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was not the Mississippi. It was a combination (according to Federal plans) of three rivers: the Coldwater, the Tallahatchie, and the Yazoo; and if these worked, Federal troops would get ashore a few miles north-east of Vicksburg and east of the Mississippi River. But the plan did have some complications. To get gunboats and transports into the Coldwater River from the Mississippi meant breaching a levee that sealed off a long-unused channel, the Yazoo Pass. It was news of this breaching by Federal engineers that reached Pemberton on February 9.
It appears that it took a week for Pemberton to believe the news. Not until February 17 was Gen Loring assigned the task of stopping the Federals, by now slowly advancing south from the Yazoo Pass. This slow advance backed off to a snail?s pace when the Federal boats ran into a barricade of pecan, cypress, and oak trees felled by Confederate outriders and engineer troops. In a stretch of less than a mile, some 80 trees lay across the channel with their top branches locked together. Each tree had to be cut away, limb by limb, before passage could be had. It took two weeks of chipping and sawing before the first gunboat got through Yazoo Pass into the Coldwater River.
The delay gave Loring a little extra time to come up with a defensive plan. His plan was this: build a fort on the narrow neck of land that separated the Tallahatchie and Yazoo rivers, about four miles up the Yazoo and due west of Greenwood, a plantation landing and village southwest of Grenada. Then block the Tallahatchie with log rafts and the sunken hulk of Star of the West. And finally downstream on the Yazoo, build other fortifications.
On February 24, Baxter and his comrades in the 20th Mississippi, now back at Grenada, received orders to move to Greenwood. Loring had directed Gen. Tilghman to send an infantry regiment from his brigade, and the 20th got the assignment. In addition, a battery of field artillery was dispatched.
Four companies of the regiment boarded the river steamer Sharp on Thursday, February 26, and headed south-west on the Yalobusha River for Greenwood. That night the rest of the regiment was ordered to cook two days? rations and be packed up,
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