Yazoo Pass Expedition

In February 1863 four hundred Union soldiers cut a Mississippi River levee, built in the 1850s to keep the river out of Moon Lake, and a small mine finished the job. The flood meant a back door to Vicksburg for Grant, and ruin for the Delta people on its route. Fields and homes went under, residents fled, and Union troops took enslaved people, cotton and corn and burned plantation buildings, while planters burned their own cotton to keep it from the enemy. Confederates at Fort Pemberton stopped the flotilla, and it turned back in April.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Freedom Park — 11 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.
• Delta Cultural Center — 11 mi
  A state museum in downtown Helena where King Biscuit Time, the longest-running daily blues radio show, is broadcast live from the Visitors Center.
• Elaine Massacre Memorial — 11 mi
  A memorial dedicated in 2019 in Helena for the Black people killed by white mobs and troops in the 1919 Elaine Massacre, the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history.
• Delta Blues Museum — 14 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.

More markers nearby

• James L. Alcorn — 8.2 mi
• Robert Nighthawk — 9.5 mi
• Conway Twitty — 9.6 mi
• Helena, Arkansas — 11 mi