Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  In all this welter of talk Twain heard, there was one name that kept recurring—James Eads, the man who was currently the biggest celebrity associated with the Mississippi, other than Twain himself.

  Eads, the designer of the diving-bell salvage boats, had gone on to several new ventures in the last few decades. Some of them had washed out—a factory to make fancy window glass, for instance. Others had been triumphs—like a series of armored gunboats for the Union navy, which were later said to have revolutionized naval warfare. And one project had made him world-famous: he had designed and built the bridge at St. Louis.

  Eads had had no formal training in engineering or architecture. He hadn’t even had a high-school education. All he’d had was an unshakable certainty that he could build the bridge. The professionals had scoffed at its radically original cantilevered design, and they claimed that its innovative new construction material, structural steel, wouldn’t hold up. But Eads persisted despite their opposition; he persisted in the face of chronic underfunding, a maze of political chicanery, and a blizzard of lawsuits from the steamboat companies; he persisted even when the unfinished bridge took a direct hit from a tornado. But when the bridge triumphantly opened to railroad traffic in 1874, he immediately gave up bridge building and moved on to something else.

  His new project was the remaking of the Mississippi itself. He wanted to install a system of jetties along the entire length of the river to control its course and reduce its flooding. By the time of Twain’s river journey, Eads had already completed a pilot project—a jetty at the river mouth. It was intended to shape and focus the immense outflow of the current spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, in order to dredge a deeper channel and punch through the centuries of accumulated sandbars. If it worked, it would enable oceangoing ships to enter the river delta safely for the first time, without immediately going aground. It turned out to work perfectly.

  Eads was one of those people whose brains are perpetually, almost involuntarily, brimming over with new ideas. Even as he was pressing the government for backing for his full-scale jetty system, he was dreaming up other projects for the Mississippi. He had already worked out a plan for revitalizing the river traffic. He wanted to build a fleet of gigantic cast-iron industrial barges to replace the steamboats. His friend and partner Richard Smith Elliott later recalled Eads’s boundless enthusiasm for the barges, and his ultimate disappointment: “Though the air was for a year or more as full of iron barges as ever the atmosphere of Utah was of grasshoppers, yet the barges did not actually get on the water.” (Decades after Eads’s death, they were the dominant form of traffic on the Mississippi.)

  Eads wasn’t fazed by this or by any other setback. In the midst of his long and finally futile campaign for the jetties, he was devising a grander and stranger proposal. He wanted to construct a new transport system across the Central American isthmus at Panama. An idea had been mooted to build a canal there, inspired by the recent opening of the canal at Suez, but he’d opposed it—he considered the whole apparatus of locks and dams to be obsolete technology. He had something else in mind. He was going to load all the ships onto gargantuan flatbed railway cars, which he would design and build, and shuttle them by train between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

  Could this have worked? Twain observed that any sane man would have dismissed Eads’s river-mouth jetty project as “clearly impossible,” and yet it had worked: “We do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities.”

  While Eads was the biggest name involved in remaking the Mississippi, he wasn’t ultimately the one with the most clout. That was the federal government. After the Civil War, it had created a new authority, the Mississippi River Commission, to take over the management of the river. It reflected a new attitude toward federalism in the wake of the Union victory. Before the war, the idea of the national government engaging in large-scale infrastructure improvements had been fiercely resisted; now such projects were expected, even demanded.

  By the time of Twain’s trip, the commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a series of radical new projects. They had begun by clearing the Mississippi of snags. This was something that had been undertaken earlier by independent entrepreneurs (including, inevitably, Eads), but only along small stretches of the river, on commission by individual communities. The corps sent out a fleet to sweep the entire river. It had taken them years, but gradually they’d rid the river of the thousands of pockets of sawyers and sleepers and preachers and planters that had been rotting in place for generations. “They have rooted out all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones to collect,” Twain wrote in amazement. “The government’s snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-of-fact days, pulling the river’s teeth.”

  The corps had gone on to an even more dramatic project. They had installed more than seven hundred beacons along the length of the river. A few of these were full-scale lighthouses built of brick; the rest were simple oil lamps set on tall poles planted securely in the riverbanks. (Local residents were hired to keep the oil tanks filled and to turn the lamps on and off.) Now, each day at sunset, the beacons flared to life, and the entire course of the river was illuminated. The river’s murkiest reaches—its shadowy islets, its dangerous shallows and shoals, its foaming and turbulent junctions—were for the first time visible all night, every night. “The national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two-thousand-mile torch-light procession,” Twain wrote. “There is always a beacon in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast. You are never entirely in the dark now.”

