The Riverside Biographical Series

ANDREW JACKSON, by W. G. BROWNJAMES B. EADS, by LOUIS HOWBENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by PAUL E. MOREPETER COOPER, by R. W. RAYMONDTHOMAS JEFFERSON, by H. C. MERWIN

_IN PREPARATION_

WILLIAM PENNGENERAL GRANTLEWIS AND CLARKE

Each about 100 pages, 16mo, withphotogravure portrait, 75 cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK

[Illustration: Jas. B. Eads]

JAMES B. EADS

BY

LOUIS HOW

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANYBoston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth StreetChicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenue

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY LOUIS HOWALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

I must mention with particular gratitude several books that wereinvaluable in preparing this sketch, in supplementing the usualbiographical dictionaries and naval histories. These are: CaptainMahan's "The Gulf and Inland Waters;" Boynton's picturesque "History ofthe American Navy during the Great Rebellion;" Mr. Fiske's "MississippiValley in the Civil War;" Snead's "The Fight for Missouri;" Mr. C. M. Woodward's "History of the St. Louis Bridge;" Mr. Estill McHenry'sedition of Eads's "Papers and Addresses, " with a biography; two memoirsby Señores Francisco de Garay and Ignacio Garfias, of the MexicanAssociation of Civil Engineers; and, above all, several memoirs andaddresses and the history of the Jetties by Mr. Elmer L. Corthell, C. E. , without which I could scarcely have written this Life. 

I must also cordially thank for kind personal aid and advice ChancellorChaplin (of Washington University), Dr. William Taussig, Mr. AlbertBushnell Hart, Major George Montague Wheeler of the Engineer Corps(retired), Messrs. Winston Churchill, William L. Wright, C. Donovan, E. L. Corthell (who was as obliging as he was helpful), Estill McHenry andJohn A. Ubsdell, Mrs. Susan F. Stevens, and especially my mother--towhose help and encouragement this Life of her father is due. 

L. H. 

ROCKPORT, MASS. , July 30, 1900. 

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

 I. EARLY TRAINING 1

 II. THE GUNBOATS 22

III. THE BRIDGE 49

 IV. THE JETTIES 75

 V. THE SHIP-RAILWAY 105

JAMES B. EADS

I

EARLY TRAINING

James Buchanan Eads was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, May 23, 1820. Both the Eads family, who came from Maryland, and his mother's people, the Buchanans, who were originally Irish, were gentlefolk; but James'sfather never was very prosperous. The son, however, went to school, andhe showed early a very special love for machinery, observing with greatinterest everything of that kind that he came upon. For a while thefamily lived in Cincinnati; from there they removed in 1829 toLouisville. In those days, when steamboats were the best ofconveyances, the Ohio River formed a natural highway between the twotowns. On the trip the small boy of nine hung around the engine of theboat, considering it with so much wonder and admiration that finallythe engineer, who found him an apt pupil, explained the various partsof the mechanism to him. 

He really had understood his lesson well, for two years later, in thelittle workshop that his father had fitted up for him, he made a smallengine which ran by steam. Besides he made models of sawmills, fire-engines, steamboats, and electrotyping machines. Except suchchance instruction as that which he found on the boat, he had had noteaching in mechanics, but worked with the ingenuity of many a brightboy; for he is by no means the only one who ever took apart and puttogether the family clock, or even a lever-watch, with no other toolthan a penknife. One of his inventions, which shows not so much histalent as his true boyishness, was a small box-wagon, open onlyunderneath and with a hole in front, which, suddenly produced beforehis mother and sisters, ran mysteriously across the room. The motivepower concealed within this agreeable toy was found to be a live rat. 

So much is often said of the precocity of youthful geniuses, that it isgood to know that young Eads was after all a real flesh-and-blood boy, a boy so mischievous that, as he was the only son, his father hired aneighbor boy to come and play with him. Certainly he was very clever;but that he had even better qualities than cleverness is shown by hisfirst actions on his arrival at Saint Louis. 

His father, deciding to move farther west, had sent ahead the mother, the two daughters just grown, and the lad of thirteen, intending tofollow with supplies for opening a shop. Again the route was by river. Arrived at Saint Louis, the boat caught fire; and early on a coldmorning the family set foot, scarcely clothed, not only in the city ofwhich the young boy was to be one day the leading citizen, but on thevery spot, it is said, where he was afterwards to base one pier of hisgreat bridge. On that bleak morning, however, none of them foresaw abright future, or indeed anything but a distressful present. Someladies of the old French families of the town were very kind to theforlorn women; and once on her feet Mrs. Eads set about supportingherself and her children. In those days, when sometimes a letter took aweek to go a couple of hundred miles, she was not the one to wait forhelp from her husband; so she immediately rented a house and tookboarders. The boy, as resourceful and self-reliant as his mother, nowshowed his energy as well as his devotion by doing the first thing hefound to help her. In going along the street he saw some apples forsale, and, buying as many of them as he could afford, he peddled themto the passers-by. 

That, of course, was no permanent occupation for a well-bred boy, whoseassociations and abilities were both high. Nevertheless his familycould no longer afford to have him at school, and it was necessary forhim to do some sort of work. One of his mother's boarders, a Mr. Barrett Williams, offered him a position in his mercantile house. Before long this gentleman discovered his young employee's aptitude andoverwhelming love for mechanics, and kindly allowed the lad the use ofhis own library. Studying at night the scientific books which he foundthere, Eads acquired his first theoretical knowledge of engineering. Inthis way, without teachers, he began, in a time when there was no freehigher education, to educate himself; and both then and ever after hewas a constant reader not only of scientific works, but of all kinds ofbooks. This practical experience in helping to support his family andin getting his own education, while he was still so young a lad, wasthe school in which he learned self-reliance. It is pleasant to knowthat the earnestness of life did not take all of his boyishness awayfrom him, for it must have been while he was hard at work that he builta real steamboat, six feet long, and navigated it on Chouteau's Pond. 

For five years he was a clerk in the dry-goods house. At the end ofthat time, probably because he was in poor health, he left thatposition for one that would take him more into the open air. Though hishealth was not strong, he was by no means an invalid; for at nineteenhis muscles were solid and his fund of nervous energy wasinexhaustible. So, with the natural taste of a boy for a more excitinglife, he took a position as clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat. While he had nothing to do with actually running the boat, he certainlykept his eyes open to everything going on both on board and in theriver; and began then to make an acquaintance with the stream which waslater to be the scene of his greatest labors. If ever Nature played aprominent part in the life of a man, the Mississippi did in that ofEads; for it became the opportunity for three of his chief works, andfrom it he learned perhaps more of the laws of science than from allthe books he ever read. To understand his life, one must have some ideaof the huge river, which seems to flow sluggishly or rapidly throughhis whole career. 

The Mississippi River, with its branches, drains the larger part of thewhole United States, --that is, from the Alleghanies on the east to theRockies on the west. The main stream, 4200 miles long, and in someplaces over a mile wide, flows along with tremendous force, ceaselesslyeating away its yellow clay banks. The water, full of sediment, is of athick dull brown color. The clay that it washes off in the bends itdeposits on the juts of land, thus forming greater and greater curves;so that often the distance between two points is very much less by landthan by water. Sometimes there are only a few yards across the neck ofa peninsula, around which the channel distance is many miles; and onone side the level of the river is several feet higher than on theother. Gradually the water keeps eating its way, until it forces apassage through the neck, and then the torrent rushes through in acascade, with a roar that can be heard for miles. The banks dissolvelike sugar, and the next day steamboats can cross where the day beforewere fields and may be houses. Besides this, the current is constantlywashing away and building up not only hidden bars on the river bottom, but even islands above its surface. In the fall and in the spring itrises with such terrifying rapidity that some years it quicklyoverflows its banks in certain reaches till it is sixty miles wide. Houses and trees torn from their places, and wrecks of boats, float orprotrude from the bottom of this brown lake. And when the floodsubsides, the current often chooses a new and changed channel. Amid theever-varying dangers of such a river the only safety for steamboats isin a race of pilots so learned and so alert as to have the shiftingbars and courses always in their minds. In 1839, when steamboats werethe only means of rapid transit in the West, when there were more ofthem in the harbor of the little town of Saint Louis than to-day whenit is a great city, this class of pilots was a large and a veryrespectable one. Much of their knowledge of the river was what youngEads learned while he was a clerk among them; and as time went on, hecame to realize that although the Mississippi seems so capricious inits terrible games that one would think them the result of chance, yetin truth, they "are controlled by laws as immutable as the Creator. "

Despite all care that could be used, steamboats were every week sunkand wrecked, and with their valuable engines, boilers, and cargoes wereoften left where they lay in the ceaseless brown current. After he hadbeen for three years on the river, Eads gave up his clerkship to gointo the business of raising these boats, their machinery, and theirfreight. In 1842, at the age of twenty-two, he formed a partnershipwith Case & Nelson, boat-builders. His first appearance in the newbusiness was an experience that well shows his quick inventive genius, his persistency, and his courage. While his diving-bell boat wasbuilding, a barge loaded with pig-lead sank in the rapids at Keokuk, 212 miles from Saint Louis. A contract having been made with itsowners, Eads hurried up there to rescue the freight from fifteen feetof water. He had no knowledge himself of diving-armor; but he hadengaged a skilled diver from the Great Lakes, who brought his ownapparatus. They set out in a barge and anchored over the wreck; but, once there, they soon discovered that the current was so exceedinglyrapid that the diver could do nothing in it. Eads at once returned toKeokuk, and, buying a forty-gallon whiskey hogshead, took it out to thewreck; and having knocked out one head, he slung pigs of lead round hisimprovised diving-bell, made a seat inside it, rigged it to his derrickand air-pumps, and then asked the diver to go down in it. The diverhaving very naturally refused, Eads on the spot set himself a precedentwhich, during his after life, he never broke, --saying that he would notask an employee to go where he would not trust himself, he got insidehis hogshead and was lowered into the river. His assistants were unusedto managing diving-bells, and when they came to haul him up the derrickgot out of order. By main force they were able to raise the hogshead tothe surface, but not above it. As the air-pump continued to work allthe while, Eads, though wondering what was amiss, sat patiently in hisplace, till finally he saw a hand appear under the rim of the hogshead. Seizing this, he ducked under and got out. Although the roughdiving-bell worked thus awkwardly at first, it served well enough, andfinally all of the lost freight was saved. 

A young man so fearless, so energetic, and so able to invent mechanicaldevices at sudden need, was bound to succeed in a business like this. And young Eads did succeed. "Fortune, " he believed, "favors the brave;"and his motto was, "Drive on!"

The insurance companies were willing to give the wreckers a largeinterest, sometimes as much as a half, of the rescued cargoes; andthere was a law by which a vessel or freight that had been wrecked forfive years belonged to whoever could get it up. Eads and his partnersworked up and down the river for hundreds of miles. The firstdiving-bell boat was followed by a larger one, provided with machineryfor pumping out sand, and for raising whole hulls. While in thishazardous business Eads invented many new appliances for use in itsvarious branches. Because he was in charge of a boat people began tocall the young wrecker Captain Eads, and that was the only reason for atitle which clung to him always. He grew now to know the river as fewhave ever known it, --his operations extended from Galena, Illinois, tothe Balize at the river's very mouth, and even into the tributaries ofthe Mississippi, --and he used to say that there was not a stretch offifty miles in the twelve hundred between Saint Louis and New Orleansin which he had not stood on the bottom under his diving-bell. 

