BOLD ENGINEERING.

331

and shell them out; but the Colonel, after spending three days in the swamps in canoes, with negroes as guides, reported it impracticable. He declared, however, that he could by hard labor, cut a channel for transports through this slough. Pope at once gave him full permission to take whatever force he wanted, and order every thing he needed and go to work. The latter immediately sent to Cairo for four steamboats, six flats, and such guns as could be spared, and put his regiment into the swamps, to commence the herculean task. The route to be laid open was twelve miles long, two of it through timber, and the remaining ten through narrow, crooked bayous, matted with brush and small trees that had grown up from the bottom. The standing timber, to a common observer, presented an insuperable obstacle. Large trees that had been growing there from time immemorial, sent their huge trunks out of the water, some of them nearly six feet in circumference. These had to be sawed off four feet below the surface of the water, for the space of fifty feet in width. In one short stretch, seventy-five of these trees had to be thus cut. The machines for doing this were rigged on rafts and flats, and worked by twenty men. Ahead of them went large gangs of men to clear away the drift wood and fallen timber that loaded the surface, and behind came two barges and a steamboat, the last of which, with long strong lines, hauled out the logs that the men could not handle. Last of all came the fleet, the flat boats being converted into floating batteries, for no one knew how soon the enemy might ascertain what was going on, and fill the swamp with sharp shooters.

At the very outset, the difficulties that presented themselves were sufficiently formidable, for it was five hundred feet from the shore to the levee, the whole way filled with stumps. Then the levee itself had to be cut. But the ground inland, being lower than this, when an opening was