Throughout December 1862, Nathan Bedford Forrest led a successful Confederate cavalry raid into west Tennessee to disrupt the communication of the Union forces under Ulysses Grant, who was driving toward Vicksburg, Mississippi. Forrest led thousands of Union soldiers in west Tennessee on a "wild goose chase" to try to locate his fast-moving forces.
Never staying in one place long enough to be attacked, Forrest led his troops in raids as far north as the banks of the Ohio River in southwest Kentucky. He would return to his base in Mississippi with far more men than with which he had started. By then, all of Forrest’s troopers were fully armed with captured Union weapons. As a result, Grant was forced to revise and delay the strategy of his Vicksburg campaign.