III
THE BRIDGE
Eads was bred to the Mississippi. He had mastered its secrets by hard experience; he had worked in successful opposition to its great wayward forces. But he was not to be content till he had tamed it, till he had saddled it, and, wild as it will always be, had made it nevertheless subservient to him. To his quietly stubborn spirit there was a delightful invigoration in using his brain to conquer the brute force of this capricious monster. For the river is the grandest power between our two oceans. Niagara is more sublime; but Niagara is constant, and therefore its immense strength has been easily set to a task. The Mississippi is so irregular that one tends unconsciously to personify it by calling it tricky. To find the causes of its sudden changes one must go back hundreds of miles to the mountains east and west. Seeming to delight in destruction, it tears down or eats away the checks that are put upon it. Only a mind never discouraged, a mind capable of discovering and comprehending the laws that after all underlie the apparently blind and brutal jests of this untiring giant, can, by the use of those very laws, tame it. And such a mind Eads had. "That everlasting brain of yours will wear out three bodies," said one friend.
Though indeed his body was strong, with iron muscles and a fierce nervous energy, yet it was not a big body, and his health was weak. Again and again he worked beyond his strength, and only on the absolute order of his doctors would he go away from his work and rest. But he could not entirely rest. His brain would work. In his health tours to Europe he was always open to new ideas, always studying new methods to carry back to his task. "Your recreation," some one wrote him, "is Monitor discussions with Captain Ericsson." Another recreation was chess. Had he not elected to be the leading engineer of his day, he might have been the chess champion. This game, never one for the slothful and unthinking, he made even more exacting than usual. He would play several games at the same time; or, without seeing the board which his opponent used, he would carry the game in his head. Though it was his nature not to like to be beaten, yet he was as kindly as he was set in his purpose; and it was also his nature to take defeat gracefully: defeat seldom came. "Never let even a pawn be taken," he gave me, a small boy, as a rule for the game. Even in little things he liked thoroughness,—a capacity for painstaking which is, I think, characteristic of the "thoroughbred."
His appearance showed his traits. Not tall, and rather slight, he was always dignified. His wide and thin-lipped mouth shut so emphatically that it made plain his intention to do, in spite of all, what he believed could and should be done. Some one said that it was a hundred horse-power mouth. It admitted no trifling. When it spoke seriously, it spoke finally. But his eyes, with their merry twinkle, showed that he could also speak humorously. He was indeed a famous story-teller, fond of all sorts of riddles and jests, and remembering all of them he heard. He used often to point his arguments with an anecdote, always a fresh one. Believing with Lamb that a man should enjoy his own stories, he would laugh at his in a most infectious way, till he was red in the face. Indeed, he was the larger half of his stories. His face was thoughtful and stern. Though he seldom found fault, he never did more than once; but he was by no means violent. His mildness was more forcible than anger. He wore a full beard, but no mustache, thus exhibiting his long, determined lip. At forty he was already bald, and after he was sixty he always wore indoors a black skull-cap. Scrupulously cleanly, in his dress he was point-device. Without the least ostentation, his clothes were invariably faultless. From young manhood he had thought that it is due to one's self and to one's friends to look one's best; and he had also realized the practical value of a good appearance. Often impressing this on his wife and daughters, he would have them at all times well dressed. Really he seems to have been a point too precise. He was just the opposite to those geniuses whose great brain shows itself by a sloppy exterior. Eads was never sloppy, even at home.
His great brain showed itself in its restless activity, in its grasp of laws and of details, in its fight to help and to better the country and the world. For it was not only the lusty pleasure of battling with Nature that made him long for another struggle with the Mississippi: he saw the value there was in it to commerce and to civilization. Before the war he had long contended with stubborn currents, and with ice, and by his energy and his talent for inventing new devices he had become the most successful wrecker on the river. Abandoning the peaceful but lively triumphs of snatching hulls and cargoes from the maw of the stream, he had offered the government to cleanse its course and thereby to increase its safety and usefulness. In war times, owing to his knowledge of the waterways and of science, he had been able to build, with a speed fairly romantic, a gunboat fleet to patrol the Mississippi. Already now greater schemes for improving this central highway of our country were in his mind, but as yet the fullness of the time was not come. Still, he was no longer merely the careful son and father striving to protect his beloved ones and with no dreams of broader duties; he was no longer contented with rose-arbors for an occupation. The grim war had roused him; his years of rest were over; he was the well-known boat-builder,—engineer, perhaps some persons already called him,—and his mind was teeming with schemes of helpfulness. Yet his ambition was not for fame, but to do in the perfect way the work that only he could do.
In 1867 a grand convention for the improvement of the Mississippi and its tributaries met in Saint Louis. Even then people were beginning to see vaguely that the Mississippi Valley is destined to be the ruling section of the country. Eads in his speech showed that he foresaw it plainly. He urged the convention to persuade the government to take steps to improve the river; showing that for less money than was paid by the river boats in three years for insurance against obstructions, those obstructions could be removed. There was not one of them, he said, that engineering skill and cunning could not master.
Two years later he urged upon the commercial convention at New Orleans by letter the importance of introducing iron boats on the Mississippi; saying that it was the fault of the tariff on iron that the saving they would effect was not taken note of. Thirty years later this scheme has again been brought up. Perhaps Eads was before his time in advocating it. But it shows how he had the interests of commerce at heart.
His convention speech is a good sample of his style. He was so painstaking that even in private letters he would insert words and change sentences and sometimes rewrite. There are first draughts with excisions of whole half pages, for he sought conciseness. He sought also a certain rhythm or grace or forcefulness, it is hard to tell exactly what, since in his letters it often resulted in a rather self-conscious formality or a stiff playfulness, and in his speeches in a prettiness or a floweriness of style. He sought too carefully. Probably in delivery the speeches sounded better than we should imagine. In reading them, they seem florid. That was, however, the favorite style of the time. And while, by overdoing it, he often seems to lose force, he is almost always clear and always entirely logical. In contrast to his speeches his professional reports are models: simple and complete, written not faultlessly perhaps, but with a limpidity which makes one interested even in dry technical details. One of his most marked talents, often noted, was the ability to explain an abstruse subject so that it would be quite clear to anybody. And this he did nearly as well in writing as by word of mouth.
He thus made clear his remarkable plans for the bridge; for in 1867 the long talked of bridge at Saint Louis was at last begun.