But it did not give Eads total victory. Just before the Mississippi reaches the sea, it splits into three main channels, or passes. He had offered to build jetties for $10 million at Southwest Pass, which carried most of the river’s water and, hence, its potential power. The board estimated the cost for construction and twenty years’ maintenance there at $16,053,124, and therefore recommended building jetties at the South Pass, where it estimated the cost would be $7,942,110.
Eads did not want to work at South Pass. It was the smallest and shallowest of all the river’s main outlets. He feared that a current powerful enough to dig a channel 28 feet deep and several hundred feet wide could destabilize not only the jetties but the pass itself. And at Southwest Pass, nature provided 14 feet of water over the sandbar. At South Pass, only 8 feet of water covered the bar. Finally, a shoal in the river blocked access to South Pass; removing the shoal would be more difficult than building the jetties themselves.
He made a counterproposal, offering to build the jetties, again at the larger Southwest Pass, for $8 million, $2 million less than his earlier offer and less than half the board’s estimate. And he guaranteed to deepen the channel to 30 feet instead of 28.
But now that Eads had won on the principle of the jetties, Humphreys and congressional allies spread more rumors about excessive profits and wrote a new jetties bill so restrictive that they believed Eads must reject it. In a memo to Humphreys, an aide explained: “The accompanying discussion of Mr. Eads’ project has for its chief object the presentation of an argumentum ad hominem which…does not aid in solving scientific questions…. The suggestions of what the bill should be, of course, do not imply a desire that it should pass, but merely to suggest amendments that would defeat the purpose of its projector and render it unacceptable to him.”
This bill required Eads to use the South Pass, produce a 30-foot-deep channel, and do it for $5 million, with an additional $1 million to be held in escrow for up to twenty years. He would receive nothing until Army engineers certified that a channel 20 feet deep existed—2 feet deeper than the goal of the canal. For this he would get only $500,000. Subsequent payments would be made in 2-foot increments until 30 feet was reached. Then Eads would receive $100,000 a year for maintenance for twenty years.
If Eads refused to accept the terms, the Corps of Engineers would build the jetties. If Eads was wrong, he would be ruined both financially and professionally. Even if his engineering theory was correct, the financial strictures could make his success impossible. But if he succeeded, his success would be total.
Eads accepted.
Meanwhile, on March 23, 1875, at a victory dinner in St. Louis attended by 400 powerful men, Eads made a speech that epitomized the nineteenth century’s linear certainty, and its hubris: “If the profession of engineer were not based upon exact science, I might tremble for the result…. But every atom that moves onward in the river…is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and eccentricity of the river, its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits, are controlled by laws as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer needs only to be assured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the result he aims at.”
Then Eads promised to “undertake the work with a faith based upon the ever-constant ordinances of God himself, and so certain as He will spare my life and faculties for two years more, I will give to the Mississippi river, through His grace, and by application of His, laws, a deep, open, safe, and permanent outlet to the sea.”
Great as that goal was, even more was at issue. And Humphreys, not a man to have for an enemy, was not finished.
CHAPTER SIX
A YEAR BEFORE Eads’ victory dinner, in the spring of 1874, the Mississippi River had overflowed from Illinois south. It had devastated the lower Mississippi region and focused the nation’s attention fully on the great river. In response, the government had created the U.S. Levee Commission to decide upon a river control policy to prevent future floods.
G. K. Warren, the Humphreys loyalist who had tried to destroy Eads’ bridge, chaired it; other members included Henry Abbot, coauthor with Humphreys of Physics and Hydraulics, and Paul Hebert, the former Louisiana governor who was then lobbying against the jetties. Despite the importance of its charge, this commission conducted no fieldwork, made no measurements, visited no sites. Its sole source of information was the Humphreys and Abbot report; it did not even review any observations or measurements made by others. Unsurprisingly, its conclusions conformed to Humphreys’ earlier ones.
As Humphreys had, it rejected reservoirs, cutoffs, and the engineering theory associated with the levees-only policy, saying, “The idea that the river would scour its bed deeper if confined…[is] erroneous.” As Humphreys had, it emphasized the importance of keeping all natural outlets open, and it was “forced unwillingly to” reject artificial outlets because of the cost. As Humphreys had, it stated flatly, “The alluvial regions of the Mississippi can only be reclaimed by levees.”
The report appeared in January 1875. The 1874 flood and this report had not entered directly into the debate over the jetties, and until his jetty contract was secure, Eads refrained from comment on it. But then he attacked. Dismissing the entire report and its recommendations, he urged, in effect, the use of jetties on the entire river. His reasoning superficially resembled the theory that levees would increase current velocity and scour out the bottom. But there was an immense difference. Levees were built back from the river’s natural banks, sometimes more than a mile back. The river had to overflow its banks before the levees could begin to confine it; as a result, any force generated by this confinement was dissipated over an area far greater than the river’s natural channel. Also, levees only confined the river during floods. Thus, levees could increase current velocity for only a few weeks each year—and not necessarily every year.