With the same devotion to his parents as when he peddled the apples inthe street, Eads now bought them a farm in Iowa, and provided in everyway he could for their comfort. But beyond the ordinary desire ofmaking a fortune for them, for himself, and for a new interest that wascoming into his life, it does not appear that there were in his mindany unusual ambitions, any of the dreams of genius. As yet he was onlya hard-working, earnest young man, extraordinarily clever to be sure, but founding on that cleverness no visions of great renown in thefuture. Perhaps this was because he had enough to dream of in thepresent, enough hopes of purely domestic happiness to look towards. Forhe had fallen in love with a Miss Martha Dillon, a young lady of abouthis own age, daughter of a rich man in Saint Louis. The fatherdisapproved of the match, not only because he thought the suitor tooyoung, too poor, too unknown, but because he wished to keep hisdaughter with him, and for other less reasonable causes. 

The letters between the engaged couple show Eads at twenty-five as akeen, experienced, and yet an unsophisticated young man; generous, proud, brave, and courteous; a lover of Nature, of poetry, of people, and of good books; an inveterate early riser; reverend in religion, andyet, while nominally a Catholic, really a free-thinker; sentimental inhis feelings almost as if he had lived a century sooner, and at thesame time controlling his true and deep emotions, and showing hisstrong love only to those he loved. 

At last Eads and Miss Dillon were married, he being over twenty-five atthe time, she nearly twenty-four. Eads then sold out his wreckingbusiness and left the river. He probably made this change because hehoped thereby not only to be more with his wife, but also to supporther in the comfort she had been used to, and to show her father that hecould do so. The new enterprise, into which at least one of his oldpartners entered with him, and into which he put all his money, was themanufacture of glass; and they built the first glass factory west ofthe Ohio River. He had to go to Pittsburg--then a long journey by boat, stage, and rail--to get trained workmen and to learn the processhimself. Almost all of the necessary ingredients and apparatus had tobe sent for to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, or to New York; and they wereoften slow in arriving and thereby made matters drag considerably. Still there was always something to do, and Eads, the only one of thepartners who understood the trade, was forced to work extraordinarilyhard. With his usual persistence he stuck to it pluckily, often stayingup late into the night and rising the next day before dawn to overseeoperations. He was also indispensable for his faculty of managing men;and a letter to his wife written on his twenty-seventh birthday (1847)shows how strong the man already was in that power of getting the mostfrom a workman, which was afterwards to count for so much in his bestwork. An employer, he says, must "have constant control of his temper, and be able to speak pleasantly to one man the next moment after havingspoken in the harshest manner to another, and even to give the same mana pleasant reply a few minutes after having corrected him. Self must beleft out of the matter entirely, and a man or boy spoken to only asconcerns his conduct; and the authority which the controller has overthe controlled, used only when absolutely necessary, and then with theutmost promptness. "

However, despite all his firmness and perseverance, the difficulties ofthe glassworks became greater and greater; and at last, after havingbeen run two years, they were shut down. Eads was left with debts of$25, 000. The very unusual action of his creditors in this crisis showswhat confidence they had in his integrity and in his ability; for theyadvanced him $1500 with which to go back into the wrecking business, and he at once rejoined his former partners. He now worked harder, ifpossible, than ever; for he felt, as he wrote to his wife, that "with aman in debt it cannot be said that his time is his own. " Powerful as hewas physically, his health was not good, but even in sickness hescarcely ceased to toil during the first year or two; and at the end often years, not only had all his debts been long since paid, but hisfirm was worth half a million dollars. 

Work, however, was to him only a means to an end. The real dignity ofcharacter he knew to lie in culture. To a small boy he sends, in one ofhis letters, the message that he should "be a good boy and study hard, as that is the only way to be respected when he is grown. " Even in hisamusements his mind sought occupation: we find him at night on thediving-bell boat playing chess, and in later years he had becomeunusually adept at that game. 

The wrecking business was full of life and action. Here and there, upand down the river, and into its branches, wherever a boat was wreckedor burned or run aground, the Submarine hurried off to reach the spotbefore other wreckers. Under their bell the divers got at the engines, boilers, and freight, while the pumps, worked from above, cleared awaythe sand; and sometimes by means of great chains and derricks the veryhull itself would be lifted and towed ashore. But on that huge river, which at times would suddenly rise three feet in a single night, andwhose strong current played such giant pranks as turning over a wreckin the chains that were raising it, there was need of eternal vigilanceand agility. However, Eads was more on his own ground on the river thanon the shore, and his business so increased that he was soon runningfour diving-bell boats. In 1849 twenty-nine boats were burned at thelevee in Saint Louis in one big fire, and most of their remains wereremoved by him. Winter as well as summer the work went on; and the taskof cutting out a vessel wrecked in an ice-gorge, or of raising one frombeneath the ice, must have been as trying as walking the river bottomin search of a wreck. Eads himself, years later, thus describes one ofhis many experiences: "Five miles below Cairo, I searched the riverbottom for the wreck of the Neptune, for more than sixty days, and in adistance of three miles. My boat was held by a long anchor line, andwas swung from side to side of the channel, over a distance of 500feet, by side anchor lines, while I walked on the river bottom underthe bell across the channel. The boat was then dropped twenty feetfarther down stream, and I then walked back again as she was hauledtowards the other shore. In this way I walked on the bottom four hoursat least, every day (Sundays excepted) during that time. " For a day'swork the city of Saint Louis gave him $80, out of which he paid his ownworkmen. He was so prosperous that, as he wrote to his wife, there wasno need for him to join the rush to California to get gold; and hissuccess caused much envy among his rivals. He began to clear thechannel of the Mississippi from some of its obstructions and to improvethe harbor of Saint Louis. 

In 1856 he knew his work so well that he went to Washington andproposed to Congress to remove all the snags and wrecks from theWestern rivers, --the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and theOhio, --and to keep their channels open for a term of years. A bill tothat purpose passed the House, but in the Senate it was defeated byJefferson Davis and others. The next year, on account of poor health, Eads retired from business, but he carried with him a fortune. He hadnot succeeded in his purpose at Washington, but his name was knownthere and remembered. 

Meanwhile his wife had died, and two years later he had married thewidow of a first cousin. With his second wife he made his first trip toEurope, --the first of very many he was destined to make. In 1857, beingthirty-seven years old, he retired, as I have said, from business. 

His youthful hopes, the ordinary ambitions of men, were realized. Hehad been a poor boy: at only thirty-seven he was rich, --very rich forthe times and for the place. From his proposals to the government, wemay imagine that he now had broader dreams of usefulness. But his firstproposition toward river improvement had been checked. He had bought alarge house and grounds. He made for himself a rose-arbor, and for fouryears he was as much unoccupied as his lively mind permitted. He was atany rate what is called a man of leisure. 

Then, four years being passed, he received from Washington, from hisfriend Attorney-General Bates, a letter written three days after thesurrender of Fort Sumter, which said: "Be not surprised if you arecalled here suddenly by telegram. If called, come instantly. In acertain contingency it will be necessary to have the aid of the mostthorough knowledge of our Western rivers, and the use of steam on them, and in that event I advised that you should be consulted. "

The government was thinking of placing gunboats to occupy and to defendthe Western waters. 

II

THE GUNBOATS

At the beginning of the Civil War the State of Missouri and the city ofSaint Louis were in a very confused condition. A border slave State, Missouri contained a great many persons of Southern birth and Southernsympathies; and besides a good many strong Northern men, Saint Louishad also a considerable German population, all stanch Unionists. Butexcepting the Germans and one or two dauntless clear-seeing men, whoread the future, few persons in either party wished to fight iffighting could possibly be avoided. The governor, a Southern man, whilehesitating at actual secession, wished and tried to control the powerof the State so that at need it might help the South; and whileprofessing loyalty, he did all he could to prove his disloyalty to theUnion. The legislature, however, would not pass a bill to arm theState, thereby, says an historian, causing the South to sustain "adefeat more disastrous to its independence than any which thereafterbefell its arms, down to the fall of Vicksburg. " In response toLincoln's call for troops, the governor refused to send any fromMissouri. An extraordinary state convention, called in this crisis, voted against secession. Seeing that the governor, notwithstandingthis, was covertly aiming at throwing himself and the State, so far ashe could, in with the Confederacy, young Frank Blair and GeneralNathaniel Lyon, carrying things with a high hand, seized and dispersedthe state militia encamped in Saint Louis, got control of almost allthe Federal arms in the State, and with outside aid and help from theregular army, chased the governor from the capital, and held him at baylong enough for the convention to depose him and the General Assembly, and to establish a state government loyal to the Union. 

During all these lively events Saint Louis was in confusion. There weremany minds in the town--secessionists, conditional and unconditionalunionists, submissionists: some who wanted war, some who wanted only topreserve peace so that they might keep their homes and fortunes safe, even on condition of abandoning slavery. 

James B. Eads did not own a slave, nor did he approve of slavery, butamong his friends and associates there were many who did own them, andmany secessionists. It is curious to observe how little a difference ofopinion on these points, that had become so vital, was able to putpersonal enmity among men who were true friends. Of course, among mereacquaintances there were many instances of bitterness and taunting. Through it all, Eads, with his rare tact and his exquisite manners, steered without collision, offending none of those who were not on hisside. And yet we are presently to see what a deep interest his side hadfor him, and how much he was able and willing to do for it. 

Between the election and the inauguration of Lincoln, Eads and threeother prominent citizens of Saint Louis wrote a letter to him, expressing their fears that an attempt at secession would be made, andurging the policy of having a secretary of state from one of the slaveStates. And they recommended, for "purity of character, sternintegrity, exalted patriotism, and enlightened statesmanship, " EdwardBates, born in Virginia, married into a South Carolina family, and longresident in Missouri. A first draught of this letter is in Eads'shandwriting. When the new cabinet was formed, Bates, a personal friendof Lincoln's as well as of Eads's, was given a position in it, that ofattorney-general. It was he who, three days after Sumter was fired on, wrote the letter, already quoted, telling Eads to expect a telegramcalling him to Washington for consultation on the best method ofdefending and occupying the Western rivers. Eads himself was by thistime no believer in a defensive policy for the government. After Sumterhe had already written to Bates advocating determined and vigorousmeasures. So, when the telegram soon followed the letter, he was gladto hasten to Washington in order to be of use. There he was introducedto the Secretary and to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. 

The importance of controlling the Mississippi River was well seen bythe great strategist, Lincoln, who called it "the backbone of therebellion"--"the key to the whole situation. " If it could be held bythe government, the Confederacy could neither move its troops up anddown it, nor--thus cut in half--could it bring over from Texas andArkansas the many men and the quantities of food greatly needed by itsarmies east of the river. Realizing this, the Confederacy was alreadybeginning to fortify the Mississippi and the Ohio with its branches. Todislodge the rebels Bates proposed a fleet of gunboats. The Secretaryof War, however, thinking this idea of gunboats either useless orimpracticable, showed at first no interest in the plan. But at therequest of the Secretary of the Navy, who realized the importance ofthe subject, Eads prepared a statement of his views, embodying Bates'sproject. In it he also suggested, besides the best kind of boats forthe service, batteries, to be erected at several points. CommodorePaulding, on reading this statement, at once reported in favor of it. Suddenly, the Secretary of War, when he saw that the scheme was comingto something, claimed jurisdiction over the whole matter, but finallyhe agreed to order the same officer already appointed for the purposeby the Navy to go west with Eads and purchase vessels to be armed. Allnecessary approvals having been made, the two went to Cairo, where theyexamined the Benton, one of the former snag-boat fleet. Afterwards Eadsproposed the strong and swift Missouri River steamboats. But neither ofthese suited his colleague, who at last went to Cincinnati, and buyingthree boats there, armed them himself: and very useful boats they were. 

