The immediate problem facing Lee was the fact that the Mississippi was cutting a new channel for itself that threatened “to destroy the river commerce” of Saint Louis, Missouri. Not by coincidence, General Gratiot was himself a native of Saint Louis, and his family home there overlooked the river. He not only received firsthand but also shared the fears and complaints of the good citizens of the city, some of them his own family—and also those of their representatives in the U.S. Congress, who determined the budget of the Corps of Engineers. The risk that Saint Louis might be cut off from the trade and commerce that had made it (and the Gratiot family) prosperous since 1764 was unacceptable. It was the key “transportation hub” (to use a modern phrase) of the west and the starting point of the California and Oregon trails—at any one time as many as 150 steamboats were moored along its levee on the Mississippi.
Lee’s responsibilities included not only saving the port and waterfront of Saint Louis, though that was his first priority, but removing the many snags formed by trees and branches carried downstream by the river’s current—these snags severely endangered shipping—and even “cutting a shipway” through the rapids of the Mississippi near the Missouri-Iowa border, thus making him responsible for nearly 200 miles of the river. Here was a multiple task of engineering to test the abilities of any man, not to speak of the tact needed to deal with the more prominent citizens of Saint Louis, the backbone to resist political threats and interference, and the attention to detail to ensure that every penny spent was properly accounted for. Gratiot was absolutely right to pick First Lieutenant Lee over more senior officers—Lee had the technical skills, the self-confidence, and the foresight needed for the task; and his dignity and commanding presence made him a natural figure of authority, despite his low rank, and elicited instant respect even from those who disagreed with him.
Saint Louis did not please Lee at first sight. He described it as “the dearest and dirtiest place I was ever in,” though he later came around to a more favorable opinion. His aide and companion on the long trip out to Saint Louis via Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh was Second Lieutenant Montgomery C. Meigs. A Georgian, Meigs was another of those multitalented West Point graduates, who went on to become the quartermaster general of the Union Army in the Civil War, and also supervised the building of the dome over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Lee and Meigs paused at Louisville on their journey down the Ohio River by steamboat to examine two “machine boats” for lifting stone, and a small steam launch for towing it. These had been gathered on their behalf by Captain Henry Shreve, a steamboat pioneer who had been laboring on the snags of the Missouri, the Red, and the Mississippi rivers for many years, another engineer apparently stuck in a seemingly endless and thankless task (unless one counts the fact that the city of Shreveport, Louisiana, was named after him). They then proceeded on their way toward Saint Louis.*
Lee and Meigs were obliged to wait in Saint Louis in sweltering summer heat for their small fleet to arrive. “They are the greatest people for promising and not fulfilling, that I ever saw,” Lee complained of the boatmen, with what was, for him, a rare degree of impatience. Inactivity and unpunctuality then and later on were anathema to Lee; brisk movement suited his temperament best, and would always play a large role in his approach to battle. For the moment, he was obliged to pass his time at what was, for him, the equivalent of cooling his heels: paying social calls on General Gratiot’s family and friends, and writing long letters to Mary advising her on how to bring up their children in his absence. “The improved condition of the children, which you mention,” he wrote in reply to a letter from her, “was a source of great comfort to me; and as I suppose, by this time, you have all returned to Arlington, you will be able to put them under a proper restraint. . . . Our dear little boy [Custis] seems to have among his friends the reputation of being hard to manage—a distinction not at all desirable, as it indicates self-will and obstinacy.” Like many other parents, he sought to inculcate in his children, at any rate in the boys, virtues he did not himself possess. Lee was notably lacking in “self-will,” in the sense of selfishness, but “obstinacy” was undoubtedly a strong part of his character, however much he deplored it in his first son. Once Lee tackled something, he was determined to see it through to the end, whatever contrary advice and warnings he received, and however difficult it might appear. The hallmark of Lee’s genius as a battlefield commander would be his obstinacy in circumstances that might, to almost anyone else, have urged caution or withdrawal, and he brought this same obstinacy and willpower to bear on the mighty Mississippi River in 1837 as soon as his little flotilla arrived in Saint Louis.
