THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER STOOD AT THE CENTER, literally and figuratively, of the United States’s westward expansion during the nineteenth century. By far the most prominent name in taming the powerful river was James Buchanan Eads. From the 1830s through the 1850s this supremely capable engineer salvaged hundreds of wrecks with a series of ever-larger diving bells, gaining in the process an intimate knowledge of the river’s bottom. When the Civil War broke out, he built a fleet of ironclad gunboats that helped win control of the river for the Union (see “Eads and the Navy of the Mississippi,” Invention & Technology, Spring 1994). And after the war he spanned the river with a gigantic bridge at St. Louis (see “Under Pressure,” Invention & Technology, Spring 1996) As Eads’s bridge neared completion, the middle of the country looked forward to a day when the Mississippi would be a steady, reliable highway for the movement of goods and people. Before that could happen, though, one more problem had to be solved. And the solution would influence both commerce and flood control on the river up to today.

At the Mississippi’s mouth, below New Orleans, the river degenerated into a quagmire, as it deposited the soil it and its tributaries had picked up over thousands of miles in a maze of islands, marshes, and shallows. The biggest problem was a group of huge sandbars that had built up where the river met the Gulf of Mexico, restricting traffic to a few narrow channels. Dredging them was a Sisyphean task, since the river kept endlessly dumping more sand. Eads had an elegant solution. But standing in his way was an opponent at least as formidable as the Mississippi itself: the Army Corps of Engineers and its autocratic head, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys.

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