The gunboat scheme had been first proposed in April; it was now June, and excepting these three wooden boats, nothing seemed to have come ofit. So in July the quartermaster-general advertised for bids forironclad gunboats. In 1861 ironclads were a rather new thing. Franceand England had a few of them, but at the time the Merrimac was begunno ironclad had been finished in America. On August 5, when the bidswere opened, that of Eads was found not only to be the lowest, but topromise the quickest work. On August 7 the contract was signed forseven gunboats to be delivered at Cairo on October 10, --sixty-four dayslater. This contract, it has been said, would under ordinarycircumstances have been thought by most men impossible to fulfill. Andthe circumstances then were anything but ordinary: it was a time ofgreat financial distress; in the border slave States the pursuits ofpeace were interrupted; all was in turmoil and confusion;rolling-mills, machine-shops, foundries, forges, and sawmills were allidle, and many of the mechanics had gone to the war. The timber for theboats was still growing in the forests; the iron was not yetmanufactured. And so short was the time that two or three factoriesalone, no matter how well equipped they might be, were not to bedepended upon. Yet Eads had undertaken to start up the factories, togather the materials, and to build his boats in two months. Never werethe self-reliance and the energy of the man better exhibited; but hiskeen business sense might have hesitated, had not his patriotism shownhim that the Union needed the boats quickly. 

Most of the machine-shops and foundries of Saint Louis were at once setto work night and day; and for hours at a time the telegraph wires toPittsburg and to Cincinnati were in use. Twenty-one steam-engines andthirty-five boilers were needed. Prepared timber was brought from eightdifferent States, and the first iron plating used in the war was rollednot only in Saint Louis and Cincinnati, but in small towns in Ohio andKentucky. Within two weeks 4000 men were at work in places milesapart, --working by night and seven days a week. To the workmen on thehulls who should stick to the task till it was done Eads promised a"handsome bonus;" and in this way gratuitously paid out thousands ofdollars. The building of this little fleet has been called "a triumphof sagacity, pluck, and executive ability unsurpassed by any exploit inthe military or civil history of the times. "

To be sure, the seven boats were not finished at the time called for. That they were all launched within a hundred days of the signing of thecontract is amazing enough, but if they had been built after designs ofEads's own, so that he would not have been delayed by sudden changesnecessitated when he found weaknesses in the plans furnished him, orwhen the designer changed the specifications, and if the government, harassed and driven as it then was, had been able to pay him accordingto its part of the contract, there is little doubt that he would havehad the vessels finished in time according to his agreement. Even as itwas, it was legally decided later that he was not at fault. When heentered into the contract he was a rich man; and as he was not toreceive his first payment from the government for twenty days, probablyonly a rich man could have had the credit necessary to put so muchmachinery into motion. As it proved subsequently, the government was solax in its payment, and demanded work so much more expensive than thespecifications called for, that before the work was finished Eads wasin a hard way financially. He had been much worried and distracted inobtaining funds: after exhausting his own fortune he had sought the aidof patriotic friends, and it was principally in order to pay them backthat he made his appeal to the government. By the terms of his contracthe might have delayed the work until his payments were received, andmight thus have saved himself great distress and worry, but, as I havesaid, he realized how much the Union needed the boats. He himself saidthat it was "of the utmost importance that these boats should be madeas effective as possible, without reference to how I was to be affectedby delays, . .. And that their completion should be pushed with theutmost energy, whether the government failed in its part of the bargainor not. " Their rapid completion then was a proof not only of Eads'smasterful energy, but of his self-sacrificing patriotism as well. Ultimately he was paid most of the money for the gunboats, and as aresult of his patriotism won back the fortune he had risked; but at thetime of course it hampered him intolerably to be without funds. He had, besides, other difficulties to contend with. At least one of hissub-contractors or head-workmen was a disappointed bidder for thegunboat contract, and was on a salary which ran till the boats werefinished; and while Eads would not mention such a suspicion in public, he suggested in a private letter that this had been an additional causeof delay. 

After all, the seven boats had been launched and were ready to be putinto commission by Flag-Officer Foote, before he had more than onethird of the necessary crews ready for them. 

These seven, the Saint Louis (afterwards De Kalb), the Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburg, were allalike. The Saint Louis, as Eads wrote to Lincoln, when he sent him aphotograph of her, "was the first ironclad built in America. .. . She wasthe first armored vessel against which the _fire of a hostile battery_was directed on this continent; and, so far as I can ascertain, she wasthe first ironclad that ever _engaged a naval force_ in the world. " Inreading the descriptions of them, and in reading in the naval historiesof their undeniable faults, it must be remembered that Eads "had nopart in the modeling of these boats, and is therefore relieved of allresponsibility as to their imperfections. " They were 175 feet long, 51-1/2 feet beam. Their flat sides sloped upward and inward at an angleof about 35°, and the front and rear casemates corresponded with thesides, the stern-wheel being entirely covered by the rear casemate. Itwas a large paddle-wheel, placed forward of the stern so as to beprotected. The whole thing was like a tremendous uncovered box, withits sides sloping up and in, and containing the battery, the machinery, and the paddle-wheel, while the smoke-stacks and the conicalpilot-house stuck up out of the top. Captain Mahan says that theylooked like gigantic turtles. Underneath the water, they were simplylike flat-bottomed scows. As they were intended always to fight bowson, they were built with that in view. In front they were accordinglyarmored two and a half inches over two feet of solid oak. The onlyother armor they carried was abreast of the boiler and engines. Thestern, therefore, and the greater part of the sides were decidedlyvulnerable. Their armament consisted of three guns forward, four oneach broadside, and two at the stern. 

When Eads was given a chance to alter a boat from his own designs, hemade it a much better one than these. It was a boat ordered by GeneralFremont in September, 1861, in excess of the government appropriationfor the river fleet. This was the same snag-boat which three monthsbefore had been suggested for alteration by Eads, and refused by thearmy's agent. In this case, as in so many afterwards when Eads knewhimself to be right, he stuck persistently to his own opinion; and outof the heavy old boat, despised and objected to by so many persons, hefashioned the "old war-horse, " the Benton, which, slow as she was, Spears, the naval historian, calls the most powerful warship afloat atthat date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had twohulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind ofa cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag itclear of the channel. " These hulls were now joined together; and whilethe boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contractgunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid thedanger that they were exposed to of having their boilers burst andgreat damage and death caused thereby. Her tonnage was twice that ofthe others; her size about 200 by 75 feet. She was entirely iron clad. In her gun-deck casemate the twenty inches of timber under the platinghad "its grain running up from the water instead of horizontally, bywhich means [wrote Eads] a ball will strike, as it were, _withthe_ grain, and then be more readily deflected. On the same principlethat a minie ball will penetrate five inches of oak, crossing thegrain, while it will not enter one inch if fired at the end of thetimber. " This detail illustrates the care and interest with which Eadsbuilt his boats. 

The eight of them, Captain Mahan says, "formed the backbone of theriver fleet throughout the war, " and "may be fairly called the ships ofthe line of battle on the Western waters. " He speaks also of their"very important services. " This is milder praise than has been giventhem. Commander Stembel said that he had heard them called equal to5000 men each; Boynton, the naval historian, goes so far as to say thatthe permanent occupation of the South was rendered possible by theironclad navy of the Western waters. Though the naval battles in theAtlantic were perhaps more brilliant, he says, none, unless thatbetween the Merrimac and the Monitor, had more important results. Eadshas been called as potent as a great general in clearing the upperMississippi. He did not, to be sure, build the entire gunboat fleet, but he did build, as Captain Mahan says, the backbone of it; and thatthe praises for that fleet, which I have quoted, are not altogetherextravagant, is further shown by the comments of Mr. John Fiske. Hesays, "While it was seldom that they ["these formidable gunboats"]could capture fortified places without the aid of a land force, at thesame time this combination of strength with speed made them anauxiliary without which the greater operations of the war could hardlyhave been undertaken. "

These eight boats figured in many a fight on the great river and itsbranches. They "were ever where danger was. " A month and more beforethe Merrimac and the Monitor were finished, the important capture ofFort Henry "was a victory exclusively for the gunboats. " It was theCarondelet that ran the gauntlet past Island Number 10, a feat as fullof romance and daring as any that the Civil War tells us of. And thesethings were done with vessels still unpaid for and the personalproperty of their builder. Their usefulness was a great satisfaction toEads, and he rejoiced, as he wrote to Foote, with "the pridefulpleasure of the poor armorer who forged the sword that in gallant handsstruck down the foe. "

When the Benton left her dock for Cairo, Foote requested Eads to seeher there in safety. Eads, who was so deeply interested in his boatsthat on another occasion he was narrowly prevented from going intoaction with one of them, gladly agreed. Before long the Bentongrounded. As Eads was merely a guest, and as there were naval officersaboard, he did not feel called upon to interfere with any suggestions. But after the officers and crew had labored all night trying to floather, then with his aptitude for emergencies he used his scientificknowledge to suggest another scheme. The captain at once gave him leaveto command the entire crew, and by means of hawsers tied to treesashore and then strongly tightened, the vessel was floated. In thiscase the old river man knew more than the naval officers. 

In April, 1862, the Navy Department called Eads to Washington to makedesigns for more ironclads, --or rather boats made wholly of iron. Thesewere to be of very light draught and turreted. He submitted plans forboats drawing five feet. The department insisted on lighter draught, but still on heavy plating. So he revised his designs once, and thenonce more. Finally the draught was reduced to only three and a halffeet. Eads has himself described his going back to his room in thehotel, and in a few hours making over his designs. When these boatswere finished they were found to draw even less than had beencontracted for, so that extra armor was ordered for them, and three ofthem exceeded the contract speed. At first two boats were ordered, later four others. For the turrets Eads submitted designs of his own, but as it was then only a month after the Monitor's fight, Ericsson'sturrets were insisted on for the first two boats, althoughmodifications were allowed. As the other four had two turrets each, Eads was allowed on two of them to try one turret of his own, with theguns worked by steam, on condition of replacing them at his own costwith Ericsson's in case of failure. This was the first manipulation ofheavy artillery by steam. The guns were fired every forty-five seconds, or seven times as fast as in Ericsson's turrets. 

In addition to the fourteen gunboats, Eads also converted seventransports into musket-proof "tinclads, " and built four mortarboats. "Such men, " says Boynton, "deserve a place in history by the side ofthose who fought our battles. "

The career of some of the gunboats subsequent to the war isinteresting. In 1880 the Chickasaw and the Winnebago, which were two ofthe six iron boats, and both of which took part in the naval campaignat Mobile, had come into the hands of Peru; and old as they were, theywere used very effectively against some of the larger and more modernboats of the Chileans. 

During those trying war times all of Eads's tremendous energy had by nomeans been exhausted by the gunboats. In more ways than one he had beenshowing himself a good citizen and a kind-hearted man. Much as hisfortune had been drained by the boats, he still found money to give tothe sufferers in the war. Out of a belated partial payment on theBenton he at once sent money to Foote for use in relief work, and withcharacteristic persistence he sent several letters and telegrams tomake sure of the money's arriving. A month or so later he sent a checkfrom Washington to Saint Louis to the Sanitary Commission, asking thatits receipt might not be made public. In the letter sent with this hespeaks of the war as "an accursed contest between brothers, " but addsthat the "cause is most worthy of the sacrifice. " From the niece of theSecretary of the Navy we also find a letter of acknowledgment of moneyto be used in relief. But it was not only to the soldiers that heshowed his tenderness: to Foote, the gallant "Christian commander" ofhis fleet, he sent various friendly gifts when that brave man laydying, --grapes from his own vines, a portrait he had had painted of hisfriend. And even to those on the other side he showed an unusualconsideration. Towards the end of the war there seemed to be no meansof feeding the many refugees in Saint Louis but by levying a tax uponSouthern sympathizers. Eads, who foresaw what bitterness such a coursewould produce, offered, in the name of a bank in which he was adirector, $1000 to start a subscription to be used instead, and theinvidious assessment was never levied again. 

