James B. Eads

by Louis How

This, then, was the situation when Eads appeared on the scene: "scratching and scraping" were going on in South West Pass, but were doing little real and no lasting good; the government engineers had declared themselves in favor of a canal; and though in some quarters jetties had been advocated, scarcely any one thought they could be built, or that if they were they would last, or that they would do any good. Eads, however, understood the river like a book, and he had studied this particular subject. He now came forward publicly, offering not only to build and to maintain jetties which would insure a twenty-eight foot channel, but to do all this for less than half the cost the board had estimated, and on a contract which should provide for his being paid only in case he succeeded. From this remarkable offer his own confidence in his plans may be inferred. A purpose which he had reasoned out as practical became an inspiration to him which nothing could shake, for his courage equaled his convictions.

But so bold was his proposition that he was considered a wild enthusiast. Never at a loss to solve any problem, again, as when he planned the bridge, he undertook to do what was commonly held to be impossible. Of course, all the backers of the canal scheme opposed him bitterly. New Orleans was of that faction. Saint Louis, on the other hand, upheld him because of his personal popularity and his signal success with the bridge. The army engineers were against him as a civil engineer. Thus the controversy was sectional, personal, and professional. Up to this time the government had invariably intrusted all works of river and harbor improvement to the military engineers; and to hand over the most important one it had ever undertaken to a private citizen, and to permit him to apply a method that had just been condemned in a report signed by six out of seven of the most distinguished army engineers, met with decided opposition. So the government hesitated. Certainly this was a proposal to make them consider, promising, as it did, an open river mouth, at a cost much lower than that of the canal, and in case of failure leaving the total loss to fall upon the contractor. Besides, several eminent civil engineers supported Eads's theory. The House, nevertheless, passed the canal bill; but the Senate, more thorough, after calling Eads and two of his principal opponents to state their views before a committee, passed a bill appointing a commission to reconsider the entire subject once more. The discussion before the Senate committee was one of the crises in Eads's life. The fate of the jetty enterprise hung on the outcome of it. Fortunately for himself and for the good of the country, he was a most magnetic and persuasive man. His theories and arguments were sound and logical, his experience of the river was vast; and beyond his aptitude for making technical reasoning simple and clear, his skill as a diplomatist was equal to his ability as an engineer.

So the commission was appointed; and, ultimately, on account of the far-reaching importance of the question of river-mouth improvement, its members decided to go to Europe to inquire into the matter. About the same time, and for the same purpose, Eads also went abroad, and while there he made a careful study of the works at the mouths of the Danube, the Rhone, and several other European rivers. What he saw there served only to strengthen his confidence in his own plans. When he returned home, there had been a noteworthy change in public sentiment. Though there still remained many either prejudiced or honest enemies to his plan, and although the newspapers were still noisy with their cheap and ignorant opposition, the country at large and Congress were inclined to accept the offer, which promised them so much at no risk at all.

The commission, returning too from Europe, where it had made as careful investigations as those of Eads, reported, by a majority of six to one, in favor of trying jetties in the South Pass. This pass, the smallest of the three mouths, had a depth of only eight feet on its bar, and had besides a shoal at its head. The South West Pass, the one which Eads had proposed to use, is not only two or three times as big, both in width and in volume of water, but it had fourteen feet on the bar, and no shoal at its head. Eads argued and implored with all his strength to be allowed to use the larger pass, as the only one adequate to the demands of commerce; and so convincing were his reasons that the House passed a bill which called for jetties in the larger pass. But the Senate, again more conservative, was cautious in this experiment, and insisted on the small pass. Finally, the bill went through, and the grant was made for the improvement of South Pass. And notwithstanding the considerable difference in size, as well as preliminary conditions altogether less promising than in the pass Eads had asked for, still, the depth of thirty feet was to be obtained,—the same result under harder circumstances. The payment promised, however, was not increased with the difficulty; but on the contrary was to be a good deal less than the estimate of the commission. The terms, which required certain specified depths and widths of channel to be obtained and then maintained during twenty years, were so arranged that Eads should not receive any part of his payment till after the work covered by that part had been finished and approved.

