Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Once the barges were full, tugs towed them to the sandbar. There, on an inclined, 100-yard-long platform, men constructed the mattresses of willow trees.

  Upon this construction depended Eads’ success. The river would rip apart an improperly built mattress. And in the construction process itself lay Eads’ profit.

  The board of engineers had anticipated his using willow mattresses but had estimated the cost based on techniques developed by the Dutch, who intertwined the willows, virtually weaving them together.

  Eads and Andrews designed a different process, and later patented it. They first laid out strips of yellow pine 20 to 40 feet long, 6 inches wide, and 2.5 inches thick. These strips were bolted together, and the willow trees were laid within them. Other layers, each one at a right angle to the proceeding one, were added, then more strips of yellow pine were bolted on top, and the whole thing was lashed together. The resulting mattress was 100 feet long, 35 to 60 feet wide (depending upon where it would be placed), and 2 feet thick.

  Workers could make and launch it in two hours. The Dutch method required two days to do the same. It was this innovation that had allowed Eads to offer to build the jetties at Southwest Pass at one-half the board’s estimate.

  A tug towed the barge to the guide pilings. The men then launched the mattresses, covered them with stone, and sank them in layers—as many as sixteen layers.

  In less than a year Andrews drove all the guide piles and laid much of the mattressing. The jetties were incomplete walls of willows, not yet filled in with sediment and consolidated. But already they were succeeding. They were compressing the current, increasing its force, and deepening the channel.

  Yet Eads had received no payments and his initial capital was running out. To attract more, he hired the luxurious steamer Grand Republic for her maiden voyage, May 2, 1876, to carry investors and the press to the jetties. Traveling amid the glamour of the grand steamer, dining on exquisite preparations of oysters, shrimp, and beef, he sensed only goodwill and excitement on the trip from New Orleans.

  Meanwhile, Charles Howell, whom Humphreys had recently promoted to major, was 30 miles away dredging Southwest Pass, still trying to achieve 18 feet of water there. Howell certainly knew of the Grand Republic’s visit and its purpose. He had no role in inspecting the jetties, and an official inspection mandated by Eads’ contract and to be conducted by a visiting team of surveyors was scheduled in only a few days. Yet Howell dispatched an assistant in a steam launch who, in full view of Eads’ guests, took repeated soundings at the South Pass. This assistant, instead of returning to Howell, disembarked at Port Eads. A few hours later the Grand Republic also stopped at Port Eads. Howell’s man, carrying charts, boarded her. During the long trip back to New Orleans, feigning reluctance, he stood in the saloon allowing reporters to pry his findings from him.

  Eads claimed South Pass was 16 feet deep at high tide. The soundings, official measurements by Army engineers, showed 12 feet. More important, they also showed a new sandbar forming 1,000 feet beyond the jetties. If the soundings were correct, they proved Humphreys right and doomed the jetties to failure.

  THE NEWS shot northward up the Mississippi valley. Stock in the jetty company collapsed. Howell pressed his attack in the New Orleans papers, accusing Eads of bilking investors. Suddenly, for the first time since his wife died, Eads was desperate.

  He tried to negotiate a loan. Without it the project could collapse. But to get it, he needed the findings of the official inspection to refute Howell. The Army engineer who sounded the pass refused to give Eads the results, insisting he could only give them to General C. B. Comstock, who had come to Port Eads from Detroit expressly for the survey. Eads asked Comstock for them. Comstock too refused, saying he “had no authority to divulge my report.”

  Eads immediately wired Secretary of War Alphonso Taft, “Please instruct General Comstock, now at Port Eads, to sound channel between jetties with me…and furnish results promptly. Major Howell has published a misstatement affecting public confidence in my work, and this information is required in justice to myself, and the public.”

  Taft did not reply. Comstock left. Eads appealed to the superintendent of the Coastal Survey for results of separate soundings it had conducted—using Eads’ own launch for them. He was refused. He appealed to the secretary of the treasury and was informed, “General Comstock will give all information required by law.”

