A Legend of a Crossing by the Forerunner of the Engineer, James Eads—From Cajeux to Caissons
ANTHONY stared at the needle of his compass. He reversed the box and looked again. "Of course the needle points to the pole; it can't do anything else." He turned his face to the north. "Now my right hand is toward the east bank of the river; my left hand is toward the west. I have been going up the river all day." He had been following the Mississippi and he wrinkled his nose in perplexity as he made the discovery. "The sun is setting on the east bank of this Great River!"
The more he thought about it, the more he was sure. "The channel wanders so crookedly over this flat plain that the stream, whose general direction is south, must be going straight north at this particular turn in its winding!" He had guessed the right answer to the Southern riddle, "Can you name a spot where the sun sets in the east?"
The dislocated sunset had a lowering aspect. Anthony scanned the clouds with the eye of a weather prophet. "It looks like more rain. A wet moon is overhanging these lands, already quite damp enough."
Two Indians, dripping from a recent shower, were sloshing along in the mud of the bank. They signaled him. He put ashore in the funny little coracle he was using. A coracle is a fishing-tub made of a wooden frame covered with skin. It is as safe as it is slow. The French prefer it to the canoe for angling.
"Medicine-men danced all night," began the Indians. "Our old Father of Waters, the Meact-Chassippi, is angry because the white man has tried to imprison him within his own banks. All land belongs to Meact-Chassippi. He wanders over it where he wills. Who defies him must perish. He is in a rage and has come to destroy our camp. The white men who oppose him must help us."
Anthony never treated any Indian messenger carelessly. Under every flowery speech and childish demand was some vital human need. These Chickasaws were leagued with the rival English. They were bringing their warlike camps nearer and nearer to the French settlements. All the doings of the colonists and every unfriendly act of nature they construed as a good reason for criticizing or attacking the posts.
"It is easy for me to stop the Great River's flow," replied Anthony, with fine sarcasm. "I will do it after your tribe has taken all your camps back into the hills of the Chickasaw country where the Meact-Chassippi can't get you. Tell your chiefs to move away to their own high ground. Then will the inundation cease."
"We cannot return with a message. As we came the lowlands flooded themselves behind us."
"By the magic of my coracle, one of you shall go back to your Chickasaw sorcerers. If the camps come toward the Great River it will drink them up. If they go back into the hills the waters will recede," was Anthony's ultimatum. The messenger inverted the coracle upon his head and waded away to launch it. The wily medicine-men who sent him out in rising water, with the surety that he could not swim back, would use his disappearance as a cause of war against the French. In the coracle he would reappear with the promise of falling waters and the positive command to retire if they wished to keep dry.
"That outwits our Chickasaw medicine-men for the present." He smiled at the other Chickasaw, who stood ankle-deep on what was supposed to be the shore. A wide river stretched before them. Behind them was the flooded plain. As far as they could see the ground wascovered with rapidly deepening waves. Some place the bank had burst and Meact-Chassippi, old as it was, frolicked with abandon.
Once it had lived in a glacier and had come down over the plain, chiseling with knives of ice a gully through the limestone. Then in the middle of this immensely wide stone valley it had begun to make itself a soft bed of silt. From fertile hillsides and deep-loamed prairies its tributaries carried fine particles of earth in their water and dropped it as they went along the channel until there was a deposit of mud in the center of the valley much higher than the surrounding country. The old river has made itself a bed where it can overlook the valley. There it still turns and twists, with never-ending restlessness. All the banks of mud are soft. The swiftly flowing stream digs now here, now there, straightens one part of the channel, makes loops in another. It carries away whole acres from one place and, dropping them in another, changes the aspect of a neighborhood every season in the year.
As mud is piled upon the banks rank growth of grass, brush, and trees springs up to beautify and hold them. Thus they grow firmer year by year. In spring freshets, as the melting ice and heavy rains bring down high volumes of water, the southern channels are cut deeper and burrow under the banks, dig through them or rise upand tumble over them as over some big dam. Then it begins all over again to make a new bed for itself along the new channel thus formed. The old bed becomes a bayou. Nothing is certain about the Great River except the uncertainty of its next flood.
Anthony was quivering with laughter; it was so absurd to be paddling with unwebbed feet where only a duck belonged. The Indian showed no emotion of any kind. But when the jocose white man and the apathetic red one questioned what to do, both pairs of lips formed the one word, "Cajeu."
So they set to work splashing among the canes, breaking them off, laying them flat like a mat, and weaving them together with long leaves and grasses. One of these little rafts was set upon another, with the canes of the first running at right angles to canes of the other.
On this frail craft, half awash under their weight, they used their hands for oars and started for New Orleans. Their utter helplessness, like two insects on a floating leaf, did not in the least disturb them. They were doing in precarious simplicity what had often been done before. That they crossed safely was not a wonder. It was a custom. The first bridge over the Mississippi was that primitive boat, thecajeu.
