In 1875, James Buchanan Eads made the United States Congress a bet: he could make the Mississippi River dig its own ship channel 30 feet deep through the mud bar at its mouth. At that spot on the South Pass, there was only about 8 feet of water. Eads and his backers would pay for everything themselves, and the government would owe him nothing until an army officer lowered a weighted line and found 20 feet of depth — then $500,000, with another $500,000 at every 2-foot interval after that, all the way down to 30. The Army’s own chief of engineers had already told Washington in writing that the river’s mud would defeat him.
But on July 10, 1879, the Army’s inspecting officer, Captain Brown, signed a certificate stating that two days earlier there had been a 30-foot-deep channel running out through the two long walls Eads had built — the jetties — into the Gulf of Mexico. The records of how that single sheet of paper came to exist tell a stranger story than an ordinary construction project. No crew dug that channel out of the bar. The river dug it.
What Eads really built was a way to keep the river from slowing down. The bar was not a new problem. In February 1859, a committee from the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce went down to the mouth of the river and counted what was stuck behind the mud ridge. They valued goods waiting to go out at more than $5.
3 million, and goods waiting to come in at another $2 million — and that count left out the ships themselves. One item alone was nearly 72,000 bales of cotton. Some vessels had been waiting for weeks. It didn’t get better.
Between 1872 and 1877, 417 vessels grounded and were held at the mouth of the river for a combined total of 12,467 hours. Meanwhile, ships kept getting bigger, and steam power was replacing small sailing vessels. The president of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce later wrote that before the jetties, a ship bound overseas could not load deeper than 18 or 19 feet — and even then risked being stuck for an indefinite time. The obstruction reached far inland.
The engineer who ran the work, Elmer Lawrence Corthell, wrote that because there was no deep channel at the mouth, there was a line somewhere short of the middle of the Mississippi Valley — and past that line, it did not pay to raise grain. He blamed the same mud ridge for pushing expensive railroads east over the Allegheny Mountains. A ridge of mud a couple of miles past the end of the land in Louisiana was deciding what a farmer in the middle of the country could afford to plant. The Army had been fighting the problem a long time.
On the Senate floor, Carl Schurz said the Army’s engineers had spent 37 years planning, reporting, and “scratching and scraping” at the mouth of the Mississippi. Their answer now was to stop fighting the bar and go around it with a ship canal and locks cut from the river near Fort St. Phillip. In 1874, the House of Representatives voted for that canal, 118 votes to 89, with $8 million just to start it.
Eads had put a different offer on the table that February. He would open and hold a channel 28 feet deep at the biggest outlet, the Southwest Pass, for $10 million, entirely at his own risk and that of his associates — with not a dollar paid until the water was 20 feet deep. The Senate balked at the canal and handed the whole question to a board of seven engineers: three from the Army, three from civil life, and one from the Coast Survey. The plan only makes sense once you understand what a river is doing when it reaches the sea.
Corthell explained it with one plain idea. A river can carry only so much sand and clay, and how much depends on how fast the water is moving. If it’s carrying less than its speed allows, it picks up more from its own bed and banks. Once loaded to that limit, in Corthell’s words, it “refuses to take a greater burden.
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Follow the water down the South Pass. For almost 13 miles, it runs between banks in a deep, fast, even channel. Then the land stops. At the land’s end, the muddy water spreads out left and right over a full half-circle.
As it spreads, it slows down. Slower water can’t hold the load it was carrying, so it drops it. That dropped load is the bar. At the South Pass, the top of the bar sat about 2¼ miles out past the land — a ridge of very fine sand mixed with clay, with about 8 feet of water over it.
Every year the river brought down more. Eads’s plan was simple, like pursing your lips to blow a clean stripe through a pile of flour on a table. Build two long walls out from the land’s end into the Gulf of Mexico, 1,000 feet apart, so the river can’t fan out. Keep it narrow, and it keeps its speed all the way over the bar and out to deep water.
A current that is still fast when it reaches the bar is carrying less than it could — so it picks up more. And the only thing out there for it to pick up is the bar. Eads didn’t invent the idea. He had gone to Europe and looked at walls like these at the mouths of the Oder, the Vistula, the Danube, and the Rhine.
At the Sulina mouth of the Danube, they had worked. The man who fought Eads hardest was no fool. General A. A.
Humphreys, the chief of engineers, was co-author of the Army’s long report on the physics and hydraulics of the Mississippi. In a letter in April 1874, he pointed out that the Danube’s Sulina branch carried far less water than this river. By his figures, the South Pass alone carried 10 times as much mud to the sea. He believed about a tenth of the river’s sediment never floated at all, but rolled along the bottom and got dropped at the outer edge of the bar.
His calculations said a bar squeezed by jetties would march out into the Gulf at no less than 1,200 feet a year, and the walls would have to be pushed out after it year after year. Down in Louisiana, civil engineer Caleb Forshey and former governor P. B. S.
Pinchback warned the Senate that walls at the mouth would push the river back up against levees that were already brimful. Humphreys was reasoning from the best measurements the Army had. Eads was reasoning from the same river and reaching the opposite answer. The board of seven studied the question through that year, and in January 1875 it recommended jetties — but not at the big pass Eads wanted.