To his personal friends he was always generous and thoughtful, sendingthem many presents, defending them from misrepresentation, and helpingthem in their chosen careers. By means of his influence and tact heprocured the release of an indiscreet person who had talked himselfinto McDowell's College prison as a suspected enemy to the government. Giving to others seemed a trait in Eads's character which afforded himan intense pleasure; and though a man of great dignity, he used withhis intimate friends a charming playfulness and affection. He could beextremely mild in correcting faults; and while he was inclined to bearwith others, he could be stern. His manners were rather those oneexpects in a European gentleman of leisure and high breeding, than in aformer steamboat clerk and a man who had worked hard most of his life. His hospitality was princely. In his large house in the suburbs ofSaint Louis he received not only the young friends of his fivedaughters and his own friends, but also officers of the river fleet andof the army, officers sent west on inspection duty, and foreignofficers following the course of the war and of the improvements ingunboat building. 

His mind was as active as his heart was generous, and the course of hislife mirrored that activity. Now he was at home, now in Washington, nowat Cairo visiting the gunboats to see how they worked under fire. InWashington he was busy with plans and projects. An intimate associatesaid of him in his later life that he was always inventing some new gunor gun-carriage; and we may be sure that if he ever was doing so, hewas in those war times. Besides inventing his own, he was also busyexamining Ericsson's inventions, in making improvements on them, inapplying steam in novel ways to the working of artillery and to therotating and raising of turrets; in sending models of his inventionshere and there, at home and abroad, to Germany, where the Prussianminister, a friend with whom he often dined, "wished they could getsome of his boats on the Rhine;" having his turrets explained at aRussian dinner in New York or Washington; and receiving from the NavyDepartment an appointment as special agent to visit the navy yards inEurope. At home he was just as busy. With his house so full of company, he nevertheless found time somewhere for solid reading apart from hiswork--the Attorney-General sent him Cicero's letters, and he lent theAttorney-General King Alfred's works. There is a curious interest inknowing what two men so engrossed, and upon such necessary duties, werereading at such a time. While he was building the second batch ofgunboats, he wrote to Bates in a personal letter that he believed hehad the most complete and convenient works in the country for ironboat-building; that there and in other places he had as many as seventyblacksmith fires at work for him, and that his men were all shelteredfrom sun and rain. After those boats were finished, he went on planningothers, and we have a letter from Farragut in which the admiral asks ifsome of them are not for his use at Mobile. 

Eads, by this period in his strenuous life, knew a great many men, allof whom he treated with a uniform dignity and courtesy, even when theywere unfriendly, and a few of whom he was on the most intimate termswith. Among all of them he was admired; perhaps already he was asprominent a citizen as there was in Saint Louis, and as it was still inthe good old times when the mayoralty there was a high honor to thebest men, it was suggested to him that he hold the office. Nor was thisthe first honor offered to be thrust upon him; early in the war Bateshad wanted him appointed commissary of subsistence at Saint Louis, andthough it was unusual to appoint a civilian to that position, Lincolnhad been willing to do it to oblige Bates, --but Eads had not wished it. More than a year later he was given a commission of lieutenant-colonelby the governor, but he was never sworn in. Like all men in thosetroublous times, he took a peculiar interest in politics; and on beingasked privately in a joint letter from the editors of three Saint Louispapers (two of them German) exactly what his politics were, he repliedthat he was as strongly in favor of emancipation as he was opposed toslavery, and that he believed in no "kid-glove policy;" but he remarkedincidentally that if he were to be offered the mayoralty he shouldrefuse it. 

His work was for the whole country. While he was still too muchengrossed with his turrets and his plans for new boats, he fell veryill. Indeed there can be no question that he sacrificed his health tobuild the gunboats. Never very robust, he was now so ill that eightdoctors gave him up. His indomitable spirit pulled him through, but hewas ordered away from his workshop to Europe, he and his family. Hisoverburden of labor had crushed him, --before this his eyes had beentired out. Bates charged him to take care of himself; "the countrycan't spare you, " he said "and I can't spare you. "

Unless Bates was a prophet, we may well think the first of thesestatements unduly strong. To be sure, when in a crucial moment thegunboats were needed, and needed quickly, Eads's unparalleled haste inbuilding them certainly did an inestimable service to the country. Butso far in his career, --and he was over forty, --while he had shown amarked inventive talent, he had not as yet made clear his signal geniusfor engineering. And although he had exhibited wonderful executiveability and such true patriotism as made him a valued citizen, he hadstill to render himself indispensable to the development of the nation. 

III

THE BRIDGE

Eads was bred to the Mississippi. He had mastered its secrets by hardexperience; he had worked in successful opposition to its great waywardforces. But he was not to be content till he had tamed it, till he hadsaddled it, and, wild as it will always be, had made it neverthelesssubservient to him. To his quietly stubborn spirit there was adelightful invigoration in using his brain to conquer the brute forceof this capricious monster. For the river is the grandest power betweenour two oceans. Niagara is more sublime; but Niagara is constant, andtherefore its immense strength has been easily set to a task. TheMississippi is so irregular that one tends unconsciously to personifyit by calling it tricky. To find the causes of its sudden changes onemust go back hundreds of miles to the mountains east and west. Seemingto delight in destruction, it tears down or eats away the checks thatare put upon it. Only a mind never discouraged, a mind capable ofdiscovering and comprehending the laws that after all underlie theapparently blind and brutal jests of this untiring giant, can, by theuse of those very laws, tame it. And such a mind Eads had. "Thateverlasting brain of yours will wear out three bodies, " said onefriend. 

Though indeed his body was strong, with iron muscles and a fiercenervous 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 absoluteorder of his doctors would he go away from his work and rest. But hecould not entirely rest. His brain would work. In his health tours toEurope he was always open to new ideas, always studying new methods tocarry back to his task. "Your recreation, " some one wrote him, "isMonitor discussions with Captain Ericsson. " Another recreation waschess. Had he not elected to be the leading engineer of his day, hemight have been the chess champion. This game, never one for theslothful and unthinking, he made even more exacting than usual. Hewould play several games at the same time; or, without seeing the boardwhich his opponent used, he would carry the game in his head. Though itwas his nature not to like to be beaten, yet he was as kindly as he wasset in his purpose; and it was also his nature to take defeatgracefully: defeat seldom came. "Never let even a pawn be taken, " hegave me, a small boy, as a rule for the game. Even in little things heliked thoroughness, --a capacity for painstaking which is, I think, characteristic of the "thoroughbred. "

His appearance showed his traits. Not tall, and rather slight, he wasalways dignified. His wide and thin-lipped mouth shut so emphaticallythat it made plain his intention to do, in spite of all, what hebelieved could and should be done. Some one said that it was a hundredhorse-power mouth. It admitted no trifling. When it spoke seriously, itspoke finally. But his eyes, with their merry twinkle, showed that hecould also speak humorously. He was indeed a famous story-teller, fondof all sorts of riddles and jests, and remembering all of them heheard. He used often to point his arguments with an anecdote, always afresh 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 theface. Indeed, he was the larger half of his stories. His face wasthoughtful and stern. Though he seldom found fault, he never did morethan once; but he was by no means violent. His mildness was moreforcible than anger. He wore a full beard, but no mustache, thusexhibiting his long, determined lip. At forty he was already bald, andafter he was sixty he always wore indoors a black skull-cap. Scrupulously cleanly, in his dress he was point-device. Without theleast ostentation, his clothes were invariably faultless. From youngmanhood he had thought that it is due to one's self and to one'sfriends to look one's best; and he had also realized the practicalvalue of a good appearance. Often impressing this on his wife anddaughters, he would have them at all times well dressed. Really heseems to have been a point too precise. He was just the opposite tothose 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 oflaws and of details, in its fight to help and to better the country andthe world. For it was not only the lusty pleasure of battling withNature that made him long for another struggle with the Mississippi: hesaw the value there was in it to commerce and to civilization. Beforethe war he had long contended with stubborn currents, and with ice, andby his energy and his talent for inventing new devices he had becomethe most successful wrecker on the river. Abandoning the peaceful butlively triumphs of snatching hulls and cargoes from the maw of thestream, he had offered the government to cleanse its course and therebyto increase its safety and usefulness. In war times, owing to hisknowledge of the waterways and of science, he had been able to build, with a speed fairly romantic, a gunboat fleet to patrol theMississippi. Already now greater schemes for improving this centralhighway of our country were in his mind, but as yet the fullness of thetime was not come. Still, he was no longer merely the careful son andfather striving to protect his beloved ones and with no dreams ofbroader duties; he was no longer contented with rose-arbors for anoccupation. The grim war had roused him; his years of rest were over;he was the well-known boat-builder, --engineer, perhaps some personsalready called him, --and his mind was teeming with schemes ofhelpfulness. Yet his ambition was not for fame, but to do in theperfect way the work that only he could do. 

In 1867 a grand convention for the improvement of the Mississippi andits tributaries met in Saint Louis. Even then people were beginning tosee vaguely that the Mississippi Valley is destined to be the rulingsection of the country. Eads in his speech showed that he foresaw itplainly. He urged the convention to persuade the government to takesteps to improve the river; showing that for less money than was paidby the river boats in three years for insurance against obstructions, those obstructions could be removed. There was not one of them, hesaid, that engineering skill and cunning could not master. 

Two years later he urged upon the commercial convention at New Orleansby letter the importance of introducing iron boats on the Mississippi;saying that it was the fault of the tariff on iron that the saving theywould effect was not taken note of. Thirty years later this scheme hasagain been brought up. Perhaps Eads was before his time in advocatingit. But it shows how he had the interests of commerce at heart. 

His convention speech is a good sample of his style. He was sopainstaking that even in private letters he would insert words andchange sentences and sometimes rewrite. There are first draughts withexcisions of whole half pages, for he sought conciseness. He soughtalso a certain rhythm or grace or forcefulness, it is hard to tellexactly what, since in his letters it often resulted in a ratherself-conscious formality or a stiff playfulness, and in his speeches ina prettiness or a floweriness of style. He sought too carefully. Probably in delivery the speeches sounded better than we shouldimagine. In reading them, they seem florid. That was, however, thefavorite style of the time. And while, by overdoing it, he often seemsto lose force, he is almost always clear and always entirely logical. In contrast to his speeches his professional reports are models: simpleand complete, written not faultlessly perhaps, but with a limpiditywhich makes one interested even in dry technical details. One of hismost marked talents, often noted, was the ability to explain anabstruse subject so that it would be quite clear to anybody. And thishe did nearly as well in writing as by word of mouth. 

He thus made clear his remarkable plans for the bridge; for in 1867 thelong talked of bridge at Saint Louis was at last begun. 

In 1833, when Eads had arrived at the town, it had about 10, 000inhabitants. Though already seventy years old, it had not advanced veryfar beyond its original state of a French trading-post. With theintroduction of steam and the waking up of the country, the growth ofSaint Louis was rapid. In 1867 it had about 100, 000 people. Despite acommanding situation, it could be seen that a struggle would have to bemade for it to maintain the leadership among the river towns. As earlyas 1839 there had been a project for a highway bridge; and we are toldthat "the city fathers stood aghast" at an estimated cost of $736, 600. In the following years there were several more abortive schemes forbridging, one of which, it is even said, would have been carried out, had not its projector died. Perhaps it is as well that he never livedto try it, for until Eads no one seems to have realized how enormousthe undertaking was. Probably few others, realizing it, would havedared to go on. 

In the winter of 1865-66 a bill was brought up in Congress to authorizethe bridging of the Mississippi at Saint Louis. Dependence on ferrieshad become intolerable to the people, and often when the river wasfrozen even the ferries were blocked. A bridge was felt to beabsolutely indispensable. However, the antagonism of rival commercialroutes was so powerful that the bill was allowed to pass only after ithad been so amended that it was supposed to require an impracticability. It declared that the central span of the contemplated bridge must be noless than 500 feet long, nor its elevation above the city directrixless than fifty feet. It was said at the time "that the genius did notexist in the country capable of erecting such a structure. "

Still, a span of over 500 feet had been built in Holland; and the factthat there was not a total doubt as to the practicability of doing aswell in the Mississippi Valley is shown by the inauguration of tworival bridge companies about a year after the passage of the bill. Oneof these, which was located in Illinois, after calling a convention ofengineers, who considered the question for ten days, without anexamination of Eads's plans, adopted a plan for a truss bridge. Theother, the Saint Louis company, from the first had Eads as its chiefengineer. For another year there was a sharp contest carried on betweenthese two companies, confined, however, principally to the courts andthe newspapers, until finally the Illinois company sold out to theSaint Louis company. Had the truss bridge been built, there is noknowing how long it might have stood, for the engineer who designed itdid not arrange to base the foundations on the bed-rock of the river. Afterwards it was shown how necessary it was to do this; but at thetime many people thought it quite superfluous, and on that, as well ason many other points, Eads met with opposition. 