Hard as these conditions were, they were based on his own proposal, and he was glad even on such terms to undertake the great work he had longed to do. He at once busied himself in raising money for beginning the Jetties, and here again his peculiar talents helped him. One of his friends has said, "His powers of persuasion, his charm of address, and the magnetism of his personality opened the hearts and purses of whomever he pleaded with in support of his engineering devices. He was a most lovable man." Moreover, he was an excellent business man. He had indeed a marvelous faculty for obtaining funds with which to carry on his works; and in that time of financial distress such a faculty was very necessary.

The theory on which he based his jetties was really extremely simple. He said that, other things being equal, the amount of sediment which a river can carry is in direct proportion to its velocity. When, for any reason, the current becomes slower at any special place, it drops part of its burden of sediment at that place, and when it becomes faster again it picks up more. Now, one thing that makes a river slower is an increase of its width, because then there is more frictional surface; and contrariwise, one of the things that make it faster is a narrowing of its width. Narrow the Mississippi then, at its mouth, said Eads, and it will become swifter there, and consequently it will remove its soft bottom by picking up the sediment (of which it will then hold much more), and by carrying it out to the gulf, to be lost in deep water and swept away by currents; and thus, he said, you will have your deep channel. In other words, if you give the river some assistance by keeping its current together, it will do all the necessary labor and scour out its own bottom.

Today, since this theory has been proved, it seems as simple as A B C. And it is almost impossible to believe what opposition it then aroused. People were not only set on blocking the undertaking, but they were actually ignorant enough to deny that the velocity of water had any connection with its sediment-carrying power. Even if the narrowing process should happen to give a channel through the present bar, they said, a new one would presently form beyond, and so the jetties would have to be extended every year.

However, Eads had his contract and his backers and his ideas and his faith in them; and he set to work on the little pass. The actual delta of the Mississippi consists of nothing but water, marsh, and some sandy soil bearing willows. At the sea end of South Pass Eads extended the low banks out over the bar, by driving rows of guide-piles and sinking willow mattresses close alongside them on the riverside. The mattresses were sunk in tiers, and each tier was weighted well with rock, put in as soon as each mattress was in position. As usual he invented many of the requisite mechanical appliances and contrivances himself, and generally such good ones that his methods came to take the place of earlier ones. The South Pass was not only the smallest and shallowest of the mouths, but it was besides more difficult than the other two in having a bar at its head as well as at its sea end. And although by his contract Eads was not required to remove that bar, by the exigencies of the case he was. Like the other it had to be attacked with water, guided by dikes and dams, which were similar in construction to the two parallel banks, the jetties proper. The scheme was always to force the river itself to do all the real work; and though there was, to be sure, a good deal of planning and building, the main idea, as already explained, is exceedingly simple. Eads never pretended to have originated this idea. He had studied many jetties in Europe. He had had the eye to see that they could be adapted to the Mississippi, and the skill to adapt them. For simple as the bald theory is, there was need of the nicest appreciation of laws and forces in applying it, and the result has been called the greatest engineering feat ever accomplished. The problem of making the quantity of water needed run up into the smallest pass "through a narrow, artificially contracted channel, located immediately between two great natural outlets,"—this problem being complicated by many "occult conditions,"—has been called, by no mean engineer, perhaps the most difficult problem ever dealt with successfully. "There is no instance, indeed, in the world where such a vast volume of water is placed under such absolute and permanent control of the engineer, through methods so economic and simple."

To the non-mechanical mind the control of such a multitude of abstruse, minute, and exact details as combine in the making of a bridge seems perhaps more marvelous than the mere bending of nature's forces to serve the ends of man. In Eads the power to do both existed.

On piles in the marsh houses were built for the engineers and the workmen, and the Jetties were begun. Eads was not able to be there in person all the time, but as usual his choice of competent and faithful lieutenants was noteworthy. His plans were approved by an advisory board of very eminent engineers; and by the end of one year the value of the work began to show. As yet it was not very strong or solid, but it had deepened the water on the bar from nine to sixteen feet.