Having been obliged to wait over two weeks, Lee set out 350 miles upstream the moment they arrived, taking with him a group of “rivermen” recruited for their knowledge of the problems of navigation on the Mississippi. The problem to which he gave the most immediate attention was the two rocky rapids that seriously impeded navigation on the Mississippi: the first (from the south) the Des Moines Rapids, just above where the Des Moines River flows into the Mississippi, near what is now Keokuk, Iowa; and the second the Rock Island Rapids, “where the river was shallow and the riverbed was rock,” near present-day Moline, Illinois. These two hazards in the river made navigation dangerous, and expensive. When the river was high and the current was running fast, steamboats could be swept onto rocks at both rapids; and when the river was low, they were obliged to stop at Des Moines and unload their cargo into keelboats, basically large, shallow-draft barges towed by horses on the bank, to be reloaded into other steamboats moored below the rapids—a problem which helped Des Moines to prosper but which slowed down shipping and added to the cost. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of these problems in the age before decent roads or railways existed in what is now the Midwest—goods in bulk moved by river or did not move at all.
The dangers of navigation on the Mississippi were demonstrated only too clearly when Lee’s steamboat ran aground on the rocks in the Des Moines Rapids and could not be floated free because of the low water level. He had planned to survey the upper rapids at first, but with his usual ability to change his plans quickly he made the stuck steamboat his headquarters and from it organized a detailed survey of the lower rapids, then moved inland on foot to what he referred to with ironic capitals as “The City of Des Moines,” which, he found, consisted of a single log cabin containing “the Proprietor and the entire population.” Lee and Meigs bedded down on untrimmed planks (or puncheons) laid on the floor. They then moved on to the upper rapids near Rock Island, where they lodged in cabins on the deck of an old, abandoned steamboat that had been holed by the rocks and from which the engines had been removed—a perfect example of the kind of shipwreck Lee was trying to prevent.
Although previous plans for dealing with the rapids had centered on the idea of avoiding them by digging a canal that would run parallel to them, an immensely expensive project that involved building locks, Lee’s survey of the upper rapids convinced him that contrary to popular opinion a safe channel could easily be cut through both rapids—a good example of his preference for simple commonsense solutions and for facing difficulties head-on that would characterize him as a general later on. He and Meigs then journeyed back downstream to where their own steamboat had run aground, and found to their relief that the river had risen high enough to set it free. At Des Moines, Lee also found a large, colorful gathering of Chippewa Indians in their birch bark canoes and tepees “in full costume . . . with scarlet blankets & Buffalo robes and painted faces,” although neither then nor later was he as favorably impressed by the Native Americans as some other visitors to the West were. He would report jovially and without a trace of regret a couple of years later, in a letter to his friend Joseph E. Johnston, that a raiding party of Sioux had “fallen on” these Chippewa, taking “one-hundred and thirty-one scalps,” and that their chief was planning “ample revenge.” Lee was a man of his times, who regarded the Indian tribes on the fro
ntier without sentimentality, as a picturesque and occasionally dangerous nuisance rather than a tragic or romantic people doomed by encroaching progress, white settlement, and widespread contempt for their culture. Because his image is so firmly fixed in people’s minds as an elderly general with a gray beard staring toward the horizon from a horse, it is easily forgotten that Lee was well versed in the most advanced technology of his own day; although he was old-fashioned in any number of ways, he was a firm believer in progress, which did not include letting the Mississippi or the Indians run wild.