In every case it turned out that he had been right. No one else knew sowell as he the immense power and the waywardness of the Mississippi. Good engineers supposed that the greatest imaginable scour at the riverbottom in extreme high water would not remove over twenty-two feet ofsand, and it was believed that there were perhaps one hundred feet ofit along the east shore. But Eads had been sixty-five feet below theriver's surface at Cairo, and there he had found the river bottom to bea moving mass at least three feet deep; and in cutting through thefrozen river to liberate his diving-bell boats, he had found that thefloating ice which goes underneath solid ice, as well as the rising or"backing-up" of the water above ice-gorges, forces the undercurrentslower than even a flood does; and he had found on cutting a wreck outof the ice that she had been held up by the gorged ice underneath her, which must therefore have been packed to the bottom. Knowing all thisand much more about what goes on under the turbid surface of the river, he did not doubt that even beneath 100 feet of sand the bed-rock mightat times be laid bare, and he was absolutely convinced that his bridgemust be founded on it. 

Moreover, he saw that on account of the exceptional force of thecurrent in its rather narrow bed at Saint Louis, the masonry piers ofhis bridge must be made unusually big and strong to withstand it. Sincethey must be so big and sunk so very deep, it was evident that theywould be so costly that the fewer there need be of them the better. Thecentral span was required to be 500 feet; with three spans about thatlength the river could be crossed, and three spans would require onlyfour piers. Steel trusses 500 feet long would have to be made extremelyheavy; but Eads showed that a steel arch the same length, while quiteas strong, would be lighter and consequently much cheaper. When hisopponents objected that there was no engineering precedent for suchspans, while he pointed out their mistake, at the same time heexpressed his conviction that engineering precedents had nothing to dowith the question of length of span; that it was altogether a moneyquestion. Therefore, since the cheapest method was to be carefullysought, he determined upon arches, --two abutment piers, two riverpiers, and three arches of respectively 502, 520, and 502 feet long. 

There were many opponents to this plan; some of them people who wouldhave opposed any bridge, as, for example, the ferry and the transfercompanies. To his own company he explained away every objection thatcame up, as he was bound to do, in view of their confidence in him. Hemade the clearest of explanations of the theories involved; and evensuch absurd predictions as that his superstructure would crush his hugestone piers, he took the trouble to blast sarcastically. To anengineering journal he wrote three letters correcting mistakes in itsaccounts of his work. But he seems to have wasted little of his energyin arguing with the newspaper public. It was a question only of timetill everybody should be convinced. 

The most extraordinary care and pains were expended in every direction. The stone, granite, and steel were both hunted up and tested byexperts, and by machines specially devised in the bridge works, thoughnot by Eads himself. For his assistants he chose men who were of realability and well trained, and to them he invariably gave great creditfor their part in the work. The plans, after being figured out indetail by them, were gone over by the mathematician Chauvenet, thenchancellor of Washington University, who found not one single error inthem. Most of the big work, such as the masonry and steel, was givenout on contract; and, as was natural, delays by the contractors oftengreatly delayed the progress of the bridge. The whole work occupiedseven years. 

While Eads had promised the company to prove by careful experiment, sofar as was possible, everything connected with the bridge that had notalready been fully demonstrated in practice, he did not pretend that inhis main outlines he was without some examples. It was in hisdevelopment of known ideas and his expedients for simplification thathis genius perhaps most strikingly showed itself. Again and again hecontrived some device so simple that, like a great many strokes ofgenius, it seemed that anybody should have thought of it. The massivepiers were sunk to the bed-rock by means of metal caissons. These wereadapted in design from some he had seen in use in France, and hadexamined during a trip his doctors ordered him to make in 1868. Eadshimself compared them to inverted pans. They were open at the bottom, but perfectly air-tight everywhere else. They had several importantfeatures which were entirely original. Such caissons, sunk to thebottom, have the masonry of the pier built on top of them even whilethey are sinking; and workmen inside them keep removing the sand fromunderneath, and throwing it under the mouths of pipes which suck it upto the surface of the river. Evidently the caissons must be filled withcompressed air to equalize the external pressure, which is constantlyincreasing as ever deeper water is reached; they must also have anopening connecting with the surface; and to admit of passing from theordinary atmosphere to the denser one, there must be an air-lock. Before this bridge was built, the air-lock had always been placed atthe top of the entrance shaft, where, as the caisson sank and the shaftwas lengthened, it had to be constantly moved up. Eads placed it in theair-chamber of the caisson itself, where it never had to be moved; andthus, as the shaft was not filled with compressed air, less was needed, and there was less danger of leaks. Another of his useful innovationswas to build his shaft of wood, and another was to put a spiralstairway into it. Indeed, in the last pier he put an elevator into theshaft. Moreover, he was the first person to run his pipes fordischarging the sand, not through the shaft, but through the masonryitself; and he invented a very simple and effectual new sand-pump, which was worked by natural forces without machinery. All theseimprovements and various others seem to have been thought of so easily, that we are inclined to wonder why clumsier methods had ever been inuse. He described them all in his reports and his letters about thebridge in a style which is not only clear but actually fascinating evento a person who has scant scientific knowledge or taste. 

One of the piers was sunk 110 feet below the surface of the river, through ninety feet of gravel and sand. Eads's theories were justifiedby finding the bed-rock so smooth and water-worn as to show that attimes it had been uncovered. This was the deepest submarine work thathad ever been done, and Eads tells us in his reports many interestingexperiments he made in the air-chambers. In their dense atmosphere acandle when blown out would at once light again. This was before thedays of electric lighting: otherwise we may be sure that that wouldhave been used, as so many other modern inventions were. For the firsttime in any such work, the last pier sunk had telegraphiccommunications with the offices on shore; which must have beencomforting to workmen starting out to their labor in the dead of winterwith two weeks' provisions. The dense air of the chambers caused notonly discomfort to the ears, but also in the case of some of theworkmen a partial paralysis. There was no previous experience to go by, but every precaution seen to be necessary was taken; the hours of workwere made very short, the elevator was provided, medical attendance andhospital care were given free. After the first disasters no man wasallowed to work in the air-chambers without a doctor's permit. And itis known that in helping the sufferers with his private means, Eads wasas charitable as ever. Out of 352 men employed in the variousair-chambers, 12 died. Eads, with his wonted generosity of praise, printed in his yearly report the names of all the men who worked in thedeepest pier from its beginning till it touched bed-rock. It isinteresting to note in passing that of all the workmen in theblacksmith's yard only the head smith himself could lift a greaterweight than the designer of the bridge. 

The superstructure consisted mainly of three steel arches, by far thelongest that had ever been constructed; the first to dispense withspandrel bracing; and the first to be built of cast-steel. The"Encyclopædia Britannica" called them "the finest example of a metalarch yet erected. " They were built out from the piers from both ends tomeet in the middle; and were put into place entirely without stagingfrom below, --once again, the first instance of such a proceeding. Allthe necessary working platforms and machinery were suspended fromtemporary towers built on the piers; and thus while the arches werebeing put up, navigation below was not interfered with. This throwingacross of the 500-foot arches without the use of false works has beenranked with the sinking of the piers "through a hundred feet ofshifting quicksands, " as producing "some of the most difficult problemsever attempted by an engineer. " One problem, caused by the fault of thecontractors, presented itself when they came to insert the centraltubes to close the arches. The tubes were found to be two and a halfinches too long to go in, although they would be only the requiredlength when they were in. It was left for Eads to insert them. Shortening them would of course have lowered the arch. Eads, who wasjust starting for London on financial business of the bridge, cut thetubes in half, joining them by a plug with a right and left screw. Thenhe cut off their ends, for the plug would make them any required lengthby inserting or withdrawing the screws a little. Then he went away. Asit would have been much cheaper not to use this device, his assistantstried for hours to shrink the tubing by ice applications, and thus toget the arches closed; and there is a popular tradition in Saint Louisthat they succeeded; but it was excessively hot weather, and they didnot succeed. The screw-plug tubes, of course, were easily put in. Anypart of this steel work can be at any time safely removed andreplaced, --another structural feature original in this bridge. 

Although Eads took care to protect his special innovations by patent, he was most willing to explain them with care to other engineers and tohave others profit by his improvements; and several of the mechanicalnovelties of his bridge are now in the commonest use, and have beentaken advantage of even in such famous structures as the BrooklynBridge. 

During the building of the bridge Eads spent many months in enforcedabsence, but while in Europe he always had his labor in mind, and, as Ihave said, brought home from France one of his most useful appliances. During his absence he left absolutely trustworthy and efficientengineers in charge of the work, and before leaving home he providedfor accidents that might occur. So much work was done in the winterthat great barriers had to be built to keep it clear of floating ice. One curious detail connected with the bridge is that the Milwaukee, oneof the double-turreted gunboats which Eads had built from his ownplans, and which had been with Farragut at Mobile, was bought now froma wrecking company, and her iron hull used in making the caissons; sothat her usefulness still continued in peace as in war. 

It has been said of Eads that he grappled with great problems inengineering, and solved them as easily as a boy subtracts two from six. While this is true, it must not be forgotten that he had not theschool-training of an engineer. Nothing is more untrue than thestatement that he was, like de Lesseps, only a contractor. He was avery unusually brilliant engineer, and his ignorance of the highermathematics served to show his brilliancy the more clearly. Somepersons have said that his chief talent was in explaining abstrusereasonings simply; but an engineer has told me that he thought Eads'schief talent was his ability to arrive by some rough means at a certainconclusion to a given problem, which conclusion would in every instancebe approximately the same that better trained mathematicians wouldreach by mathematics. 

By the time the bridge was finished, indeed from the time (1868) whenhis first report for it made a decided stir in the scientific world, both at home and abroad, Eads was a very well-known engineer. In thatsame year a visit to Europe for his health's sake gave him theopportunity to interview a French steel company, through whom he met afamous bridge-builder, and was led to examine the piers of the bridgethen being constructed at Vichy; and it was there that he found his newideas for caissons. Going home, by way of England, he explained hisplans to the engineers there, and was by them proposed as a member ofthe Royal Society. Even at home, in his own adopted State, he was notwithout recognition; for in 1872 the University of Missouri conferredupon him the honorary degree of LL. D. From the general of engineers hereceived a request for suggestions for improvements in guns; and fromhis work on the subject of Naval Defenses it is plain that his mindstill found time to run on this favorite topic. 

In 1874 the bridge was finished. After it had satisfactorily stood thesevere tests put upon it, it was formally opened on the 4th of July. The celebrations of that day were the first public outburst of approvalgiven to Eads's work. And to-day the strong and graceful bridge standsas his most beautiful and lasting monument. And as even the greattornado of 1896 was unable to do the piers any serious damage, they arelikely to last indefinitely, and thus make the bridge "endure, " as itsbuilder said, "as long as it is useful to man. "

To Saint Louis it has been so useful that while on the one hand thegrowth of the city was the cause of its being built, on the other ithas been one great cause of the continued growth and prosperity of thecity. But it had even broader results than that. "It made a radicalchange in the conditions of transportation East and West, and it madepossible the Memphis bridge and the future New Orleans bridge. "

And in another direction yet it is peculiarly important. Inbridge-building it marks an era, not only because of its strength andbeauty and the daring of its design, but also because of its manylabor-saving devices, the inventions of a thoroughly practical mind. Adistinguished engineer calls it "a great pioneer in the art of sinkingdeep foundations and building spans over wide stretches of space, thatastonished in its construction the entire civilized world. " London"Engineering" chose it, while building, as preëminently the "mosthighly developed type of bridge;" and says, "In that work the alliancebetween the theorist and the practical man is complete. " In Eads itfinds its long-sighed-for dream, combining the highest powers of modernanalysis with the ingenuity of the builder. 

