Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  The channel of the lower Mississippi, below Cairo, Illinois, can generally accommodate 1,000,000 second-feet without difficulty. In 1927 the Mississippi River at Cairo was carrying at least 1,750,000 second-feet, and possibly 2,000,000. The Arkansas was carrying 813,000 second-feet, almost one-third more than it had ever carried before, while the White approached 400,000 second-feet. James Kemper personally inspected the area. So did engineers of the American Railway Engineering Association. They independently estimated that the Mississippi at the mouth of the Arkansas was carrying in excess of 3,000,000 cubic feet per second.

  From the mouth of the Arkansas south, on both banks of the river, the levees trembled. In the worst sections, behind the levees dozens of sand boils spouted water, the weight of the river pushing through every weakness.

  Everywhere men were racing to top the levee, racing both the rising river and their counterparts on the opposite shore. Bags averaged 6 inches in thickness. Men had raised the levee at least three bags high for much of the levee line above Greenville, and the Mississippi River lay washing at the top. That meant the river was 1.5 feet higher than the levee.

  Levee engineers, for the first time on a large scale, tried a desperate measure. They pumped billions of gallons from the river onto the land, hoping the additional weight of water would stabilize and buttress the levee, preventing sand boils and sloughing.

  In the areas it was tried, the new technique did help, but violent storms continued. On April 19, tornadoes tore across four states to the west, killing 31 people. On April 20 those same storms struck the lower Mississippi region. Percy’s friend Henry Ball recorded in his diary: “Stormy tonight with a gale blowing and heavy rain threatened every moment. Hard on levees. Heaven spare us!”

  The gale was worse than the rain. Great waves pounded the sandbags and the levee. Men tried to protect it with log booms, but the waves snapped the chains connecting the logs and tossed them into the air; individual logs repeatedly crashed down onto the levee like pile drivers.

  The cold rain continued. Water poured out of the Arkansas, poured out of the White, both rivers still rising; upriver, above Memphis, the Mississippi itself was still rising.

  Walter Sillers was in charge of one section of the levee. His daughter accompanied him on an inspection tour of the part near their home. It terrified her: “I’d never seen anything like that before and I’ve been in a good number of high waters…. There were streams…of water running through there all up and down the side of that levee…. In front of our house, you can see right across there at the levee, the water was up at the top, running over the top. And the boats would go by and you could see the men’s knees as they were standing in the boat, from across the levee…. They had sacks up there but the water was just running, trickling through them. My mother said she was standing there and saw the reeds moving on the levee, so she went up to see what it was, and it was the water coming over the levee.”

  The next day Sillers went down to inspect the levee at Mounds Landing. His daughter asked him, “Is it as bad as Lake Vermilion? It just couldn’t be, could it?”

  “It’s worse,” he said.

  “Well I don’t see how it can last.”

  “It will not. It’s not going to last.”

  The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported: “Forces were redoubled on levees north of Greenville late today, as the Mississippi River, lashed into fury by the strong winds, battered at the great dykes…. Five thousand men labored in a driving rain to place sandbags on the top in the places where the water is almost even with the top. ‘No material damage has been done,’ Major A. J. Paxton, commanding the national guard troops in Greenville, declared. ‘We expect to hold the levee.’”

  In fact, upriver from Mounds Landing, water was running over the top of the levee. The sandbags seemed to be holding. But two hours later, for a two-mile stretch the river was pouring over the tops of the sandbags.

  That night Seguine Allen told the planter B. B. Payne, “You get all your labor and bring ’em to the levee and work on the sacks.”

  Payne snorted, “That’s not going to do you a bit of good for the simple reason the river’s rising an inch an hour. All the labor in Washington County won’t do you any good.”

  Bill Jones and Moses Mason were piling sandbags near Mounds Landing. The levee, Jones recalled, “felt like jelly. The levee was just trembling.” When he looked, for a moment, into the dark water of the river, “The water was just boiling.”

