Yazoo Diversion Canal

The river left. In 1876 the Mississippi changed course, cutting through De Soto Point and abandoning Vicksburg on an oxbow lake. The city that had been besieged in 1863 for its command of the river spent the next 27 years watching commerce flow past in the distance. Steamboats that had once docked at the bluff landed somewhere else. The waterfront went quiet. The Army Corps of Engineers solved it in 1903 by diverting the Yazoo River through the old Mississippi channel. The Yazoo Diversion Canal restored Vicksburg's access to navigable water, and the city became a river port again. The new channel cut only about 1.5 miles from where Grant's men had tried to dig their way past the Confederate guns forty years earlier — Williams in 1862, Grant in 1863, both attempts abandoned after disease and collapsing levees beat the shovels. The Mississippi eventually carved the route they couldn't finish. The canal floodwall now carries the 32 Dafford murals. The Levee Street walk follows the water. From downtown you can see what took 27 years to get back.