In New Orleans the Chickasaw went to theauthorities and told his mission. Anthony's report of a broken bank and the rising flood gave much concern. The whole town, in a drenching rain, examined the puny walls of earth wherewith they had tried, as the Chickasaw declared, "to imprison that mighty giant, Meact-Chassippi."
In selecting a site for the town it had been necessary to find some spot that would be easy to reach by the ships coming through the Delta and also through Lake Pontchartrain. The highest place was taken, but even that could not be very high in this low flood-plain.
When the energetic citizen Dubreuil took a shovel and threw up this levee, and then dug a ditch inside to carry away the drip, he did a sensible act. The water was standing two feet deep in the houses after every freshet. Yellow fever followed all inundations.
The colony's engineer, Sieur La Tour, had ordered each householder to put a palisade around his premises and to cut a ditch outside. The levee was made higher and stronger. The assistant engineer, young Pauger, was proud of the system of defense.
"Why so serious a face, my Tony?" he asked. "Are we not protected to please you?"
Anthony could not laugh. "This will be a very wet season."
"How do you know?"
"By the way the sky lowers, the manner in which the beasts take to the uplands, by the odors in the air, and"—here he wagged his head sagely like an oldest inhabitant—"and a feeling in my bones!"
Although Pauger was a hard-headed mathematician, he had faith in such uncanny "signs" as Anthony picked up from the Indians who lived in the open. He always acted upon them seriously. "We must get permission to go up the river and show the smaller outposts our manner of making a dike," he said. "Then will they be secure against the coming freshet."
As the pirogue, which was a tree-trunk hollowed out in boat shape, was being paddled to the north, Pauger inquired: "Why do you look behind us so often, Tony? Do you see any one?"
Anthony shook his head.
"Do you hear something?"
Another negative.
"Do youalmostknow that we are being followed?"
Anthony nodded. Pauger believed a pursuer was on their trail as fully as he did that a flood was coming.
Like little fishes, they kept near shore out of the strong current. Their food and their fire-pot were in the pirogue, and they slept at night curled up in bow or stern while the boat washidden among fallen trunks which looked exactly like itself.
They could not discover the thing which stalked them—did not know whether it was man or beast, by land or water.
Still it came on, and they hid from it and fled before it as any other explorer would have done.
The few posts on the river welcomed them, listened to Pauger with respect. They agreed to begin at once, for their own sakes, to set up stockades at the points of most exposure, to heap them with dirt, to dig a moat, and to prepare for a heavy freshet.
Several times the pirogue crossed the river, which was not yet too dangerous. The French called any boat, big or little, a "water-carriage." If a hydroplane had dropped down beside these two old-time rowers they would have had no other name for even so startling a vision.
The "water-carriages" of the Mississippi have been of changing styles. The resources of the country determined their shape and power. American pioneers who followed the French took lumber from their forest, sawed it into planks by their water-driven mills, spiked and doweled it together, and built big flatboats, guided by poles, on which they loaded the products of their farms and floated down to New Orleans to sell the goods, boat and all. Thousands of flatboats at a time lined the wharves ofthe post. At the beginning of the nineteenth century steamboats, at first small and clumsy, afterward large and graceful, were going up and down the Great River, carrying undreamed-of tonnage and housing passengers in luxury as soft as the palaces of France.
Anthony and Pauger would not have believed a word of any story which foretold a steamboat or a hydroplane, yet they had absolute faith in the enemy prowling unseen.
At Fort Chartres they found the garrison already alarmed. An eddy of the rising water was beginning to eat away the peninsula which stood between the fort and the Mississippi. No engineer with definite plans for spiles, stone barriers, and dikes ever found more energetic helpers than Pauger in the folks on the Illinois.
Each day they labored on the levee. Every night some untoward accident happened to delay it. Tools were lost. Openings grew larger. The best logs rolled to the brink and floated away.
Said an Illinois chief in secret to Anthony: "The manitou of the waters is against us. He does not like to be turned from the path of his desire."
Like a flash Anthony saw the cause of their troubles. It was the Chickasaw! He had followed them from New Orleans. He was doing the damage; he was spreading dissension. That his meddling might drown the whole Illinoisnation did not deter him if he could thereby destroy the fort and its white men to propitiate his manitou.
"We must set double guards to-night. We will both watch," Anthony said to Pauger as he told his news. "The cut by the eddy is forty feet deep. If it begins to undermine the mainland the fort itself will topple in."
In the early hours, while the sentinels snored carelessly, as they had probably done every night, a dim form—silent, slow as a wraith of smoke, drifted along the center of the stockade and pried and pulled and sawed away at the last spile set like a keystone to the arch of the barricade. The engineer, with dreadful visions of his whole levee going down, ran toward the figure, firing his pistol. Anthony called, rousing the garrison to stop the fatal leak which must follow such a break.
