Raymond S. Spears

“ Science has determined well enough, as a commercial proposition, the character and limitations, the costs and profits, the facts and influences regarding the Mississippi; but it is fascinating to dream and to speculate on the things that might follow adequate development and use of the Mississippi. The impulse of turning the river's full force into American industry cannot be measured, nor its effect foreseen. ”

“ The drift of timber, the spoil of thousands of square miles of flooded lands, tears down the river, the long prongs of snags jabbing into the sides of steamboats. One rush of broken ice tore up two million dollars' worth of property by raiding down the Tennessee into the "safe" ice harbor just above Paducah, dislocating the summer traffic plans of nobody knows how many steamboat lines. ”

“ The Mississippi River as a force in the development of America has been constant and overwhelming. There is a whole literature based upon it, and from that literature have come some of the most interesting ideals and notions of the American people. For seventy years, unchallenged, a great traffic followed its gentle incline of six or eight inches to the mile. ”

“ They have fronted the most savage and desperate attacks of swirling currents and flood depths. Mattresses of willow-trees, covered by the blasted riprap of Missouri and Arkansas stone, have held firm against the boiling onslaughts of swift waters and the insidious and eternal wear of unremitting pressure. ”

“ The wealth of the Middle West, of the fifteen Western States that are appealing to the government for the profitable service of the Mississippi, is based largely on the foundation laid when ten thousand steamers plied the great river, in high water and low, before a railroad had entered its basin. Those steamboats, carrying the people, carrying their products, importing their necessities, insured to the nation the States of Missouri, lower Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Iowa, Arkansas, and Louisiana. ”

“ The service of the moment is performed when the practical demand of the hour is expressed, but the feeling of a great nation for a wonderful phenomenon, made up of ten thousand smaller phenomena, looks with fond memory and delight through the history of the mighty river, and picks its subjects for expression according to personal ideas. ”

“ In the rich region of the lower valley they have built more than two thousand miles of breastworks to hold back the spring-tide, to enable the planters of cotton and corn to continue their crop-making, though the surface of the Mississippi be on a level twenty-five feet above their soil, and nineteen feet higher than their heads. ”

“ When delegates from fifteen Western States approach the head of the Railroad Administration, and urge him to use the Mississippi more fully for freight transportation, they dwell significantly upon the commercial needs of the present moment. ”

“ More to the purpose of the present moment, the government engineers have expelled the quicksands and confined the waters so that from the vagaries of running waves of sand and shallow films of water, true channels have been forced through, and the old two or three feet of available low-water depth has been increased to eight or ten feet, practically guaranteed up a thousand miles of river. ”

“ Or, again, one can imagine a government engineer turned loose upon the problem of the shifting quicksands of Plum Point or Lake Providence reaches. He has the fact that the Missouri annually pours about two hundred million cubic yards of sand and gravel into the river bottoms past the mouth of the Ohio at Cairo. ”