  “It was just boiling up,” Mason remembers. “The levee just started shaking. You could feel it shaking. You could watch the water—everything was wet, but it was like the water was raising dust.”

  Earlier that day the gauge at Cairo had reached 56.4 feet, almost 2 feet higher than the record set a few weeks earlier. The reading did not reflect the record amounts of water downriver pouring into the Mississippi from the Arkansas and the White.

  In Vicksburg, Major Lee noted that that night: “From dark until dawn came calls for help [from the entire levee line]. It rained heavily that night and at dawn we tried to get our big Navy seaplane started. It was waterlogged and it took us over an hour to get away.”

  Florence Ogden remembered, “All night long we heard the tramp of gun boots through the house. The guards would come into the house to get coffee. It just simply poured down that night. You never heard such a rain in your life. And they began calling for labor, labor, labor, send us labor, early in the morning, before day.”

  At Mounds Landing itself, 450 men in one camp were struggling to increase the height of the sandbag wall six more inches. The Mississippi was threatening to pour over the top. The men had no time to build a proper base. The waves pounded the levee and washed over them as they worked. They were freezing—the temperature was in the low forties. At a site a mile north the situation seemed even more dangerous; several thousand more men were working there.

  At 3:30 A.M., Lieutenant E. C. Sanders, in charge of the National Guard contingent at Mounds Landing, named Camp Rex, toured two and a half miles of levee. Frequently, he stepped into holes more than knee-deep, dug out by waves. In innumerable places water was seeping through the levee. At the northern edge of his sector a guard reported a sand boil. Sanders went to inspect it and discovered a geyser of water as thick as a man’s leg. He had no labor to spare and telephoned the next base up to take care of it; they did. He also noted a low spot in the levee caused by automobile traffic.

  At 4:30 A.M. a new contingent of men arrived and Sanders put them to work setting up tents for even more men. At 6:30 word flashed down—a small break in the levee had appeared.

  In a car he rushed to the scene. Water 12 inches deep and 24 inches wide was gushing through the low spot he had noted earlier.

  He ran to awaken the labor, rushed another man to a nearby plantation “to arouse the labor” there, notified other camps on the levee. All had their own problems yet sent men. Within half an hour 1,500 men were working on the low spot. By then the flow of water had grown to the size of a roaring stream.

  “The negroes ran to the break also,” Sanders wrote in his official report, “but as they arrived they soon became demoralized and ran away. It then became necessary for the civilian foreman and my detachment to force the negroes to the break at the point of guns.”

  Hundreds of blacks, held by guns, began risking their lives for someone they had to see as a white fool. Under the guns they filled sandbags, threw them into the breach, passed them down the line to men standing in the breach. The water poured through in a growing torrent, washing the sandbags away as fast as they threw them in. Under their feet the levee quivered, shook. The breach was wider, deeper. The river was overflowing the levee along a front of several miles.

  Charlie Williams arrived on the scene. He could do nothing. The river was still rising.

  Mason remembers, “You could see the earth just start boiling. A man hollered, ‘Watch out! It’s gonna break!’ Everybody was hollering to get off. It was like tu
rning a hydrant on—water was shooting forward.”

  Men began running. Everyone was yelling at the top of his voice. At that moment Sanders was on the phone to his commander in Greenville, Major A. G. Paxton, saying, “We can’t hold it much longer—There she goes!”

  Williams remembered that the levee “just seemed to move forward as if 100 feet of it was pushed out by the river.”

  A man named John Hall was handling the phones in the levee board office, relaying information, dispatching materials. When word came to him about the break, he went in to see Seguine Allen, the chief engineer. “I took him the message and the old man just sat there and cried.”

  Word spread instantly amid confusion. Many papers initially reported the break as having occurred at Stops Landing, a few miles north. Cora Campbell told historian Pete Daniel, “I was…right where it broke. My husband, he was working on that levee…. I run and run and run…. The bells was ringing and the whistles was blowing. Oh it was a terrible time. We made it to the levee.”

