Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

"And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,—usually at some long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a multitude of blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,—some high enough to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,—with crustaceous white growths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,—so long drowned that the shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves;—and beside these are others which have kept their feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand around,—soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,—is everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white claws;—while in the green sedges beyond there is a perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind bearing among reeds: a marvellous creeping of 'fiddlers,' which the inexperienced visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks, shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet to the sliding beach lean more and more out of the perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted masses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,—like the reaching arms of cephalopods.... Grand Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going,—slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How it went I first heard from the lips of a veteran pilot, while we sat one evening together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some high tide had pressed deeply into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been tropically warm; we had sought the shore for a breath of living air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat lifted,—a sudden breeze blew,—lightnings flickered in the darkening horizon,—wind and water began to strive together,—and soon all the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhaps the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many voices—voices of drowned men,—the muttering of multitudinous dead,—the moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage against the living, at the great Witch-call of storms...."

The defense of the Gulf gateway of the United States of America not only against Nature's forces, whether coming in the form of an invasion by a mighty flood from the North, or the invasion of a great destroying storm wave from the South, must be accomplished by the adoption of a plan for the protection of that country similar to that proposed for the organization of a Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River Valley and in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and in the State of Nevada.

The national government should immediately acquire not less than 1,000,000 acres of land bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and lying between Bayou Lafourche and Atchafalaya Bay and the Atchafalaya River. Then a great dike should be built by the national government from Barataria Bay, following the most practicable course along the shores of the Gulf to and along the eastern shore of the Atchafalaya Bay and River to Morgan City. Thence this great dike should skirt the northeastern shore of Grand Lake to the northern end of that lake. From there it should be continued north to the Mississippi River to a connection with that river near the headwaters of the Atchafalaya River.

The material necessary for the construction of this great embankment and protecting levee from the Gulf north to the Mississippi River should be taken entirely from the eastern side of the embankment, and the channel thus constructed should be enlarged sufficiently to build an adequate protecting levee on the east bank of the channel. The artificial channel thus constructed should be so large as to constitute a controlled outlet and auxiliary flood channel which, with the ten mile wide Atchafalaya wasteway, would take off all of the flood flow of the Mississippi River at that point in excess of the high water level as it rests against the levees in all ordinary flood years. The purpose of this outlet and wasteway would be to make it impossible that in any year of unusual floods the levees or banks should be subjected to any greater hydrostatic pressure than in ordinary years. The point where this controlled outlet would leave the river would be approximately the same place where the great Morganza Crevasse broke through the levee and opened a way for the flood to sweep with its devastating force through the country between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and Canals; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf Coast Dike.

Ten miles west of the great north and south embankment above described, on a north and south line which would pass close to the town of Melville in Louisiana and follow the west bank of the Atchafalaya River for some distance below Melville, another great embankment should be built, paralleling the one previously described. The material for the construction of this second embankment should be taken from its western side, thus forming a channel which should be used both as a drainage outlet and a navigable canal extending from the Bayou Teche to the Red River. At the point of its junction with the Red River, locks should be constructed which would prevent any of the floods of the Red River from ever entering or passing through this navigable drainage canal. From that point another great embankment should be extended by the most practicable route to the west or northwest, where a junction could be formed with the high land in such a way as to turn all the surplus flood drainage from the Red River and all other rivers to the north into the great ten-mile wide wasteway lying between the two embankments and running south from the mouth of the Red River or from Old River to Grand Lake.

The volume of water that would make a flood twenty feet deep in a channel a mile wide could be carried through this wasteway with a flow of only about two feet in depth, and two great benefits thereby attained:

First, the cutting power of the water could be controlled and its danger from that cause obviated.