  Yet more projects were getting under way. Twain could see the evidence of them everywhere. “They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current,” he wrote, “and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi, they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house-roof, and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows of piles.”

  What was it all for? The corps was setting out on a successor project to the snag clearing: they were going to dredge the river of its sandbars and establish a minimum depth in the channels. Then they were going to construct an immense new maze of levees and spillways to regulate the river current and reduce its annual flooding. (They had rejected Eads’s large-scale jetty proposal—too hastily, as it turned out. Eventually they would incorporate elements of it in their designs.) And they were beginning to consider an even more ambitious proposal: permanently stabilizing the river’s course. Twain wrote:

  One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.

  It did not escape Twain’s notice that all these projects were being carried out at a time when the Mississippi was almost entirely devoid of traffic. So what was the point? In Life on the Mississippi, he vented his doubts by way of a surrogate—a cranky, eccentric steamboat pilot of the old school named Uncle Mumford, who denounced the remaking of the river in a long monologue:

  When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn’t a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than bri
stles on a hog’s back; and now when there’s three dozen steamboats and nary a barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat’s as safe on the river as she’d be in heaven. And I reckon that by the time there ain’t any boats left at all, the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all the days will be Sundays.

  But Twain knew that he and Uncle Mumford were on the losing side. The river was bound to be transformed—even if generations would pass before anybody made any use of it. “The military engineers,” Twain concluded, “have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again,—a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.”

  Or, as Richard Smith Elliott, the friend and partner of Eads, put it, in words that are virtually a death warrant for the old, wild river:

  The United States will have a population of about sixty-three millions in 1890, and eighty millions in 1900. The majority will be west of the Alleghenies. To say that we shall allow the great river to remain in its present imperfect and destructive condition, is to say that we do not understand the interests of the nation, or our own power.

  Here and there on his journey downriver, Twain could glimpse, among the ruins of the old river economy, the first stirrings of new life. A few of the towns that he had expected to find abandoned turned out to be flourishing. There was never any mystery about why: “We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too, there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau.”

  The riverfronts may have been derelict, but the areas around the railway depots were alive with fresh growth. The shanties had been replaced by squat fortresses of brick: brick warehouses were rising alongside the rail yards, and there were brick smokestacks poking up from factories on the bluffs. Twain was particularly impressed by a tour of a cotton mill in Natchez. It was a hulking three-story factory that could turn out millions of yards of fabrics a year—the South was at last milling its own cotton for export.

  Around New Orleans, the run-down old mansions and plantation houses of the sugarcane country were being rehabbed into factories and manufacturing plants. Twain visited one of them. It was, he said, “a spacious house, with some innocent steam machinery in one end of it and some big porcelain pipes running here and there.” But as he looked closer, he found that he was wrong: “No, not porcelain—they merely seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammonia which was being breathed through them had coated them to the thickness of your hand with solid milk-white ice.”

  The house had been turned into an ice factory. The floors of the great rooms were lined with rows of countless tin boxes, each filled with filtered water and packed around with bags of salt. The ammonia chilled the water, and workers stirred it to keep it from clouding up. When the blocks of ice were ready—“hard, solid, and crystal-clear”—they were cut out of the tin boxes and lifted onto carts. The carts were then wheeled from the big hall out the back door, where a row of flatcars waited on a newly constructed spur line of the local railroad. Then the train trundled off to the street markets of New Orleans.

  The ice blocks were being sold as decorative centerpieces for dinner tables. Lovely and curious objects had been frozen within them: coins and toys, bouquets of tropical flowers, French dolls dressed in silk. The blocks were set out in shallow bowls, and during the sultriness of the delta afternoons, they would slowly melt, cooling the diners gathered around the table. By twilight, as the last of the ice dissolved, the toys and trinkets in their depths would be left floating in the brimming bowls: dolls and flowers and gifts and party favors, like flotsam from a modern kind of flood. It made Twain marvel at how the world was changing. “In my time,” he observed, “ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it. But anybody and everybody can have it now.”