  The law required Comstock’s report to go to Humphreys, then to the secretary of war, then to Congress, and only then to the public. The results would not appear for months.

  Eads’ loan negotiations collapsed. By the time the official results were scheduled to become public, there might be no jetty company left.

  Eads had one last chance at a rebuttal. On May 12, 1876, the oceangoing steamer Hudson was due at the mouth of the river. She was 280 feet long and 1,182 tons, and drawing 14 feet, 7 inches.

  E. V. Gager was her captain, and Eads’ friend. He had once said he hoped to captain the first oceangoing ship through the jetties. Never would there be a better time. When she arrived, Eads, the pilot, and a few reporters boarded her outside the bar. The pilot reported that his earlier soundings had indicated sufficient water in the jetties for her to use them, but the tide had turned since then and was falling fast. He could not recommend the attempt.

  Every moment the water was growing shallower. Gager did not hesitate, waved the pilot away, and ordered, “Head her for the jetties.”

  The pilot obeyed.

  Three hundred men understood what was happening, and its significance. Everywhere, on the barges sinking willows, on the shore at Port Eads, on the launches, on the Hudson herself, men ceased what they were doing and watched silently. In a calm sea, with swells barely whitening against the jetties, all was still. Only the ship moved.

  “Shall we run in slow?” the pilot asked.

  “No!” Gager snapped. “Let her go at full speed.”

  The engines churned. She seemed almost to leap forward. At full ahead, Corthell later wrote, “on she came like a thing of life.”

  Her speed increased still further. If Howell’s soundings were correct, she could destroy herself, rip a great gouge out of her bottom. Faster she went, the great white bow wave climbing higher up her hull, her wake swamping the Gulf’s swells, steaming onward, racing the falling tide down through the two-and-one-third-mile-long channel. As Corthell recalled, “As long as she carried that ‘white bone in her teeth,’ the great wave that her proud bows pushed ahead of her as she sped onward—we knew that she had found more than Major Howell’s twelve feet.”

  Then she was through! On the Hudson, on the barges, at Port Eads, the men erupted in cheers, and kept cheering, and kept cheering, and kept cheering. She stopped at Port Eads for a brief celebration. The reporters wired their stories the length and breadth of the country. The channel was open!

  “No event in the whole history of the jetties gave us such intense pleasure and satisfaction as the successful passage of this beautiful ship through the jetties,” Corthell said. “It is not too much to say that Capt. Gager, who took the risk and responsibility of this trial trip, greatly assisted the enterprise in one of its darkest hours; for the stubborn facts brought out by his brave action could not be gainsaid. They restored confidence in the jetties, and the much-needed loan was soon afterward secured for the further prosecution of the work.”

  Meanwhile, Eads was pressing Congress for help. It passed a resolution demanding the release of the official survey. The secretary of the treasury obeyed.

  The survey showed 16 feet of water in the channel, and no bar forming beyond the jetties.

  YET EADS’ financial squeeze and his problems with the government continued. Despite his achieving the required depths, several times the government delayed payment until the cabinet debated the question. One such debate lasted three days, ending only when the attorney general informed the cabinet that the government had to pay.

  At one point
, out of money, Eads wired Corthell, “Discharge the whole force except those necessary to protect property, unless they are willing to work on certificates, payable on receipt of 22 foot payment.” Seventy-four of seventy-six men agreed.

  Only the work went well. The South Pass had been surveyed for 150 years; no prior survey had ever found more than 9 feet of water over the bar. Eads officially achieved a 20-foot-deep channel October 4, 1876. Oceangoing ships began routinely using his still-unfinished channel.

  Eads then built a new series of dikes, which increased the slope of the river from .24 foot per mile to .505 foot per mile, producing, according to the Army report, “a marked scour in the channel.” On March 7, 1877, Comstock reported 23.9 feet of water there.

  The law stipulated that Howell’s dredging at Southwest Pass must end whenever the jetties achieved an 18-foot channel. Howell continued dredging in violation of the law. But on August 22, 1877, his appropriations ran out. There would be no more. The dredging ended.

