In the spring of 1864, the Red River Campaign brought heavy fighting to southern Arkansas as Union leaders sought to separate western Confederate forces from the east and reopen access to Texas cotton, but Union mistakes, heavy rain and floods, and strong Confederate resistance doomed the effort. After defeats at Marks' Mills and Poison Springs, General Frederick Steele's Union VII Corps left Camden on April 26 heading north toward Little Rock, with General E. Kirby Smith's Confederate troops less than 24 hours behind. Torrential rains turned the Camden Road into a quagmire, and on April 29 Confederate infantry caught the Union army in the flooded white oak forest of the Saline River bottoms just south of Jenkins' Ferry. Over two days, Confederate forces launched three major attacks but failed to stop the Union escape as Steele's troops crossed the swollen Saline River at Jenkins' Ferry on a mobile wooden bridge suspended by India Rubber pontoons, after which the bridge was sunk. Unable to follow, the Confederates were left behind while the exhausted Union army moved north to higher ground, burned many of its cumbersome wagons, and continued on to Little Rock, ending the campaign and marking the Union's last major encroachment into south Arkansas.