The bullet missed the Indian. It so startled him that he lost his balance. He fell straight into the gap his own fanatic hands had made. With his body head downward in the mud he stopped the gap. Earth closed round him, the spiles settled, his bones formed the cap of the arch—the levee held.
Poor Chickasaw! Only one of many victims to the tyranny of the Great River, so bountiful, so mysterious, and so awe-inspiring!
When Anthony and the engineer had made
THE TWO MEN CLUNG DESPERATELY TO THE BRANCHES THEY HAPPENED TO BE ON AND WENT DOWN-STREAM WITH IT.THE TWO MEN CLUNG DESPERATELY TO THE BRANCHES THEY HAPPENED TO BE ON AND WENT DOWN-STREAM WITH IT
THE TWO MEN CLUNG DESPERATELY TO THE BRANCHES THEY HAPPENED TO BE ON AND WENT DOWN-STREAM WITH IT
sure that the level was not injured they did a foolish thing. Going 'way down to the Mississippi bank, they climbed a giant gnarled oak to view the flood now sweeping on in fearsome grandeur.
The tree, long undermined, chose this hour to fall. The oak—roots, earth, trunk, branches, all—dropped into the stream and whirled away. The two men clung desperately to the branches they happened to be on and went down-stream with it.
The heavy roots, like the stone tip of an arrow, went first. The boughs floated with their lightest side up. In them rode the two explorers with the speed of an express train.
They crept together as full of terror as two children might have been. They wedged themselves in secure nests among the stout old limbs. Exhausted, one watched while the other slept. Hungry, they chewed the leaf-buds. In the most dangerous of all water-carriages they bridged the stream from side to side, yet dared not try to get ashore.
From a crumbling hill a panther leaped upon their wildly hurrying craft and crouched against the trunk, mewing piteously. Afraid of the men, of the flood, and of the rocking tree, it dared not move to attack or defense.
The merciless waves at last threw them into a bayou against a turn of a bank where otherdebris was plastered, spread out like fans against the bluff.
Why is one man superior to his fellows? Why should Pauger, marooned in a brush-heap on a flooded river, tired and wet and hungry as he was, notice that the running water was dammed by the closely interlaced branches of fallen trees on either side of its channel?
They prevented its spread; so it began to dig for itself a deeper and deeper channel in the less resisting mud of the bottom. "If we were to plait branches with small limbs and strengthen such mats with heavy posts against the shores of the Delta to keep the river from spreading, then by its own force would it dig a deeper channel for itself as it goes to the sea just as this stream is doing. Such a device of branches would keep open the ship canal to the Gulf." This observation of the engineer Pauger was the beginning of the idea of those jetties which now clear the water path to the sea.
There was a boy of French extraction with the mind and spirit of the early explorers who chanced to be born in our own times. His name was James Buchanan Eads. He had the title of captain. Pauger's first hazy inspiration of the jetties Eads perfected and put into practical working use at the mouth of the Great River. He improved all the old systems of levees.
During the Civil War, the President of the United States appealed to Eads to aid the navy. In response to the country's need he invented the gunboat, forerunner of armed cruisers; built several in an incredibly short time, and sent them to thunder at the forts of Vicksburg and turn the tide of battle in favor of the Union.
He was a builder. Caissons, those large water-tight boxes within which work is done under water, were his invention. They made possible the construction of that long bridge, a triumph of engineering skill, which crosses the Mississippi at St. Louis and spans the years from our day to that hour of the flood when Anthony went from east to west on a floating tree.
Pauger was fainting under the strain of their exposed position. To encourage him Anthony said, "The post of Point Arkansas is just below here." Filling his cupped hands with water, he sent up shower after shower of mimic rain between them and the miserable, cowering beast. "Pretty pussy! Pretty pussy! Now—scat!" She backed away from the spattering water which all cats hate. As she crawled up the tangled roots she spied some patches of dry ground. In a tawny streak she leaped the chasm from the dripping tree to the knobs ahead, and disappeared.
Then Anthony, quite as a part of his day's work, stretched his half-unconscious companionon a spreading limb, detached it, and, abandoning the tree, swam down the bayou, pulling the precious load after him until he found a landing-place.
He was weak. The heavy water nearly overcame him. The landing was difficult, his companion was a dead weight. Several times on the point of sinking, he did not give up, but made the shore by supreme efforts. Taking Pauger on his back, he started for the post. The garrison saw him and came running out with welcoming shouts.
The sun was bright, the air clear, the whole happy world looked good to Anthony. He had taken part in great events and had seen many noble men whom two nations remember with gratitude. He little dreamed that in all the history of the Great River there were few explorers more heroic than he had been that day.