He was back in Saint Louis by October 11, and rented the second floor of a warehouse on the levee overlooking the Mississippi as his drafting office. His gift for picking the right man was already in evidence when he hired Henry Kayser, a twenty-six-year-old German-American who had studied architecture and higher mathematics at Wetzlar and Darmstadt, and who was a gifted surveyor and mapmaker. Kayser and Lee quickly developed a great respect for each other, which ripened into trust and friendship. With Kayser’s help, Lee quickly produced maps of the upper and lower rapids on the Mississippi, based on his surveys, that were not only precise but works of art, and laid out detailed plans for cutting a channel through both these navigational hazards, then proceeded to produce a beautifully rendered map of the Mississippi’s course past the city of Saint Louis.
Kayser, though a civilian, became the equivalent of Lee’s second in command and chief staff officer, and their correspondence when Lee was away from Saint Louis is amazing for Lee’s grasp of even the smallest detail, from the price of pilings and stone to the construction of floating engines to remove rocks. Modern biographers sometimes treat Lee as if he were inactive or (as one of them puts it) “lethargic,” except when called on to do battle in the Mexican War and the Civil War, but this is to misread Lee’s character—he was at all times a “body in motion,” totally committed to whatever his current job was, whether it was civil engineer, college president, or general; and while the slowness of promotion and the low pay in the army often depressed him and made him question his choice of profession, he approached everything with the same energy, imagination, capacity for detail, and determination to win with which he approached war.
His solution to the problems that were rapidly transforming Saint Louis into a landlocked city was brilliantly conceived, hugely ambitious in scale, and triumphantly successful, so much so that one Missourian later wrote, “Lee mastered the Mississippi; he sent the current back to its old channel, and the river was saved to St. Louis,” and went on to point out, as Mark Twain did in 1870, not just the immensity of the task, but the immense consequences of Lee’s success, which made possible the commercial development of whole new areas of the country and the creation of a long list of new cities: “The problem of St. Louis was the problem of the whole Mississippi Valley. The improvement of the harbor of St. Louis and the clearing of the channel was by no means of purely local benefit, for the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and the territories of Iowa and Wisconsin were vitally concerned in the results. . . . Without them the west would have remained a vast wilderness.”
Lee altered the course of American history by his vision and by his single-minded determination to bring it about, making possible the building of great cities where there had once been, at best, a few log cabins or an abandoned Indian encampment. Another observer remarked, in 1886, “The commerce thus made available has supplied the wants of the millions who have since made of the upper Mississippi and of the plains of the Red River of the North the granary of North America. Cities have sprung up which, like Minneapolis and Saint Paul, count their inhabitants by the hundreds of thousands.” Had Lee never become a hero of the Mexican War or commanding general of the Confederacy he would have deserved fame—and what is more, gratitude—for the two years he spent opening the Mississippi up at last to the hundreds of steamboats that could journey up and down the full length of the river in safety after he completed his work. His own innate modesty prevented Lee from taking pride in his achievement, or indeed from seeking the credit he deserved, but there is no doubt from his letters that it gave him a greater personal satisfaction than winning battles.
Previous attempts to save Saint Louis as a port had consisted of hiring oxcarts to carry away the sand and silt dug up by gangs of laborers, a method that was both expensive and futile—the Mississippi carried so much sediment that it swiftly created shoals and even large islands wherever there was a rock or a tree stump to impede the flow, then changed its own course to adapt to them. In Saint Louis, the river had created two substantial islands—Duncan Island and Bloody Island (the latter so called because it was a well-known place for duels)—and then shifted its main course to the east, so the deep water now ran close to the Illinois bank, while the Missouri side became shallower and shallower. Lee studied the river’s currents, and came up with the simple of idea of harnessing its immense force to cut a channel through the silt and eventually to sweep away the islands altogether.
He proposed to accomplish this by building a dam at the head of Bloody Island, and a dike running down its west side, thus moving the full force of the Mississippi’s current to the west bank, where it would carry away the silt and eventually the two islands themselves—a simple and very modern approach to the problem, as opposed to the vast program of building levees, locks, and canals that the Corps of Engineers has been pursuing from the late nineteenth century to today in the continuing struggle to make the Mississippi go where man wants it to.