  Even then, financial pressure on Eads continued. Ultimately, he lobbied Congress to accelerate the payment schedule, and added to his usual lobbyists Grant’s former secretary Porter, the Union general who had captured Jefferson Davis, and P. G. T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who fired on Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War, whom he paid $5,000. Congress finally pushed forward payment.

  Now Eads turned his attention to Humphreys.

  EADS WANTED a civilian commission independent of the Corps of Engineers to govern the Mississippi River. Although civil engineers and their supporters had called for one for years, it was now being spoken of as “the Eads commission.”

  In response, Humphreys lashed out with blind enmity, insisting in a letter to Congress, despite all data, that a new sandbar was forming beyond the jetties: “The results actually attained at the South Pass disprove the views advanced by Mr. Eads, and confirms those of the Engineer Department. Hence, any claim that he shall be intrusted with the control of the Mississippi River, in so far as it rests upon the results thus far achieved by him, has no proper basis.”

  Eads had had enough. He wrote an article for Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine, had it reprinted as a pamphlet, and distributed it to congressmen, reporters, and engineers across the country. It was entitled, “Review of the Humphreys and Abbot Report.”

  It was a crushing article. Eads derisively subtitled sections, “The Laws of Gravity Ignored”; “How the Wonderful Discovery Was Made”; “No Relation Between Cause and Effect!” He used Humphreys’ own data to deliver blow after blow, describing Humphreys’ calculations as “totally wrong,” “mathematically…a blunder that would disgrace a boy in High School,” and, finally, “The mistake made by Humphreys and Abbot is one unpardonable in the merest tyro in the science of dynamics.”

  Two years earlier a Prussian engineer had written an article in the same magazine also attacking Humphreys and Abbot’s original report. The two men had written a forty-three-page rebuttal. But now Abbot warned against replying to Eads at all, arguing, “a reply might advantage him…. [M]ake an end of it.”

  At Humphreys’ insistence, Abbot did finally write a rebuttal. It was ignored by all except Humphreys’ most loyal supporters.

  In the midst of these exchanges, Humphreys received more blows. The National Academy of Sciences urged the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey to survey the West—work formerly done by the Corps of Engineers. Humphreys, an original founder of the academy, resigned from it. As he had before, he fought the proposal in Congress. But no longer did he have the power to ward off passage of the legislation.

  Then on June 28, 1879, Congress created the Mississippi River Commission, a mix of Army and civilian engineers, to control the entire river. Both private individuals and state governments would have to obey it. Upon the bill’s passage, Humphreys resigned as chief of engineers and retired from the Army, effective June 30.

  Exactly one week later, U.S. Army Captain Micah Brown certified that the South Pass channel had reached the final goal, a depth of 30 feet.

  On July 11, the New Orleans Daily Times announced: “The work is done. Human patience and courage and industry, backed by an indomitable and untiring will, and informed and directed by human skill, have applied the forces of nature to the accomplishment of an end too vast for mere artificial agencies. Man has used the tremendous river which uncontrolled has been its own oppressor and imprisoner, and has now become its own liberator and saviour. There is no achievement of mechanical genius which compares with it in the splendor of its economies or in the magnitude of its results. There is no parallel instance of man’s employment of the prodigious energies of nature in the realization of his aims. It stands alone in these respects as in the almost incalculable possibilities which it has brought within our reach.”

  IN 1875, WHEN EADS BEGAN work on the jetties, 6,857 tons of goods were shipped from St. Louis through New Orleans to Europe. In 1880, the year after he finished, 453,681 tons were shipped by that route. New Orleans rose from the ninth-largest port in the United States to the second-largest, trailing only New York. (In 1995, by volume of cargo greater New Orleans ranked as the world’s largest port.)*

  Yet the impact of the jetties on the Mississippi River far exceeded that of anything else that had happened at the river’s mouth. That impact would be felt through the Mississippi River Commission.

