers and ships and guns and towns of the white people, they never would have made war against them.”

The second day on the boat was a Sunday and the pastry-cook did his best to furnish a wonderful collection of cakes, pies, and jellies.

Barker and the boys could not help being amused at the way Tatanka looked furtively at the sumptuous Sunday dinner. The variously colored jellies served in tall glasses, especially excited his-curiosity and suspicion.

“Is it medicine or is it to eat?” he whispered to Barker.

“It’s all to be eaten,” Barker informed him. “Don’t think again of bad medicine on this boat.”

“If the Sioux chiefs were here,” Tatanka remarked with a smile, “they would have to carry away many glasses of food, for it is the custom of the Indians to take away with them whatever they cannot eat at a feast.

“Captain Banks must be very rich to have so many dishes on his ship.”

The pilot of the Grey Hawk did not know the river well enough to run after dark, so the passengers saw the whole distance by daylight.

At night a group of colored deck-hands appeared as minstrels for the entertainment of the passengers.

“The black men have big white teeth and big white eyes, and they can sing and dance,” Tatanka remarked, “but they couldn’t give the Sioux war-whoop.”

About the 20th of June the steamer tied up at Haynes Bluff on the Yazoo River.

Tatanka, who had wondered at the soldiers and ships at New Madrid, was here simply bewildered. Ships, teams, mule-teams, ox-teams, horse-teams, and soldiers and more soldiers everywhere; infantry, cavalry, and terrible artillery. Tatanka, with the observant eyes of an Indian scout, saw everything, but hardly spoke a word all day.

Grant had by this time about 70,000 men, an army about ten times as large as the whole Sioux nation. From Haynes Bluff southward his lines were stretched out and entrenched over a distance of fifteen miles.

Over hills, through ravines, through woods and cane-brakes ran the sheer endless line of rifle-pits, trenches, parapets, and batteries. And in front of the Union works, rose in grim defiance the lines and pits and batteries of the Confederates. The lines of the two armies ran about three miles east of Vicksburg over wooded hills which rise about two hundred feet above the river. For one month since the 19th of May the Confederate army under General John C. Pemberton and the city of Vicksburg had been besieged, by the Union army, while the Union fleets held the river above and below the city.

General Pemberton, now in command at Vicksburg, was the same man, who two years ago had taken his battery from Fort Ridgely to La Crosse on the Fanny Harris.

Grant had at first attempted to take the city by assault, but had found that the Confederates were so strongly entrenched and defended their lines so stubbornly that the Northern army had to settle down to a regular siege with the object of starving their opponents into surrender.

Many Northern people came to visit their friends in Grant’s army. They brought with them turkeys and chickens and ducks as gifts to the Boys in Blue, but for once the soldiers did not appreciate these delicacies. While they were maneuvering and fighting to get into their present position on the hills in the rear of Vicksburg, Grant had boldly cut loose from his base of supplies. Foraging parties had scoured the plantations for anything they could find, and the army had largely existed on poultry.

“Give us bacon and bread!” was now the cry. “We are sick of anything that crows or quacks or gobbles; we are sick of all meat with wings. Give us bacon and bread!”

Once while Grant was riding along the lines, a soldier recognizing him called in a low voice, “Hardtack.” In a moment the cry ran along the whole line, “Hardtack! Hardtack!” Grant assured the men that a road had been built for the distribution of regular commissary supplies such as bread, hardtack, coffee, sugar, bacon, and salt meat. The men at once gave a ringing cheer, and on the next day full rations were issued to the whole army.

The four travelers from the North had plenty of opportunity to watch the operations of a great siege, and Barker met several men whom he had known in Indiana and Minnesota.

There was little fighting now, but much digging of pits and trenches and some mining and counter-mining.

“We are just camping here,” an old acquaintance told Barker, “and the digging is good. No rocks in these hills as in the hills of New England and New York.

“If the Johnnies weren’t camping so blasted close to us, it would be a fine life. As it is, the man who shows his head above the parapets is done for. The sharpshooters get him.

“I just got through digging and sitting in a pit twenty-four hours.

“Three men from our company were detailed to dig an advance rifle-pit. We started after dark with picks and shovels. Two men with picks scratched up the dirt, the third man threw it out. We made no noise; a mole couldn’t have worked more silently. Heavens, how we scratched and dug! By daylight, our pit was deep enough to shelter us. It had to be or we wouldn’t have come back. But it was not deep enough for us to stand up. All day we sat and lay in that hole. At noon the sun almost roasted us brown, although we crouched against the shaded wall.

“In the afternoon it began to rain and some of our dirt washed back into the pit.

“‘Mike,’ I said to my Irish fellow-digger, ‘I guess we’ll have to swim or surrender.’

“‘By me faith,’ Mike replied, ‘I’ll wait till the water runs over me gun-muzzle. We can’t surrender because our shirts are too dirty for white flags.’

“We agreed that Mike was right, and sitting in the sticky mud, we ate the rest of our bread and bacon before the rain could spoil it.

“After the rain was over, some sharpshooters began to practice on our pit. They couldn’t hit us, and we were right glad that they gave us something to think and talk about.

“After dark three other men relieved us and we had a chance to stretch our bones.”

“What did these men have to do?” the boys wanted to know.

“Deepen the pit,” the soldier told them, “and widen it to right and left in the direction of two other rifle-pits. You see in that way we push our lines closer and closer to the enemy.

“In many places we are so close now that the men can talk to each other.”

Quite often the Union soldiers who were short of tobacco would barter bacon or bread for tobacco, because the Confederates at this time were beginning to feel the shortage of food.

All through the Civil War the men in both armies showed a fine spirit of chivalry to the enemy, whenever duty and the stern law of war would permit acts of courtesy and kindness.

At one time in the Vicksburg siege a dead mule between the lines became unbearably offensive to the Confederates.

“Heh, Yanks!” a soldier shouted, “we’ve got to bury that mule. He’s smelling us out.”

“All right,” the Yankee boys replied. “We smelled him yesterday. Send out three men, and we’ll send three. Say, Johnnies, better stick up a white rag, when you’re coming out, so our boys don’t make a mistake!”

The mule was covered with dirt. The The soldiers exchanged various little articles and swapped some yarns and jokes.

“Yanks, when are you coming to town?” the Southerners asked.

“We’ll be there on the Fourth. By that time your grub will be gone.”

“Like thunder you will,” the Boys in Grey returned the banter. “Why, men, we’ve got enough grub to last till winter. If you Yanks stick around long enough, we’ll invite you to a Christmas pudding.”

“Many thanks,” the Northerners came back; “you can’t fool us on mule-meat and river-soup. We’ll bring our own rations when we come in.”

A moment later the men had returned to their lines.

“Look out for your heads,” the call rang out. “We’re going to shoot.”

The men who had just enjoyed a friendly visit, were again facing each other in the life-and-death struggle for the control of the Mississippi.

Tatanka and the boys were just having the time of their lives with all the new and exciting things they heard and saw. Barker was as much interested, but he kept his eyes open for the one enemy he must either elude or defeat. He felt sure that if Hicks were still alive he was not far from Haynes Bluff and the Union lines.