Fort Desperate Artillery

Fort Desperate's artillery was close to a token. Two detachments of Company B, 1st Mississippi Artillery, about 25 men with two 12-pounder guns, were all the fort's colonel had to set against Union batteries on the ridges around him. The defense rested on the infantry, on a parapet raised on three sides with an outer trench, and on steep ground where felled timber slowed any approach. Johnson later credited his own 15th Arkansas, which held the most dangerous ground, more than the guns.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 0.6 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 8.2 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.5 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 17 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Sharpshooter Tower — steps away
• Fort Desperate — steps away
• Union Sap — steps away
• Union Batteries 7 and 8 — steps away