Lee not only plotted out in every detail the exact way he wanted the dam and dike to be constructed, but accounted for the cost exactly: $158,554 for the entire project (about $4 million in contemporary money), a large sum for a mere first lieutenant to request, and an indication of how much trust General Gratiot and the mayor of Saint Louis had in him. To Lee’s irritation (but hardly to his surprise, given his opinion of politicians), Congress never appropriated the full sum he had requested, but even so, with $50,000 from Congress and a further $15,000 from the city of Saint Louis, “he accomplished in two years, the return of the channel to the Missouri shore . . . washed out the sand bars and deepened the harbor so that in low stages of the river there was at least 13½ feet of water over the bar.” By July 1838, “Lee had pushed Duncan’s Island a considerable distance down stream.” This, together with surveying and blasting a safe channel for shipping through the upper and lower rapids, would fully earn Lee the grandiose praise he received from the mayor of Saint Louis: “By the rich gift of his genius and scientific knowledge, Lieut. Lee brought the Father of the Waters under control.”
He and Meigs returned east in the winter of 1837: Lee to rejoin his family and to submit his report and lobby for the funds to undertake it; Meigs to be transferred elsewhere, in the best military tradition of moving a man the moment he has learned enough to be useful where he is. On the way home Lee encountered a railroad for the first time in his life—the Baltimore and Ohio had extended its tracks as far as Frederick, Maryland, and from there Lee had his first experience of riding on a train, although “the cars [still] had to be drawn by horses for a part of the distance.” Steam engines, of course, Lee was already familiar with, but the railway was something of a novelty at that time in America.
About one thing Lee was determined: when he returned to Saint Louis in the spring he would take Mary with him. Judging from her letters to friends after she had arrived there it cannot have been easy for Lee to persuade her to leave Arlington for what was, from the point of view of a Virginian grandee, a raw, primitive town in the wilderness. Even so, the Lees left their daughter Mary behind with her grandparents, and set off with their two sons Custis and William (always referred to as “Rooney”), accompanied by a slave named Kitty to look after them, on a journey of nearly five weeks, which took them from Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia: then on to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, by train; from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh by canal boat; then down the Ohio
River, pausing in Cincinnati and Louisville; and finally up the Mississippi from Cairo to Saint Louis. Lee boasted that the boys enjoyed the journey, which was probably true—what could be more exciting for small boys than a trip by railway, canal boat, and steamship?—and that Mary spent much of it taking naps; but since he also mentions the “crowding, squeezing and scrambling,” it is possible to guess that Mary was not as thrilled as her children, and that napping may have been her way of escaping from the hustle and bustle of travel and the unwelcome company of strangers. Almost a decade later, on his first visit to America, Charles Dickens, an altogether more intrepid traveler than Mary Lee, complained about the poor table manners, tobacco chewing, and constant hawking and spitting of his fellow travelers, as well as the crowding and lack of privacy on trains and river steamboats and the universal western habit of entering into conversation with total strangers as if they were lifelong friends.
Throughout their married life Lee, like many another husband, made a brave effort in letters to emphasize Mary’s enjoyment of their travels, although it is perfectly apparent that given an opportunity she preferred to stay at home in the familiar surroundings and comfort of Arlington. Her feelings about Saint Louis cannot have been improved by the discovery, once they arrived there, that the rooms Lee had supposed were rented for them were not available, still less by the news that their furniture and household goods, which were following them, had been destroyed when the steamboat on which they were being shipped had exploded (not an infrequent occurrence with early steamboats, since the American passion for speed and competition often led to overheating the boilers). They spent a month in uncomfortable temporary lodgings before Lee was able to rent part of a large mansion, originally built by William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which the Lees shared amiably enough with William Beaumont, an army surgeon, and his family.
Clouds of Glory Page 14