  It never became, formally or informally, “the Eads Commission.” Though Humphreys and the War Department could not prevent the establishment of the commission, they did succeed in having Congress stipulate that Army officers outnumber civilians on it by three to two, that an Army officer serve as president, and that this officer report to his military superior, the chief of engineers. Eads was named to the commission, but he could not dominate it. In 1882 he resigned to protest its compromises.

  Science, he knew, does not compromise. Instead, science forces ideas to compete in a dynamic process. This competition refines or replaces old hypotheses, gradually approaching a more perfect representation of the truth, although one can reach truth no more than one can reach infinity.

  But the Mississippi River Commission never became a scientific enterprise. It was a bureaucracy. The natural process of a bureaucracy, by contrast, tends to compromise competing ideas. The bureaucracy then adopts the compromise as truth and incorporates it into its being. The military hierarchy in the river commission exacerbated these bureaucratic tendencies. Over time, as Army engineers staffed nearly all key posts, the commission lost any real independence from the Corps of Engineers. And with rare exceptions, the Army controlled even civilian appointments.

  The commission took positions, and the positions became increasingly petrified and rigid. Unfortunately, these positions combined the worst, not the best, of the ideas of Eads, Ellet, and Humphreys.

  Both Eads and Humphreys opposed outlets. Ellet proposed them. Ellet was right. But the commission opposed outlets.

  Both Eads and Humphreys opposed building reservoirs. Ellet had proposed them. Ellet was right. But the commission opposed reservoirs.

  Eads wanted to build cutoffs, believing they had enormous impact on floods. Humphreys and Ellet opposed cutoffs. Eads was right. The commission followed Humphreys and Ellet.

  Yet the greatest and most dangerous mistake of the Mississippi River Commission still lay elsewhere—in its position on the levees-only policy. Almost inconceivably, the commission arrived at a position that Eads, Humphreys, and Ellet had all violently rejected. It did so by compromising and mushing together its analysis over time. It embraced Humphreys’ levees-only idea and justified the decision by citing Physics and Hydraulics. But, as years passed, commission engineers ignored his reasoning and espoused the theory that levees would cause the river to scour out the channel enough to accommodate floods. Ellet had called this idea “a delusive hope, and most dangerous to indulge.” Humphreys had proved the theory “untenable.” Eads too had rejected it, distinguishing between the scouring effects of “contra
ction works” built into the river channel and levees far back from the banks.

  On this one point, Eads, Humphreys, and Ellet all concurred. Nonetheless, the levees rose, confining the river while failing to increase velocity enough to deepen the channel. No reservoirs were built, as Ellet had wanted. No outlets were built, as Ellet had also wanted, and as even Humphreys would likely have accepted, as the cost-benefit equation changed with development. No cutoffs were built, as Eads had wanted. Only levees were built.

  So the water rose higher. In turn, the levees rose higher; as more lands were reclaimed and water was cut off from it, the water also rose, and so on, and so on. At College Point, Louisiana, 40 miles above New Orleans, a levee 1.5 feet high had held the flood of 1850, a flood Humphreys investigated in detail; by the mid-1920s the levee exceeded 20 feet. At Morganza, Louisiana, a levee 7.5 feet high had held the flood of 1850; by the mid-1920s it towered 38 feet, nearly the height of a four-story building.

  By the 1920s, the commission went further. To increase the volume of the Mississippi River, without building the contraction works Eads had demanded, it began closing all natural outlets. This policy, Humphreys had warned, “would, if executed, entail disastrous consequences.”

  THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER is wild and random. High water magnifies its wildness. It also magnifies its power. At its head, as Army engineer D. O. Elliot said, the river “is held in place…by the gorge in the Commerce hills. Its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico is fixed by the works of man. Between these points it writhes like an imprisoned snake constantly seeking to establish and maintain a state of equilibrium, between its length; its slope; and the volume and velocity of its discharge.”

  In the century of the engineers the study of this writhing river began as a scientific enterprise. The resulting policy became a corruption of science. Indeed, the policy was scientific only in that it began an immense, if unintended, experiment with the forces of the river.