Yazoo Expedition

The Yazoo expedition was a sideshow to Sherman, with cotton as its prize. While Sherman's column left Vicksburg on February 3, 1864, to wreck railroads around Meridian, Col. James Coates took about 1,200 men and five gunboats up the river as a cooperating force. After the fight on March 5 he loaded his transports and went back downriver the next day. By his own report he carried off 1,728 bales of cotton, though his figures do not quite add up. Sherman reached Canton on February 27, a few days before Coates sailed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Triangle Cultural Center — steps away
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Blue Front Cafe — 15 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Delta National Forest — 22 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

• B.S. Ricks Memorial Library — 0.2 mi
• Yazoo County Courthouse — 0.3 mi
• Bank of Yazoo City — 0.4 mi
• Bethel A.M.E. Church — 0.5 mi