IV

THE JETTIES

The Mississippi River is a great antimonopolist. As more and morerailways have been built it has been less and less used. And yet, because it drains almost every corner of a valley which comprises overone third of the whole United States, it affords means oftransportation to an immense area; and since it cannot be controlled byany one company or group of companies, its freight rates can hardly bearbitrarily fixed. Still, so long as there are impediments to its freenavigation in the shape of floods and bars, it cannot be depended onfor shipping, and the magnificent opportunities it should offer tocommerce are lessened. The vastest river system in the world, it showsin its various parts great contrasts. One large tributary flowing fromthe Alleghanies, one from the Rockies, one from the north, others fromthe southwestern plains, are each able to contribute their variousproducts of grain, lumber, cattle, cotton, fruits, and so on. Somebranches freeze every winter; others never do. Some are clear, otherssilt-bearing. From about Cairo it flows southward through the greaterdelta, or land built up by its own action in ages past, and in all thispart of its course both banks and bottom are of yielding alluvion. Forsome hundreds of miles "the crookedest of great rivers, " it variesfrequently in width and velocity and is full of shoals; then forhundreds more, though uniform in width, it often rises higher than itsshores, and is confined in artificial levees, which it continuallybreaks down. Finally, below New Orleans, growing more sluggish, anddividing into several mouths, or "passes, " it wanders through tracts ofwaste marsh-lands into the gulf, which it colors brown for milesaround. Blocking the end of each shallow mouth there was formerly asand-bar; and these obstructions to navigation were the despair of theriver commerce, and no less the despair of the government in itsattempts to remove them. 

Every one interested in trade or shipping realized what a very serioushindrance to the usefulness of the Mississippi these choked-up mouthswere, but no one realized it better than Eads. Understanding that thegreat valley is capable of supporting 400, 000, 000 people, and intent ondoing all in his power for good, even before he had completed thebridge he was studying the problem of opening the river. Itsimprovement and the welfare of its millions of people were cherishedobjects of his life. For some men one great undertaking at a time isenough, but Eads's energies were such that his works overlapped oneanother. It is hard to see how one man can have time, even if he hasbrains, to do all he did. But apparently he never lived an idle day. The bridge, with its many extraordinary solutions of new problems, madeits builder's permanent reputation. At the particular request of WestPoint he had supplied that institution with writings, diagrams, andmodels. And so far afield had his fame spread that on one of his manytrips abroad, he made plans, at the request of the Sultan's grandvizier, for an iron bridge over the Bosphorus. A change in viziers, however, prevented its being built. 

It seems as if the river-mouth problem had not always been sodifficult. Still, Eads showed that the bars were inevitable; and it isprobably only because, with the growing population and trade of thecentral States, the need for an outlet was greater, that the problemseemed more complicated. Moreover, ocean vessels were increasing insize and draught, which also made an adequate channel more desirable. Although the blockade had forced the construction of several expensivelines of railway, yet it was impossible to carry all the products ofthe valley by rail. Millions of dollars' worth of merchandise weredelayed at the bars. As early as 1726 attempts had been made to deepenthe channels through the river's mouths by harrowing. But the firstgovernment effort was in 1837, when an appropriation was made for asurvey and for dredging with buckets. Again in 1852 anotherappropriation was made; and a board, appointed by the War Department, recommended, --

 1. Stirring up the bottom. 

 2. Dredging. 

 3. If both these methods failed, the construction of parallel jetties "five miles in length, at the mouth of the South West Pass, to be extended into the gulf annually, as experience should show to be necessary. "

 4. "Should it then be needed, the lateral outlets should be closed. "

 5. Should all these fail, a ship canal might be made. 

Dredging by stirring the bottom was tried, and produced a depth ofeighteen feet. Three years later this depth had entirely disappeared. In 1856 an appropriation was entered into, but the jetties were nevercompleted. Later than that dredging was tried again. Up to 1875 morethan eighteen feet of depth had never been obtained, and even thatcould not be steadily preserved. Channels, opened in low water, werequickly filled up with sediment in high water, and sometimes a severestorm would wash in enough sand from the gulf to undo the result ofmonths of dredging. 

As early as 1832 a ship canal near Fort Saint Philip, which should cutthrough the river bank out to the gulf, had been planned, and thissolution had been approved of by the Louisiana legislature. That ideahad been revived from time to time. And there had also more than oncebeen new recommendations made for jetties, which by narrowing thechannel should deepen it. Finally Congress ordered surveys and plansfor the canal, and then appointed a board not only to report on them, but also to ascertain the feasibility of improving the channel of oneof the natural outlets of the river. In 1874 this board reported infavor of the canal, and against the idea of jetties, which, in itsopinion, could hardly be built, could not be maintained, and would beexcessively costly. 

This, then, was the situation when Eads appeared on the scene:"scratching and scraping" were going on in South West Pass, but weredoing little real and no lasting good; the government engineers haddeclared themselves in favor of a canal; and though in some quartersjetties had been advocated, scarcely any one thought they could bebuilt, or that if they were they would last, or that they would do anygood. Eads, however, understood the river like a book, and he hadstudied this particular subject. He now came forward publicly, offeringnot only to build and to maintain jetties which would insure atwenty-eight foot channel, but to do all this for less than half thecost the board had estimated, and on a contract which should providefor his being paid only in case he succeeded. From this remarkableoffer his own confidence in his plans may be inferred. A purpose whichhe had reasoned out as practical became an inspiration to him whichnothing could shake, for his courage equaled his convictions. 

But so bold was his proposition that he was considered a wildenthusiast. Never at a loss to solve any problem, again, as when heplanned the bridge, he undertook to do what was commonly held to beimpossible. Of course, all the backers of the canal scheme opposed himbitterly. New Orleans was of that faction. Saint Louis, on the otherhand, upheld him because of his personal popularity and his signalsuccess with the bridge. The army engineers were against him as a civilengineer. Thus the controversy was sectional, personal, andprofessional. Up to this time the government had invariably intrustedall works of river and harbor improvement to the military engineers;and to hand over the most important one it had ever undertaken to aprivate citizen, and to permit him to apply a method that had just beencondemned in a report signed by six out of seven of the mostdistinguished army engineers, met with decided opposition. So thegovernment hesitated. Certainly this was a proposal to make themconsider, promising, as it did, an open river mouth, at a cost muchlower than that of the canal, and in case of failure leaving the totalloss to fall upon the contractor. Besides, several eminent civilengineers supported Eads's theory. The House, nevertheless, passed thecanal bill; but the Senate, more thorough, after calling Eads and twoof his principal opponents to state their views before a committee, passed a bill appointing a commission to reconsider the entire subjectonce more. The discussion before the Senate committee was one of thecrises in Eads's life. The fate of the jetty enterprise hung on theoutcome of it. Fortunately for himself and for the good of the country, he was a most magnetic and persuasive man. His theories and argumentswere sound and logical, his experience of the river was vast; andbeyond 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 thefar-reaching importance of the question of river-mouth improvement, itsmembers decided to go to Europe to inquire into the matter. About thesame time, and for the same purpose, Eads also went abroad, and whilethere 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 servedonly to strengthen his confidence in his own plans. When he returnedhome, there had been a noteworthy change in public sentiment. Thoughthere still remained many either prejudiced or honest enemies to hisplan, and although the newspapers were still noisy with their cheap andignorant opposition, the country at large and Congress were inclined toaccept the offer, which promised them so much at no risk at all. 

The commission, returning too from Europe, where it had made as carefulinvestigations as those of Eads, reported, by a majority of six to one, in favor of trying jetties in the South Pass. This pass, the smallestof the three mouths, had a depth of only eight feet on its bar, and hadbesides a shoal at its head. The South West Pass, the one which Eadshad proposed to use, is not only two or three times as big, both inwidth and in volume of water, but it had fourteen feet on the bar, andno shoal at its head. Eads argued and implored with all his strength tobe allowed to use the larger pass, as the only one adequate to thedemands of commerce; and so convincing were his reasons that the Housepassed a bill which called for jetties in the larger pass. But theSenate, again more conservative, was cautious in this experiment, andinsisted on the small pass. Finally, the bill went through, and thegrant was made for the improvement of South Pass. And notwithstandingthe considerable difference in size, as well as preliminary conditionsaltogether less promising than in the pass Eads had asked for, still, the depth of thirty feet was to be obtained, --the same result underharder circumstances. The payment promised, however, was not increasedwith the difficulty; but on the contrary was to be a good deal lessthan the estimate of the commission. The terms, which required certainspecified depths and widths of channel to be obtained and thenmaintained during twenty years, were so arranged that Eads should notreceive any part of his payment till after the work covered by thatpart had been finished and approved. 

Hard as these conditions were, they were based on his own proposal, andhe was glad even on such terms to undertake the great work he hadlonged to do. He at once busied himself in raising money for beginningthe Jetties, and here again his peculiar talents helped him. One of hisfriends has said, "His powers of persuasion, his charm of address, andthe magnetism of his personality opened the hearts and purses ofwhomever he pleaded with in support of his engineering devices. He wasa most lovable man. " Moreover, he was an excellent business man. He hadindeed a marvelous faculty for obtaining funds with which to carry onhis works; and in that time of financial distress such a faculty wasvery 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 ariver can carry is in direct proportion to its velocity. When, for anyreason, the current becomes slower at any special place, it drops partof its burden of sediment at that place, and when it becomes fasteragain it picks up more. Now, one thing that makes a river slower is anincrease of its width, because then there is more frictional surface;and contrariwise, one of the things that make it faster is a narrowingof its width. Narrow the Mississippi then, at its mouth, said Eads, andit will become swifter there, and consequently it will remove its softbottom by picking up the sediment (of which it will then hold muchmore), and by carrying it out to the gulf, to be lost in deep water andswept away by currents; and thus, he said, you will have your deepchannel. In other words, if you give the river some assistance bykeeping its current together, it will do all the necessary labor andscour 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 wereactually ignorant enough to deny that the velocity of water had anyconnection with its sediment-carrying power. Even if the narrowingprocess should happen to give a channel through the present bar, theysaid, a new one would presently form beyond, and so the jetties wouldhave to be extended every year. 

However, Eads had his contract and his backers and his ideas and hisfaith in them; and he set to work on the little pass. The actual deltaof the Mississippi consists of nothing but water, marsh, and some sandysoil bearing willows. At the sea end of South Pass Eads extended thelow banks out over the bar, by driving rows of guide-piles and sinkingwillow mattresses close alongside them on the riverside. The mattresseswere sunk in tiers, and each tier was weighted well with rock, put inas soon as each mattress was in position. As usual he invented many ofthe requisite mechanical appliances and contrivances himself, andgenerally such good ones that his methods came to take the place ofearlier ones. The South Pass was not only the smallest and shallowestof the mouths, but it was besides more difficult than the other two inhaving a bar at its head as well as at its sea end. And although by hiscontract Eads was not required to remove that bar, by the exigencies ofthe 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 twoparallel banks, the jetties proper. The scheme was always to force theriver 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 alreadyexplained, is exceedingly simple. Eads never pretended to haveoriginated this idea. He had studied many jetties in Europe. He had hadthe eye to see that they could be adapted to the Mississippi, and theskill to adapt them. For simple as the bald theory is, there was needof the nicest appreciation of laws and forces in applying it, and theresult has been called the greatest engineering feat ever accomplished. The problem of making the quantity of water needed run _up_ into thesmallest pass "through a narrow, artificially contracted channel, located immediately between two great natural outlets, "--this problembeing complicated by many "occult conditions, "--has been called, by nomean engineer, perhaps the most difficult problem ever dealt withsuccessfully. "There is no instance, indeed, in the world where such avast volume of water is placed under such absolute and permanentcontrol 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 seemsperhaps more marvelous than the mere bending of nature's forces toserve the ends of man. In Eads the power to do both existed. 