  Epilogue

  JOHN BANVARD TOOK HIS Mississippi River panorama on a tour of England in the early 1850s. It was a tremendous success. The “Three-Mile Painting” awed Queen Victoria and got a rave review from Charles Dickens—in fact, Dickens greatly preferred Banvard’s panorama to his actual experience of the Mississippi. Banvard himself became a celebrity. He served as his own narrator at the showings; after years of practice he had become a superb and polished entertainer. One reviewer in London praised his “Jonathanisms and jokes, poetry and patter, which delight his audience mightily.” (A Jonathanism was a wild hyperbole, which was regarded then as the hallmark of American speech.) The way Banvard told it, his creation of the panorama had been as exciting as anything shown on the canvas itself. His journeys up and down the river, to paint each scene from life (or so he claimed), had been one long epic of frontier adventure. He made it sound as though he had been sketching with one hand while fighting off wild animals, savage Indians, and menacing desperadoes with the other. He clearly gloried in the role of the heroic frontiersman. He liked to claim that he was entirely self-taught as an artist and had only taken up his paintbrush because he had been so inspired by the great river itself. (“No—he had a teacher,” his promotional pamphlet clarified. “He studied the omnipresent works of the One Great Living Master! Nature was his teacher.”)

  Banvard had competition on his English tour: John Rowson Smith and his Leviathan Panorama of the Mississippi River. But Smith was nowhere near as theatrical a personality as Banvard. He hired other people to be his narrators while he supervised from offstage. His great pitch for his panorama wasn’t its romance, but its documentary veracity. It was, he claimed, a wholly exact rendering of the river, painted with scrupulous on-the-spot accuracy. He was particularly careful about his steamboats—there were steamboat buffs in the audiences then, ready to debate the most hairsplitting details of their design. He specifically guaranteed in his advertisements that every steamboat in his panorama was a faithful rendering of a real steamboat currently afloat somewhere on the Mississippi. His panorama even took an intermission from the vistas of the river for a detailed tour of basic steamboat design, including a cutaway schematic of a typical interior.

  Smith was irked by Banvard and considered his panorama a sham. During their English tours they got into a fierce feud in the London newspapers over the truthfulness of their respective creations. This may have been a publicity stunt—and if it was, then it was a clever one: it kept the attention of the English public for months, and drove up attendance at both panoramas. But the artists themselves seem to have been entirely serious about it. Or at any rate Smith was. He was exultant when his attacks on Banvard received crushing, even conclusive support from a world-renowned authority. This was the artist and writer George Catlin, famous for his books on the Missouri Territory and the Plains Indians. (His Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, first published in 1841, is still highly regarded today.) Catlin went to a showing of the Banvard panorama in London and declared that in his opinion its scenes of the Missouri River were faked. He found so many important landmarks missing, and so many inaccuracies in the ones that were shown, that he doubted Banvard had ever been on the Missouri at all. Smith immediately trumpeted Catlin’s charges in his ads; Banvard never refuted them.

  But while Smith won the fight over accuracy, he lost with the public. His realistic panorama was never as popular as Banvard’s grand extravaganza. In the end he seems to have surrendered: he finished his tour and came back to America in 1853, long before Banvard did, and he immediately retired from the panorama business. There’s no evidence that after he returned from England he ever showed Leviathan Panorama again. He resumed his old career as a theatrical scene painter, and he died in obscurity in 1864.

  It was around this time that the other Mississippi panoramas began to drop out of sight. Their original owners wearied of the touring life and sold them, their new owners were unable to get enough bookings for
them, and they eventually were lost or destroyed. One of the panoramas was abandoned in Havana when a Caribbean tour went bust. Another was sold to a potential exhibitor in Asia, and the last recorded trace of it was when it was transshipped through Calcutta on its way to Java—there’s no evidence whether it ever reached its destination. One disappeared in a more spectacular fashion: Leon Pomarede had unwisely added special effects to his Original Panorama of the Mississippi, big billows of smoke and steam that came writhing out of the wings to enhance the illusion that the audience was on a steamboat with its boilers at full power; something went wrong before a showing in New Jersey and the canvas roll caught fire. The panorama went up like a torch and was irretrievably damaged within a few minutes.

  By the middle 1850s, Banvard’s panorama was the only one still on tour. Banvard cashed in on the absence of competition: after England he continued on for the next several years through Europe and the Middle East. He was wildly popular wherever he went. By the time he finally returned to America, he was a wealthy man. He bought a mansion outside of New York City. He wrote travel books and poetry. He opened Banvard’s Museum in New York, a hall of curiosities and theatrical exhibitions in imitation of Barnum’s American Museum; the Mississippi panorama was the opening attraction. In his travels he’d collected material for several new panoramas as well, including one of the Holy Land and another of the Nile, and he debuted them in New York to great acclaim. By 1860 he had become the most famous artist in America.