One result of his achievement was a quick improvement in prices. Every acre, mill, farmhouse in the whole of the Mississippi Valley was increased in value by the impetus which the open river-mouth gave to commerce. New Orleans rose from the eleventh to the second export city in the country. Consequently there was a great increase in the number of lines of ships going there, and in their tonnage. And as a result of that there was a rapid increase in railway facilities. In twenty years from the commencement of the Jetties there was a gain of one hundred per cent. in the total commerce of New Orleans, nearly all of it due to these works. This boom has, despite the marvelous multiplication of railways, preserved the river traffic; and the river traffic, as always, has by competition lowered freight rates. The effect has spread to remote districts; and by this reduction in rates and prices there is no doubt that the Jetties have made living cheaper on the Atlantic seaboard as well as in the Mississippi Valley.
Even more: in another way they have made living cheaper. The half-rail-and-half-water route from the Pacific coast to New York via New Orleans, which the Jetties first made possible, forced the transcontinental railways to cut down their time for shipping freight over one half. The tonnage by this newer route has increased enormously, and its competition has affected commerce by reducing all rates from the Mississippi Valley and the West and the Pacific slope to the Atlantic seaboard and to Europe. As a consequence bread has been made cheaper to all the great populations that require the food products of the central zone and the Pacific slope.
Another very different but curious change is probably largely due to the Jetties. Before their construction only very light-draught ships could safely reach New Orleans; but it was so favorite a cotton port that many owners would build vessels of unusually light draught, in order that they might make one trip a year to New Orleans with them, although the rest of the time they sailed to deeper ports. As soon as it became known over the shipping world that New Orleans was now open to deep-draught vessels, a great many new ones were built. Thus the Jetties, as much as any other cause, brought in the era of great ships.
It has been calculated from statistics, which it is not necessary to give here, that the annual saving to producers of the Mississippi Valley brought about by the fall of rates, the saving in marine insurance, and the saving in time, due to the Jetties, is $5,000,000; and it is furthermore calculated that the annual money value of the Jetties to the people of the country at large is, by a very conservative estimate, $25,000,000.
Even the Jetties, however, were not the end of Eads's efforts toward the improvement of the Mississippi. For several years before their completion he had been delivering addresses urging the application of the same system to the entire alluvial basin of the river from the gulf to Cairo. People were in despair as to what to do to prevent the breaking of the levees (the results of which are as "terrible to the dwellers on those flats as the avalanche to people who live on the sides of steep mountains"), and the distress and prostration created by the awful spring floods. Most people thought there were two possible remedies,—to build more and higher levees, and to drain off some of the volume of the river through the Louisiana bayous. But Eads insisted that the requisite move was to reduce the excessive width of certain stretches of the river with willow mattresses; by uniformity of width to produce uniformity of depth, and consequently uniformity of current. This would facilitate the discharge of floods, and would tend to lessen the need of any levees, whereas drawing off any of the volume of water, he said, would increase the elevation of its surface slope, and thus necessitate higher levees.
His arguments on the question are clear and forcible; and it is likely that his plan, if carried out, would solve the important question of the Mississippi. But enough money to try it thoroughly has never been appropriated; and so little effect has patching had, that at this very day there are still advocates of the scheme of drawing off some of the water,—a scheme which Eads blasted years ago.
In 1879 the Mississippi River Commission was created, consisting of one civilian and six military and civil engineers, of whom Eads was one. But for him the government would not have undertaken, at any rate at that time, its very comprehensive system of river improvement, founded primarily on his theory. Besides giving a regular, deepened channel, and putting an end to overflows, he contended that his system would reclaim about 30,000 square miles of rich alluvial lands subject to inundation. For two years he served on this commission: for many years before he had been working and fighting for the same grand result,—grand though almost fruitless. "He had no selfish interest to subserve" in this; "no contract to execute; nothing himself to gain." But when, on returning from a trip to Europe, he found that the work was no longer being carried on as he thought it should be, he resigned from the commission. Deploring the wrong methods used, he still was most deeply interested in this great work up to the time of his death. If, some day, the Mississippi is conquered, it will doubtless be through the means he pointed out.
V
THE SHIP-RAILWAY