Battling the unexpected.

At first, Grant’s march on Grenada went well, but with his troops strung out from Oxford to Water Valley, the general suddenly found his army vulnerable on every front, as his advance cavalry was caught in an ambush at Coffeeville a few miles outside Grenada. It was the first important victory in the West for the Confederacy, and for Grant it was a defeat that cost dearly, in the support of both Washington as well as the general’s own men.

Meanwhile, smarting from his own failed attempt to retake Corinth, Confederate General Earl Van Dorn made a bold move, leading a lightning-quick cavalry raid out of Grenada on Grant’s Holly Springs base. Millions of dollars of ordinance, food and materiel were put to the torch, leaving Grant and his army stranded without supplies and Vicksburg more unattainable than ever. Grant retreated and regrouped—his plans to take Vicksburg by land were shattered.

Later, Grant claimed the Holly Springs raid and his own subsequent retreat forced him to the realization that an army could rely on the land and its people for supplies—new knowledge that Sherman would go on to exploit to even more devastating effect.

In late 1862, however, Sherman and Grant were stymied, Vicksburg was still safe, and a great conflict in Grenada had been avoided. Yet, if the city emerged from the Civil War relatively unscathed, hardly more than a decade later, Grenada would face a far more implacable foe, when yellow fever hit the city, wiping out more than half of the population, including the town doctor.

In the next century, the city would fight another disease endemic to the South—the disease of racism—but first there was a World War to help win, and a fight against a raging river.