  The levee was the only land. The rest would soon be water. At plantations all through the district bells rang, dogs barked, cows bellowed, people hurried about gathering necessities—most had long since built scaffolds in their houses and moved furniture onto it. In Greenville at 8 A.M., the fire whistle and every whistle at every mill began to blow, and every church bell rang. Immediately water pressure dropped to nothing as thousands of people tried to fill their bathtubs with a supply of drinking water.

  At 12:30 P.M., Thursday, April 21, Lee wired General Edgar Jadwin, head of the Corps of Engineers, “Levee broke at ferry landing Mounds Mississippi eight A.M. Crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta.”

  Things would never be the same again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE ROAR OF THE CREVASSE drowned all sound. It carried up and down the river for miles, carried inland for miles. It roared like some great wild beast proclaiming its dominance. Men more miles away felt the levee vibrate under their feet and feared for their own lives.

  There is no accurate count of the number of men swept to their deaths as the levee broke. The Red Cross listed two dead. The Memphis Commercial-Appeal said, “Thousands of workers were frantically piling sandbags…when the levee caved. It was impossible to recover the bodies swept onward by the current at an enormous rate of speed.” The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported, “Refugees coming into Jackson last night from Greenville…declare there is not the slightest doubt in their minds that several hundred negro plantation workers lost their lives in the great sweep of water which swept over the country.” Judge R. C. Trimble, an eyewitness, said he did not expect the bodies to be recovered for days, if ever. The Associated Press quoted National Guard Sergeant Henry Bay, who was in charge of the rescue and “estimated that more than 100 negroes had been drowned in the flood waters.” The only official account, that of the National Guard officer at the crevasse site, stated only, “No lives were lost among the Guardsmen.”

  The crevasse was immense. Giant billows rose to the tops of tall trees, crushing them, while the force of the current gouged out the earth. Quickly the crevasse widened, until a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high—later its depth was estimated at as much as 130 feet—raged onto the Delta. (Weeks later, engineer Frank Hall sounded the still-open break: “We had a lead line one hundred feet long, and we could find no bottom.”) The water’s force gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

  It was an immense amount of water. The crevasse at Mounds Landing poured out 468,000 second-feet onto the Delta, triple the volume of a flooding Colorado, more than double a flooding Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper Mississippi ever carried, including in 1993. The crevasse was pouring out such volume that in 10 days it could cover nearly 1 million acres with water 10 feet deep. And the river would be pumping water through the crevasse for months.

  ON THE RIVER ITSELF the crevasse created a maelstrom. Hundreds of workers climbed onto a barge below the break to escape, and a tugboat began to push it downstream. The engines strained and the barge and boat trembled, yet they were being sucked upstream, toward the crevasse. “Let’s put all the niggers on the barge and cut it loose,” a man said. Charlie Gibson, a retired levee contractor so feeble that he had to be carried about in a chair but whose advice was so valuable that he had been brought to the levee anyway, ordered: “We ain’t goin’ to cut the barge loose. I’ll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together.”

  They escaped by angling across to the Arkansas shore. The Pelican, a Mississippi River Commission steamboat, was not so lucky later that day at a far smaller levee break in Arkansas. In full sight of thousands of workers and refugees, the current sucked the Pelican toward this crevasse. Desperately trying to stop, the captain rammed his bow into the levee. The levee collapsed and the Pelican capsized, was dragged through the crevasse rolling over and over. In one of the most heroic acts of the flood, a black man named Sam Tucker jumped into a rowboat alone—no one would join him—and headed for the break. The current lifted his boat and rocketed him through the turbulence. Somehow he survived, followed the steamer, and a mile inland picked 2 men out of the water. They were alive; 19 others drowned. The amount of water pouring through this break paled when compared to Mounds Landing. Yet the Memphis Commercial-Appeal wrote, “It was as if [the steamer] had been carried over Niagara Falls.”