This was a crucial point. Neither Humphreys nor Ellet had ever disputed the fact that a faster current increased scouring of the bottom. The question was, how much? The river in flood carried several orders of magnitude more volume than when it was at low water. Levees did confine floods, and did increase scour, but could levees cause enough increased current and scour to accommodate a flood?
Humphreys, Ellet, and Eads all agreed that levees could not do so. But Eads proposed to concentrate the river’s force constantly, year-round. He planned to invade the river, to build not levees back from the banks but jetties in the river’s channel. These would constrict the water year-round, even at low water, and apply a constant scouring of the bottom. He also called for cutoffs to create a far straighter and faster river. All this, he was certain, would significantly deepen the river.
He declared: “By such correction the flood…can be permanently lowered, and in this way the entire alluvial basin, from Vicksburg to Cairo, can be lifted as it were above all overflow, and levees in that part of the river rendered [superfluous]…. There can be no question of this fact, and it is well for those most deeply interested to ponder it carefully before rejecting it; for the increased value given to the territory thus reclaimed can scarcely be estimated.”
Eads was directly contradicting Humphreys, the U.S. Levee Commission, and the entire Corps of Engineers. If the jetties in South Pass succeeded, Eads would clearly try to apply his theory to the length of the river, and make the Corps irrelevant.
IN EARLY MAY 1875, Eads arrived in New Orleans. He had delayed starting work until the end of the flood season, and the city that had earlier fought him now waited anxiously. Upon his arrival he was entertained at the Canal Street mansion of Dr. William Mercer, who used the same gold service for Eads that he had used for the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia during Mardi Gras three years earlier. The city council formally applauded Eads’ “grand enterprise,” while the Cha
mber of Commerce, the Cotton Exchange, the Merchants’ Exchange, the Ship and Steamship Association, and others of prominence hosted a reception at the St. Charles Hotel, which called itself the most elegant in the country. There, under the chandeliers sat Creoles and Americans, carpetbaggers and Confederates, fanning themselves with the printed menus commemorating the occasion. One thing brought them together—money.
In a toast simultaneously blunt and gracious, General Cyrus Bussey announced: “Captain Eads has fought his way with an address and vigor and courage which deserve unqualified admiration. Against the most persistent misrepresentations that ever beset any human endeavor, against ignorance, angry and false witness, he has at last brought his efforts to a successful termination…. That he has the sympathy of the community in this hour of his triumph, and at the outset of the enterprise, is eminently fit and proper. That he did not have it when it was most sorely needed, Captain Eads can afford to forget. The struggle is over.”
The struggle was not over.
Eads had always loved the river and knew it more intimately than he had ever known any man or woman. He knew it in private ways that would never be known by any river captain, by any fisherman, by any levee contractor, by any engineer. He had buried his hands in the rich silt of its bottom, wandered blind in its depths, and come as close to breathing it as a man could do and live. The river had taken him from his family and wrapped itself around him. Now, finally, in his great pride, he had determined that he would command it, the great, great river, the Mississippi itself.
But Humphreys had said: Anyone who knows me intimately knows I had more of the soldier than a man of science in me…. We must get ready for a combat…. The contest must be sharp and merciless.
THE MORNING AFTER the reception and Bussey’s toast, Eads, his contractor James Andrews, a determined and bold man who had worked with him on the bridge, and two other engineers left behind the city’s elegance and proceeded downriver aboard a small steamer.
Below New Orleans the river resembles a 100-mile-long arm crooked at the elbow, narrowing gradually, to Head of Passes. There the river divides into three main channels, Southwest Pass, Pass à l’Outre, and South Pass, each extending like a long thin finger—the land separating the passes from the sea is as narrow as a few hundred yards—out into the Gulf.
At Head of Passes the party crossed over a shoal and entered the finger that was South Pass. It ran in an almost perfectly straight line 700 feet wide for 12.9 miles. Along its banks were dense, impenetrable reeds, 10 to 12 feet high, interrupted by an occasional copse of willow trees in the upper reaches. This was, geologically, truly the river’s delta, created as the Mississippi River deposited its immense sediment load. It was the newest land in North America, a mixture of water and earth so soft that, except for the banks immediately adjacent to the pass, it could not support a man’s weight. The animal life was primitive; muskrats and minks, herons and gulls and ducks, and snakes. The closer to the Gulf, the more desolate and solitary the marsh became, the grayer the reeds and grasses.
Upon reaching the sea, they anchored, rowed to shore, and walked on the beach. The Gulf surf lapped gently, but the jetties would have to withstand the most violent hurricanes. In the already steamy heat, clouds of mosquitoes, gnats, and sand flies began to swarm around them. Then they climbed the lighthouse.
It was the only elevation for 100 miles. From it they could see the whole country. River, land, and sea were barely differentiated. Every inch of land within view could be overflowed by tides or the river. Out in the Gulf, beyond the pass, the sandbars and mud lumps were in the process of becoming land. For miles beyond the bars, out into the sea, the Mississippi continued to have an identity. Half a century earlier a European visitor had described the scene: “The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from its horrors.”
