Slaughter Pen

About the middle of the siege, on the night of June 11, Union troops attempted to breach the Confederate lines by way of the garrison's slaughter pen. The slaughterhouse, cattle pen, and dump were located here and in the nearby ravines on a high bluff running into Sandy Creek. According to Colonel Isaiah G. W. Steedman, a picked command of possibly a thousand men tried to pass through during a rainstorm, but the ravines, filled with the offal of many hundred cattle, caused the men to become separated, lost, and mired in the putrid ground. They came straggling through the thin Confederate line and were captured in detail, while most scrambled back to their own lines. Beef was a mainstay of the Port Hudson garrison's diet, supplied by longhorn cattle driven from Texas, though one Confederate at Port Hudson described it as poor, gristly, blue, gummy meat that could be boiled for hours without producing any grease.

Louisiana · United States