Eagle Bend

Eagle Bend was the staging ground for a gamble that failed. In March 1863 Admiral David Porter took five gunboats up Steele's Bayou, Black Bayou and Deer Creek, hoping to reach the Yazoo above Vicksburg's bluffs. The creek's bends sometimes cut progress to a mile every two hours, and Confederates dropped trees ahead of the fleet and then behind it. A plantation slave reported the felling in the rear. Porter told his captains to be ready to scuttle. Sherman's infantry arrived in time, and by March 27 the fleet was back on the Mississippi.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 12 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.
• Old Court House Museum — 13 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 14 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• Delta National Forest — 21 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• Chickasaw Bayou Battle — 11 mi
• French Fort St. Pierre — 11 mi
• Waltersville — 12 mi
• Fort Nogales — 12 mi