Mule steak and dressed rat

摘要

"Not a dog barked at us, not a cat shied round a corner. Poor things, they had all been eaten in the straitness of the siege." The eyewitness was a Yankee chaplain with the Federal Army when on Independence Day, July 4th 1863, it entered Vicksburg, the previously impregnable town that commanded the Mississippi River. The fall of the so-called "Gibraltar of the West" hastened the end of the American civil war by cleaving the Confederacy in two and cutting its supplies of grain, livestock, munitions and men.