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

None the less the storm of detraction continued. There were enoughdifficulties to meet without this, but none of them was met moreforcibly. It was never Eads's way to attack other people in a maliciousspirit, for he was never jealous; nor did he often deign to answerpurely personal attacks. But in defense of his undertakings, to protectthem and the people who had put money into them, he was ready to fight. His defense commonly took the form of criticism of his critics, and insuch writing his pen was decidedly trenchant. Probably no man everincurred more foolish criticism, and probably none ever pointed outmore plainly how foolish it was. Even "the ablest of his adversariesconfessed themselves afraid of his pen. " Besides this parrying ofattack, he was continually writing and talking to show the simplicityand feasibility of his method; and one man phrased what it is likelymany exemplified, that a few minutes' conversation with Eads had donemore to convert him to the Jetties than any amount of writing and oftalking with other people could have done. Always modest andunassuming, he was so thoroughly in earnest that he convinced others byhis own conviction. 

Never was a man less afraid to work. Years before, in the diving-belldays, he had set himself the precedent of never asking an employee todo what he himself would fear to do. And, on the other hand, he did nothesitate to ask an employee to do as much work as he himself would havedone. His former confidential clerk has told me that sometimes, afterevenings of discussion, Eads on starting to bed, perhaps at midnight, would say to him, "Now, have that figured out for me in the morning, "which meant three or four hours of scrupulous figuring or writing to bedone by eight the next morning. 

Undoubtedly he could not have worked so hard as he did himself had henot been able to throw aside his cares and problems when he was notactively engaged with them. A very sociable man, he liked not only tobe with people, but to be making them enjoy themselves. Thus he wasboth generous and jovial. No one loved more to give presents; no oneknew more droll stories and more poetry. Nor was his joviality by anymeans a descent; for not only before royalty was he dignified, but inthe most democratic assembly. His was not, however, a forbiddingdignity. Simple-hearted as a child, he was fond of children, and theywere fond of him. 

Of course, he kept up his miscellaneous reading. He was speciallydevoted to poetry; and loved not only to recite verse upon verse aloud, but also to read to his friends and associates. As usual, hisenthusiasm spread to others. One old lady has told me that she neverhad thought much of poetry till she heard him read it. Burns and EdwinArnold and Tennyson were favorites; and there is a letter written byEads to Tennyson, apparently to send him a clipping in which the onewas described reciting from the other's poems. Eads excuses himself forintruding with his tribute, and remarks that both of them have builtworks destined to outlive their authors. He says it quite modestly andcandidly, "as equal comes to equal; throne to throne. "

Yet despite the confidence of their builder, despite his cheerfulness, the Jetties were not getting along well. To be sure, they were steadilydeepening the channel, and thereby proving to all ingenuous persons whowere undeceived that jetties were what had long been needed, and thatthey should be helped along and finished. But the Jetties were situatedfar off in a remote marshland where few people saw them; consequentlynearly everybody was either deceived or was disingenuous. People whohad no business to interfere did interfere. Every hitch was shoutedabroad, every success was concealed or twisted. Concrete difficultieswere enormous. Sudden storms at just the wrong time delayed and undidthe work. The need for more money was pressing, and it could beborrowed only at exorbitant rates of interest. The newspapers wereclamoring that the rash experiment was a failure; and though, ofcourse, it was not a failure, still it might have fallen through, whenone day the Cromwell liner, Hudson, drawing over fourteen feet ofwater, came in through the Jetties, and they were saved. 

Although the prestige of the undertaking was thus established, Eadsrealized that his contract with the government was too severe. Not thathe asked to be paid beforehand for his work, but he did ask to be paidas the work was actually done. So evident were his energy, skill, andgood faith that Congress promptly voted him an advance of a milliondollars. It also sent a commission to inspect and to report on theprogress and efficiency of the works. This commission, while reportingfavorably, advised against any further advance payments. But Congress, nevertheless, voted him three-quarters of a million more. It is saidthat this is the only instance where the government has voted money toan individual in advance of the specific terms of his agreement. Moreover, his contract was re-arranged so as to be less oppressive. 

It has been said that if Eads had failed with the Jetties he would notonly have destroyed his reputation, but he would have been abeggar, --though, some one added, he would still have deservedeverlasting gratitude for his efforts and sacrifices. And now he hadalready succeeded in changing the little pass into a grand channel ofcommerce sufficient for the largest shipping that visited New Orleans. Yet the violent opposition and the calumnies still continued. There wasa wonderful persistency in the false reports which came from bitteropponents who would not be convinced. The foolishness and ignorance oftheir arguments are almost incredible. But however foolish, they had tobe disproved; and Eads set himself patiently to work to point out theerrors in logic and in physics; and in doing so he wrote what those whoknow call one of the greatest works on river hydraulics. 

While there were so many men's hands against Eads, it is pleasant torecord that there were also many for him. It was the "ScientificAmerican" which first suggested his name for the presidency. Itadvocated him as a fearless, honest, and forceful man; but the peculiarcompliment in it was that this was a technical paper that upheld him. The proposal was repeated in many newspapers, but Eads had no moreintention now than ever of going into politics. He knew in what line hecould do most for his country, and had an ambition rather to be asupremely useful engineer than to be president. 

Another of his admirers was the late Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II. , who, after a visit to the Jetties, first tried to persuade Eads to goto Brazil to do some very important work for him, and who then, failingthat, sent him a personal letter asking him to recommend an engineer. And he engaged the one whom Eads recommended. 

In 1879, a little over four years from the time the Jetties were begun, the United States inspecting officer there reported the maximum depthof thirty feet and the required width and depths throughout thechannel. Thereupon all the remainder of the price agreed was paid overto Eads, excepting a million dollars, which was kept, at interest, as aguarantee, during twenty years' actual maintenance of the channel. Omitting from the count every day of deficient channel, these twentyyears are now (1900) almost over; the results in the channel and in thepart of the gulf just beyond the Jetties have been precisely andentirely what the projector of the works predicted when he began them. The bar has never formed again. The Jetties themselves, so far fromhaving to be lengthened, are shorter than they were originallydesigned. In a word, the sole legitimate objection that can be made tothem is that they do not furnish a great enough depth. Of course theyfurnish the required depth, and as great a depth undoubtedly as canpossibly be had in the little South Pass. Ships, however, now draw morewater than they did twenty-five years ago, and a still deeper channelis needed. The best proof of the success of the present one is that thegovernment is preparing to apply the same plan to the big South WestPass, which Eads begged to open and was not allowed to. It is said thatin that pass he would have produced thirty feet in one year. Butnothing is more useless to discuss than what might have been. What Eadshas accomplished with his Jetties is certain. 

One result of his achievement was a quick improvement in prices. Everyacre, mill, farmhouse in the whole of the Mississippi Valley wasincreased in value by the impetus which the open river-mouth gave tocommerce. New Orleans rose from the eleventh to the second export cityin the country. Consequently there was a great increase in the numberof lines of ships going there, and in their tonnage. And as a result ofthat there was a rapid increase in railway facilities. In twenty yearsfrom the commencement of the Jetties there was a gain of one hundredper cent. In the total commerce of New Orleans, nearly all of it due tothese works. This boom has, despite the marvelous multiplication ofrailways, preserved the river traffic; and the river traffic, asalways, has by competition lowered freight rates. The effect has spreadto remote districts; and by this reduction in rates and prices there isno doubt that the Jetties have made living cheaper on the Atlanticseaboard as well as in the Mississippi Valley. 

Even more: in another way they have made living cheaper. Thehalf-rail-and-half-water route from the Pacific coast to New York viaNew Orleans, which the Jetties first made possible, forced thetranscontinental railways to cut down their time for shipping freightover one half. The tonnage by this newer route has increasedenormously, and its competition has affected commerce by reducing allrates from the Mississippi Valley and the West and the Pacific slope tothe Atlantic seaboard and to Europe. As a consequence bread has beenmade cheaper to all the great populations that require the foodproducts of the central zone and the Pacific slope. 

Another very different but curious change is probably largely due tothe Jetties. Before their construction only very light-draught shipscould safely reach New Orleans; but it was so favorite a cotton portthat many owners would build vessels of unusually light draught, inorder 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 asit became known over the shipping world that New Orleans was now opento deep-draught vessels, a great many new ones were built. Thus theJetties, as much as any other cause, brought in the era of great ships. 

It has been calculated from statistics, which it is not necessary togive here, that the annual saving to producers of the MississippiValley brought about by the fall of rates, the saving in marineinsurance, and the saving in time, due to the Jetties, is $5, 000, 000;and it is furthermore calculated that the annual money value of theJetties to the people of the country at large is, by a veryconservative estimate, $25, 000, 000. 

Even the Jetties, however, were not the end of Eads's efforts towardthe improvement of the Mississippi. For several years before theircompletion he had been delivering addresses urging the application ofthe same system to the entire alluvial basin of the river from the gulfto Cairo. People were in despair as to what to do to prevent thebreaking of the levees (the results of which are as "terrible to thedwellers on those flats as the avalanche to people who live on thesides of steep mountains"), and the distress and prostration created bythe awful spring floods. Most people thought there were two possibleremedies, --to build more and higher levees, and to drain off some ofthe volume of the river through the Louisiana bayous. But Eads insistedthat the requisite move was to reduce the excessive width of certainstretches of the river with willow mattresses; by uniformity of widthto produce uniformity of depth, and consequently uniformity of current. This would facilitate the discharge of floods, and would tend to lessenthe need of any levees, whereas drawing off any of the volume of water, he said, would increase the elevation of its surface slope, and thusnecessitate higher levees. 

His arguments on the question are clear and forcible; and it is likelythat his plan, if carried out, would solve the important question ofthe Mississippi. But enough money to try it thoroughly has never beenappropriated; and so little effect has patching had, that at this veryday there are still advocates of the scheme of drawing off some of thewater, --a scheme which Eads blasted years ago. 

In 1879 the Mississippi River Commission was created, consisting of onecivilian and six military and civil engineers, of whom Eads was one. But for him the government would not have undertaken, at any rate atthat time, its very comprehensive system of river improvement, foundedprimarily on his theory. Besides giving a regular, deepened channel, and putting an end to overflows, he contended that his system wouldreclaim about 30, 000 square miles of rich alluvial lands subject toinundation. For two years he served on this commission: for many yearsbefore he had been working and fighting for the same grandresult, --grand though almost fruitless. "He had no selfish interest tosubserve" in this; "no contract to execute; nothing himself to gain. "But when, on returning from a trip to Europe, he found that the workwas no longer being carried on as he thought it should be, he resignedfrom the commission. Deploring the wrong methods used, he still wasmost deeply interested in this great work up to the time of his death. If, some day, the Mississippi is conquered, it will doubtless bethrough the means he pointed out. 

V

THE SHIP-RAILWAY

When the Jetties were finished and paid for, Eads found himself in avery good situation. Not only was his bold scheme proved to be acomplete success, but it had in the end paid him well; and he waspromised still further payment for maintaining his works twenty yearslonger. His reputation was world-wide. He was now fifty-nine years old. Five years later, in 1884, he went to live in New York. It is not hardto imagine why so busy a man wished to be more in the centre of things, though, for that matter, he had not for some years past spent much ofhis time at home. There was too much to make him travel. Besides thefrequent voyages which he was ordered to take for the sake of hishealth, --and which, as he was a very bad sailor, he said were realmedicine, --he was in demand here and there, in places miles apart, forprofessional services; and then, too, he visited many engineering worksin various remote lands, --river improvements, docks, the Suez Canal. Itwas not alone that his curiosity was always healthy, but also that hiseducation--the broad, useful education that he gave himself--was neverended. 

