In late December 1862, Confederate Gen. Nathan B. Forrest’s First West Tennessee Raid began when his command arrived at Clifton on the night of December 15 to ferry approximately 2,100 soldiers across the Tennessee River. Forrest, leading a cavalry brigade on a raid through west Tennessee from Dec. 15, 1862-Jan 3, 1863, destroyed railroads and severed Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s supply line between Columbus, Kentucky, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. He crossed the Tennessee River at Clifton, defeated Union Col. Robert G. Ingersoll’s cavalry at Lexington, captured Trenton and Union City, ranged briefly into Kentucky, raided back through Tennessee, evaded defeat at Parker’s Crossroads, and crossed the river again at Clifton, forcing Grant to switch his supply base to Memphis. Forrest ordered the construction of two flatboats, each capable of carrying 25 men and their horses, while troops stayed out of sight without fires and sentries watched for Union gunboats. By December 17, the Confederates were over and riding westward. A Confederate diarist recalled that horses were pushed from a bluff into the swift, icy water toward a fire on a sandbar, that eight horses were lost, and that after standing for hours in a cold drizzling rain, numbed and soaked, his company crossed upstream at broad daylight on one of the hidden flatboats built by Forrest’s vanguard.