  Meanwhile, the water from Mounds Landing was roaring inland. E. M. Barry recalled: “[T]he water was leaping, it looked like, in rapids thirty feet high. And right in front of the break was the old Moore plantation house, a big mule barn, and two big, enormous trees. And when we came back by there [a few hours later] everything was gone.”

  For three miles inland from Mounds Landing the river scoured out the land—today a large, deep lake still remains as a legacy—but even as the mountain of water flattened, spread out, and slowed, its force remained terrifying. It tore out trees, made splinters out of thousands of thin sharecropper cabins, crushed or undermined and then swept away houses and barns.

  Cora Walker, a black woman, lived a few miles south of the break. Her home lay beside the toe of the levee. “An airplane kept flying over, real low, backwards and forwards,…told us we better get to the levee. A lady was coming to the levee, had a bundle of clothes on her head and a rope around her waist leading a cow.” Suddenly, the water arrived, tearing south. “She and the cow both drowned…. Just as we got to the levee we turned back and saw our house turned over. We could see our own place tumbling, hear our things falling down, and the grinding sound. And here come another house floating by. The water was stacked. The waves were standing high, real high. If they hit anything, they got it. Every time the waves came, the levee would shake like you were in a rocking chair.”

  One planter a few more miles inland stood on his veranda and watched along the rim of the horizon “the flood water approach in the form of a tan colored wall seven feet high, and with a roar as of a mighty wind.”

  In Leland, twenty-five miles from the crevasse, Mrs. D. S. Flanagan watched the flood come “in waves five or six feet deep and just rolling and rolling. I never had seen it come like that, so dangerous looking, in all the floods I had been in. There was a Negro standing on the railroad track below the oil mill, and, when the water hit that track, it just washed out all the way under the track, the Negro into it, and he was never seen again.”

  The water rolled over and over itself, lifting trees, mules, roofs, dogs, cows, and bodies, rolling forward, the water filthy, liquid mud, churning, spitting brown foam and froth. Sam Huggins recalled: “When that levee broke, the water just come whooshing, you could just see it coming, just see big waves of it coming. It was coming so fast till you just get excited, because you didn’t have time to do nothing, nothing but knock a hole in your ceiling and try to get through if you could…. It was rising so fast till peoples didn’t get a chance to get nothing…. People and dogs and everything like t
hat on top of houses. You’d see cows and hogs trying to get somewhere where people would rescue them…. Cows just bellowing and swimming…. A lot of those farmhouses didn’t have no ceiling that would hold nobody.”

  Newman Bolls said that the water moved with such force that behind one large tree the ground was dry—the current broke around it. In that space a cow and its calf stood bellowing with a deep, plaintive sound. Later, when the current lessened, water filled the sanctuary; the animals drowned. They were joined by others. In the quiet of the new sea, animals by the hundreds were floating.

  Those who understood the river’s power abandoned their homes and left their doors and windows open to let the water flow through and lessen resistance; closed doors forced buildings to bear the full current. In Winterville, several families gathered together in what seemed a sturdy house. The current swirled around it, scoured out a hole 25 feet deep underneath it, and the house collapsed. The Associated Press reported, “23 white women and children, marooned, in one house…were drowned in the Mississippi flood, says a report made public today by [Seguine] Allen…. Urgent warnings to all people living between here and Vicksburg nearly 100 miles…were issued by Maj. Allen. ‘Wall of water going south is very dangerous and unless people move to levees quickly, they will be drowned.’”

  The superintendent of the Illinois Central in Greenville had scattered dozens of boxcars on Delta sidings for emergency shelter. Fred Chaney, outside Greenville, had been getting phone reports of the advance of the crevasse water and moved into a boxcar. “At 9:00, we could hear the rustle of waters in the woods a mile north of our box car haven. It sounded not unlike the first gust of wind before an on-coming storm and a shiver shot up and down my spine as the rustling noise grew louder and its true significance plumbed the depths of my mind.”