We have seen how he refused to go to Brazil. He was also wanted atJacksonville, Florida, where the citizens called him in 1878 to examinethe mouth of the Saint John's River, and to report on the practicabilityof deepening the channel through the bar with jetties. He went there, and, after a personal examination, presented a very elaborate report. In 1880 the governor of California had requested him to act asconsulting engineer of that State, and he accordingly visited theSacramento River, and reported upon the plans for the preservation ofits channel and the arrest of débris from the mines. In 1881 he wasconsulted by the Canadian Minister of Public Works on the improvementof the harbor of Toronto, which he also examined. This was the firstinstance in which the Canadian government had ever employed an Americanengineer. When he was in Mexico, the government there asked him forreports on the harbors of Vera Cruz and Tampico and suggestions fortheir improvement. Although he did not examine these two harborspersonally, he drew up plans on surveys furnished by engineers whom hesent there; and the work which has since been carried out after hisinstructions has proved eminently satisfactory. Again, it was thepeople of Vicksburg who sent for him to tell them how to better theirharbor; and at another time he was consulted about the Columbia Riverin Oregon and about Humboldt Bay. In 1885 the Brazilian Emperor made asecond attempt to secure his services for an examination of the RioGrande del Sul, but ill health and pressing business prevented hisacceptance of the offer; nor was he able to undertake the examinationof the harbor of Oporto requested by the Portuguese government. Itseems superfluous to say that all the reports he did make "wereexhaustive and eminently instructive in their treatment of the subjectsdiscussed. "

Perhaps the two most important professional cases submitted to him werethose in 1884 on the estuary and bar of the Mersey River and onGalveston Harbor. In the case of the Mersey he was called in, at thesolicitation of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board of Liverpool, tosettle a dispute. Appearing before a committee of the House of Lords, he gave his testimony as to the effect which the proposed terminalworks of the Manchester ship canal would have upon the estuary of theMersey and the bar at Liverpool. "He brought to the solution of thisquestion that same keen insight into hydraulics and the same closeapplication that had made him so successful in this country. " He showedso plainly what would inevitably be the deleterious results of theproposed plans that the committee decided against them. Subsequentlythey were changed to conform to his suggestions. For this report hereceived £3500, said to have been the largest fee ever paid to aconsulting engineer. 

In the Galveston case, the same year, he was requested, not only by thecity but by the state legislature, to formulate a plan and to take acontract from the United States government for improving that harbor. The government had already been carrying on works there for severalyears and accomplishing nothing. Indeed, it was the jetty method--bythis time more highly thought of than ten years before--which was beingattempted, but not in proper form. Eads, after long and careful studyof the situation, made a plan, which he offered to carry out onconditions very similar to those adopted in the case of the MississippiJetties, but Congress was not willing to grant the contract. Sincethen, however, the works there have been altered according to hissuggestions, and have consequently been more successful. 

For a good many years, owing to the weakness of his lungs and to otherillness, Eads had not only had to travel much for his health, but totake special care of himself generally; and yet, to judge from thefollowing account, in the first person, of how he had spent the year1880, it seems that his wondrous energy had not failed: "I inspectedthe River Danube about 800 miles of its course; and investigated thecause and extent of the frightful inundation at Szegedin, in Hungary, which involved an examination of 150 miles of the Theiss River. I alsoexamined the Suez Canal, to familiarize myself more thoroughly with thequestion of a ship canal across the American isthmus, having previouslyvisited the Amsterdam ship canal and the one at the mouth of the RiverRhone. As a member of the Mississippi River Commission I also aided inperfecting the plans for the improvement of that river, and thepreparation of its report now under consideration before Congress. Asconsulting engineer of the State of California I made a thoroughinspection of the Sacramento River, to consider the best method ofrepairing the injury to its navigation caused by the hydraulic miningoperations there, and submitted a lengthy report upon it. On my wayback I visited the wonders of the Yellowstone Park, crossing the RockyMountains in that excursion six different times. Within this time Ihave thrice visited the Jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi, besides my visit to the city of Mexico, Tehuantepec, and Yucatan. .. . Ihave also, at the request of the mayor and council of Vicksburg, twicevisited that city during the last year, to examine its harbor with aview to its improvement. "

In 1884 Eads received perhaps the most distinguished honor of hiscareer--the award of the Albert Medal. As it came only two or threemonths after the report on the Mersey, it was undoubtedly due to thatas its immediate cause, although the Jetties were almost specificallynamed as the reason for this honor, --and Eads had not by any meanslacked even earlier appreciation in England. Three years before, at ameeting of the British Association, he had been urged, nay pressed, todeliver an impromptu address on his works, both completed andprojected. Nevertheless, it was not until after the Mersey report thatthe Albert Medal was conferred upon him. This medal, founded in 1862 inmemory of the Prince Consort, is awarded annually by the Society forthe Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. It was in Eads'scase awarded "as a token of their appreciation of the services he hadrendered to the science of engineering, " to the engineer "whose workshave been of such great service in improving the water communicationsof North America, and have thereby rendered valuable aid to thecommerce of the world. " He was the second American citizen and thefirst native-born American to receive this medal. 

Of course he belonged to many scientific organizations. He was a memberof the Engineers Club of Saint Louis, and for two years president ofthe Academy of Science there; he was also a member of the AmericanGeographical Society, of the Institution of Civil Engineers, GreatBritain, and of the British Association, and of the Society for theEncouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; a fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science; and a member, fellow, and for a year vice-president of the American Society of CivilEngineers. 

He was now a person whose return from Europe, with plans for riverimprovement, and news about a fresh engineering scheme, was an item inthe small as well as the large newspapers. For, since the Jetties werefinished, he had a new scheme, --a decidedly new one it seemed to mostpeople, --though, as formerly, he made no pretense of having originatedthe idea. Instead of resting content, now that he was almostsixty, --rich, and honored, and frail, --instead of resting content onhis laurels of the gunboats, the Bridge, the Jetties, he was as activeas ever, with the hope of opening more roads to commerce andprosperity. The publication of the proceedings of De Lesseps'sInteroceanic Canal Congress in 1879 gave Eads an opportunity topropose, in a letter to the New York "Tribune, " his own project forspanning the isthmus. The Tehuantepec route from the Gulf of Mexico tothe Pacific would be, in the general lines of travel, about 2000 milesshorter than the Panama route, or 1500 miles shorter than theNicaragua. And it was at Tehuantepec that Eads proposed building, not acanal, but a ship-railway. The proposition was astounding. It certainlysuggested very picturesque visions of transportation; but at firstsight it did not sound very practicable. However, Eads held that itpresented six great and purely practical advantages: First, it could bebuilt for much less than the cost of a canal. Secondly, it could bebuilt in one quarter of the time. Thirdly, it could, with absolutesafety, transport ships more rapidly. Fourthly, its actual cost couldbe more accurately foretold. Fifthly, the expense of maintaining itwould be less than for a canal. Sixthly, its capacity could be easilyincreased to meet future requirements. 

In 1880 he appeared before a committee of the House, and in reply to DeLesseps, who was advocating the Panama Canal, he stated his plan forthe ship-railway. A few months later he went to Mexico, where thegovernment gave him, besides a very valuable concession for buildingthe ship-railway, its cordial assistance in his surveys. It was at thistime that Mexico requested his aid in improving its two harbors, andwhen he returned home, sent him in the Mexican man-of-war, theIndependencia. The next year he proposed to Congress to build theship-railway at his own risk, and to give the United States specialprivileges, which had been arranged for in his Mexican charter, provided the government would, as he proved the practicability of hisplan by actual construction and operation, guarantee part of theship-railway's dividends. Although this arrangement would have laid aslittle risk on the government as the jetty arrangement had, it was notaccepted. 

Strange and even unnatural as the idea itself appeared, it was adaptedfrom perfectly simple ship-railways already in existence and insatisfactory use. Science, he said, could do anything, howevertremendous, if it had enough money. In the magnified form contemplated, the plan provided for a single track of a dozen parallel rails, and acar with 1500 wheels. On this car was to be a huge cradle into whichany ship might be floated and carefully propped. The car having thenbeen hauled up a very slight incline out of the water, and monster, double-headed locomotives hitched to it, by gentle grades it and theship were to be drawn across to the other ocean a hundred miles away, where the ship could be floated again. To obviate any chance ofstraining the ships, all curves were to be avoided by the use ofturn-tables. 

Nevertheless, many people believed that such a journey would strain aship so much that it would never float afterwards. On the other hand, there is so imposing an array of names of distinguished engineers, shipbuilders, and seamen, who declared that the plan was feasible inevery particular, that it is hard to think they could all have beenmistaken in thus supporting the leading engineer of the day. It mayeasily be supposed that every other imaginable and unimaginableobjection was raised, but to one and all Eads gave an answer thatsounded conclusive. 

As usual he was willing to back up his ideas with money, and he had themost elaborate surveys made, and remarkable models prepared to show theworking of the ship-railway. He preached this new crusade of sciencewith his customary vigor. So many men were financially interested inthe project, or were ready to be, that it would at all events have beentested, had not its leading spirit, the very life of it, died. 

Even though he was at the same time engaged in investigations soimportant as those at the Mersey and at Galveston, Eads devoted thelast six years of his life mainly to this daring and tremendousenterprise. In 1885, after obtaining from the Mexican government amodification of his concession, guaranteeing one third of the netrevenue per annum, he had a bill introduced in Congress, whereby, whenthe ship-railway should be entirely finished and in operation, theUnited States was to guarantee the other two thirds. Though this billwas favorably reported, Eads finally decided to withdraw it, and to askafter all for a simple charter, which would doubtless have beengranted. During those six years there was perhaps not another man inthe country who was so able to persuade others of the scientific, financial, commercial soundness of his projects. If, more than any oneelse, he could make a scheme appeal, it was not that it was in anysinister sense a scheme, but because his tact and his address werepleasing, his reputation firmly grounded for honesty and common-senseas well as for thorough scientific knowledge, so that his enthusiasmwas contagious. His enemies might call him a lobbyist, but his solemeans of persuasion were the soundness of his views, the clearness ofhis arguments, and the fervor of his wish to benefit his country. 

For this undertaking, as for his previous ones, Eads invented manydevices. All in all he held nearly fifty patents from the United Statesand England for useful inventions in naval warfare, bridge foundationsand superstructure, dredging machines, navigation, river and harborworks, and ship-railway construction. 

In January, 1887, when his bill was to come up, he went to Washington. He was in such poor health that he was not able to remain there, but onhis doctor's advice he went with his wife and one daughter to Nassau. While sick there, he was still at work on improvements for hisship-railway. He was wont to say to his intimate friends, "I shall notdie until I accomplish this work, and see with my own eyes great shipspass from ocean to ocean over the land. " But in Nassau it was soonknown that he was dying; and still he said, "I cannot die; I have notfinished my work. "

He died March 8, 1887, not quite sixty-seven years of age. No one hasfinished his work. 

 * * * * *

In any career there are three main elements of success: talent, education, work. Eads's life, like that of so many other self-made men, seems to show us that education is less important than the other two. But while it is true that he had not the formal education of anengineer, he had a certain very broad training gained in experience, and had read hard. Education, after all, is nothing but a summarymethod of teaching the lessons of life; therefore, while lessinsistent, it is often swifter than practical experience. And there isno doubt that a man like Eads would be the first to deplore a youngman's failing to appreciate its value. When he himself was young, henever supposed that he was a genius; but if he had thought this, hewould have striven to be the best-read and the best-equipped ofgeniuses; believing that though he might be mistaken about his talenthe could make sure of his culture. 

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