In mid-March 1862, Brigadier General John Pope sought a way past Confederate batteries at Island No. 10, which blocked movement on the Mississippi River while his troops at New Madrid remained on the wrong side of the river. Because Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote would not risk running the Confederate position with his squadron, Colonel Josiah Bissell of the Engineer Regiment of the West surveyed the flooded swamps and bottomland north and east of New Madrid and proposed a canal route for steamboats. His plan used natural bayous and sloughs along a roughly 12-mile path, cut 50 feet wide and 4½ feet deep, following Wilson's Bayou into the swamps and then crossing to St. John's Bayou, whose mouth offered a sheltered cove to hide transports from Confederate observers. For nineteen days Bissell's men battled floodwaters and timber rather than enemy troops, using a submerged saw where open bayou permitted and hand labor where necessary to clear the passage. Completed on April 4, the channel allowed four steamboats and several barges, though not gunboats, to pass. The forces brought through the channel helped support the gunboats that later ran past Island No. 10, contributing to a Union victory on April 9, 1862. In the decades after the Civil War, flood control and bottomland reclamation transformed the surrounding swamps into farmland, leaving the canal site difficult to recognize.
