As soon as he had the means Grant marched his army south for Vicksburg. There were three converging forces: Grant's from Grand Junction, Sherman's from Memphis, and a smaller one from Helena in Arkansas. But the Confederate General, J. C. Pemberton, who had replaced Van Dorn, escaped the trap they tried to set for him. He was strongly entrenched on the south side of the Tallahatchie, north of Oxford, on the Mississippi Central rails. While Grant and Sherman converged on his front, the force from Helena rounded his rear and cut the rails. But the damage was quickly repaired; and Pemberton retired south toward Vicksburg before Grant and Sherman could close and make him fight. Then Grant tried again. This time Sherman advanced on board of Mississippi steamers, with the idea of meeting the Union expedition coming up from New Orleans. But Van Dorn cut Grant's long line of land communications at Holly Springs, forcing Grant back for supplies and leaving Sherman, who had made his way up the Yazoo, completely isolated. Grant fared well enough, so far as food was concerned; for he found such abundant supplies that he at once perceived the possibility of living on the country without troubling about a northern base. He spent Christmas and New Year at Holly Springs, and then moved back to Memphis. In the meantime Sherman's separated force had come to grief. On the twenty-ninth of December its attempt to carry the Chickasaw Bluffs, just north of Vicksburg, was completely frustrated by Pemberton; for Sherman could not deploy into line on the few causeways that stood above the flooded ground. On the eleventh of January this first campaign along the Mississippi was ended by the capture of Arkansas Post. McClernand was the senior there. But Sherman did the work ashore as D. D. Porter did afloat. Meanwhile Bragg had brought the campaign to a close among the eastern tributaries by a daring, though abortive, march on Nashville. Rosecrans, now commanding the army of the Cumberland, stopped and defeated him at Stone's River on New Year's Eve. The "War in the West," that is, in those parts of the Southwest which lay beyond the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi system, was even more futile at the time and absolutely null in the end. Its scene of action, which practically consisted of inland Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, was not in itself important enough to be a great determining factor in the actual clash of arms. But Texas supplied many good men to the Southern ranks; and the Southern commissariat missed the Texan cattle after the fall of Vicksburg in '63. New Mexico might also have been a good deal more important than it actually was if it could have been made the base of a real, instead of an abortive, invasion of California, the El Dorado of Confederate finance.