South Pass was dying, becoming land, shoaling at its entrance and exit. Eads needed to produce a channel with a continuous depth of 30 feet. For a distance of 12,000 feet, more than 2 miles, the depth was less than that. At high tide, the deepest water over the bar itself was 9 feet, and the bar was 3,000 feet thick.
But after three days of study the Eads party left more confident than ever. Light, silty sand made up the bar; Eads was certain a strong current could easily cut through it. Equally important, deep water lay beyond the bar, and a strong coastal current ran across it, so sediment flushed out by the jetties would either sink or be swept away. Any unspoken concern in Eads’ heart about the formation of a new bar beyond the jetties vanished.
Upon their return to New Orleans, Eads was so confident that he wrote his New Orleans attorney, Henry Leovy, whose clients included Jefferson Davis, about plans for a railroad to the mouth of the river: “[T]ransfers of cargoes of grains from barges into ships can be made quite as cheaply as by elevator in the City and with an important saving in port charges…. I believe the stock of the [rail]road would become quite valuable. I am willing to make some arrangement, mutually beneficial, by which I received stock in exchange for land at Port Eads, as I own ten miles front on each side of the pass with the riparian right out to sea on both sides of the channel.”
He also promised a channel deep enough to use by July 4, 1876, thirteen months away. An assistant told the Picayune, “Assurance of success is absolute.”
REGARDLESS OF his engineering, however, if Eads could not raise capital, or if he had to pay too high a premium to attract it, he would fail. This was his weakness, and here Humphreys aimed his attack.
To raise money, Eads organized the South Pass Jetty Company. Investors in it would be paid only if the jetties succeeded. But then they would receive double their investment plus 10 percent interest. He capitalized the company at $750,000 but planned to raise only what was needed to keep work going until the first government payment. Raising the money was not easy. He exhausted his own contacts, then urged Elmer Corthell, a young Brown University graduate still in New England who would become resident engineer at the jetties, to make “any ‘bloated bondholder’ or ‘money aristocrat’ wish he had a hand in” by telling anyone who had $100,000 to invest that Eads would negotiate a private, even more lucrative deal.
Andrews & Company, of which Eads was a minority owner, agreed to supply all equipment—pile drivers, barges, steamers, housing, office space, materials, and labor—and build and place all piling, plus 450,000 cubic yards of stone and wood fillers, for $2.5 million. Eads believed this would be enough to get a 26-foot-deep channel.
Eads would pay Andrews & Company nothing until 60,000 cubic yards of material were in place, at which point Andrews would get $300,000. The company was guaranteed one-half of all subsequent government payments until it was paid.
Like Eads himself, the company’s majority owner, James Andrews, moved quickly. Andrews had first seen the bar in late May 1875. On June 12 he left New Orleans with several dozen men and a steam tug pulling a pile driver and three flatboats, one for boarding workers and two loaded with material to build housing. They arrived in a steaming marsh, and were promptly tormented by small gray motile clouds of biting insects.
One of Andrews’ first acts was to establish direct communication by telegraph with New Orleans, and soon equipment and supplies began arriving at what ultimately became Port Eads, a small town complete with hotel, offices, and boardinghouses for 850 men. For now the men lived on the boarding boat; no liquor was allowed. There was no relief from the insects and heat, not even in the water; water moccasins kept the men from swimming.
Only five days after Andrews arrived at the river’s mouth, on June 17, he drove the first piles into the floor of the ocean. The work went quickly. In one day they could drive 176 piles. Lumber came from Mississippi and New Orleans; crushed stone, dischar
ged from ships as ballast, came from New Orleans; limestone carried in fleets of twelve to twenty barges at a time came from 1,400 miles upriver, quarried from the blue and gray limestone bluffs of the Ohio River at Rose Clare, Indiana.
By September 9 the guide piling for the east jetty was finished, and extended in a lonely curve of wood two and one-third miles into the Gulf. The job was executed with extraordinary precision; the piles farthest from land’s end were located within a few inches of their planned site. Work on the west jetty had already begun.
Next came the heart of the jetty: the fascine mattresses. These were made of willow tree trunks, which were thin, flexible, and straight. The trunks were to be linked, secured to the guide piling, and sunk. Eads expected the river to deposit sediment upon them and eventually make them impermeable. Then they would do their work.
Harvesting the willows was the worst work. The trees came from 6,000 acres of land 30 miles upriver and formed only 40 years earlier, when fishermen, seeking a quicker route to the Gulf, had cut a canal there. The river had quickly overwhelmed the lock, and forced an opening 1,400 feet wide and initially 80 feet deep. This opening became known as “the Jump,” but after the first surge of water the river had begun depositing sediment and making land. The trees had grown rapidly on it.
To get to the area the men traveled on a barge where they slept stacked in bunks. Ventilation was as good as Eads could design, but in the near-tropical heat and with swarming mosquitoes, nights were awful. Days were worse. The men, half-naked, without shade, chopped down trees and dragged them, at every step sinking—sometimes shoulder-deep—into the soft mud, 200 yards to waiting barges. Moccasins and leeches made the water and marsh frightening.
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