It picked the smallest one, the South Pass. Eads came into that fight with an odd kind of schooling. In 1842 he patented his own adaptation of the diving bell and went into the business of raising sunken steamboats and their cargo. Corthell says Eads walked under the shelter of that bell in hundreds of places on the bed of the river at every stage of the water, learning its currents and its sediment by direct contact.
In early 1875, he took his plan back to Congress. In the House it passed with only two votes against it, still aimed at the big Southwest Pass. Then the Senate committee dug in. One board of engineers had backed a canal; the next had backed jetties at the little South Pass.
The senators did not want to overrule both of them. The little pass was also about $2¾ million cheaper. The Senate’s terms were blunt: give the same guarantees and the same depth at the small pass for $5,250,000, or the job goes to the Army engineers. Eads took it, and on March 3, 1875, it became law.
Three weeks later, St. Louis threw him a banquet with three or four hundred people in the room, and he told them why he wasn’t afraid. “Every atom moving down that river,” he said, “from the springs and the mountain snows all the way to the Gulf is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. ” He promised to give the Mississippi a deep, open, safe, and permanent outlet to the sea.
Paying for it was the harder part, because Washington would send nothing until the lead line read 20 feet. So Eads financed the work the way the river would pay him — in stages and on risk. The contractors, James Andrews and Company, agreed to bring their own steamers, barges, and boarding houses, and to sink 50,000 cubic yards of willow mattress work and 10,000 cubic yards of stone before asking Eads for a single payment. Then a finance company was set up just for this, the South Pass Jetty Company, to advance him money.
Its terms tell you how the lenders rated the odds. They would get their money back with 10% interest and 100% profit on top — and every cent of it depended on the jetties working. If the lead line never found 20 feet, they would get nothing back at all. In June 1875, a steamboat called the Grafton tied up at the end of the South Pass with a coal barge and machinery.
Corthell says that apart from the lighthouse, there wasn’t a building within 10 miles, except a few fishermen’s huts. Within four months, the soundings out there would get worse instead of better, and nobody on the site had planned for that. The crews started at a spot called East Point, the last scrap of land on the east bank of the pass. Speed was the whole game.
Corthell points out that even the first half-million, when it came, would cover only a small part of what it cost to reach 20 feet. The only way out was to reach the deeper payments as fast as possible. Eads’s instructions to his assistants, spoken and written, kept coming back to rapid construction. Eads and Andrews were both away that summer and early fall, so the details of the building fell to Corthell.
Before construction, the line where the east wall would stand had as little as 6 feet of water over it, 8 feet on average. On June 13, they drove the first mooring piles. On June 17, 1875, work on the East Jetty began with piles driven from the land’s end out toward an old wreck marked on the chart. That line of piles was the skeleton of the wall.
For the first mile, they drove two rows 12 feet apart, with piles 8 feet apart in each row. After that, a single row ran on out into the Gulf. The piles didn’t hold anything back by themselves; they were guides. The real wall was made of willow mattresses — huge mats of interwoven willow built on the bank, floated out along the piles, and sunk with stone, one course on top of another.
Now picture Corthell out there that first summer. For a stretch of it, he had no assistant at all. By his own record, he was the superintendent, the engineer in charge, the transit man, the draftsman, the chain man, the recorder, and the calculator. Every day he checked the position of the guide piles by measuring angles from two stations a mile or more apart, while two pile drivers kept pushing the line out to sea.
He took soundings along the line of the piles every day, and along the whole length at least once a week. The force he was running that summer was 300 men. Good laborers were scarce, and the contractor couldn’t deliver willows fast enough. Corthell credits four things with holding the work together: experienced foremen, a strict ban on liquor, paying every man and every bill on time, and a telegraph line straight to New Orleans.
The Army’s inspecting officer later checked his work, measuring where the sea end of that guide piling had been set 2¾ miles out from the land, and found Corthell had placed it within a foot. The second place to stand is on the other side of the pass, at a spot called Kip Signal Station, where the west wall came ashore. Before they got that far, the Gulf took a swing at the east side. On September 15, 1875, a storm came through with wind at 52 miles an hour.
About 1,100 feet of mattresses had been left floating in position along the east jetty for several days so the river could settle mud into them before they sank. The storm wrecked all of it. There were early signs the river was listening. As early as August, the engineers found mud already settling on and behind the mattresses of the east jetty, and new land forming outside the line of piles.
Six days after the storm, on September 21, they started the guide piles for the west jetty, 651 feet from Kip Signal Station, and ran them out to sea 1,000 feet from the east line and parallel to it. Eads and Andrews came back to Port Eads around the end of October. The workforce was increased, and the building went on through the fall and winter harder than before. That December, storms broke loose several of the timber aprons on the west side and tore apart temporary wing dams near the ends of the jetties.
Corthell put storm waves at the mouth of the river at 12 to 15 feet trough to crest. But the worst news of that first season came from the lead line, and it had nothing to do with storms. In October, with the walls only partly built, the soundings showed the depth over the crest of the bar had dropped. It had been 9.
2 feet. Now it was 7½. The whole promise was deeper water, and after four months of work, the river was giving them less. Corthell’s reading was simple: squeezing the river partway had made the crest worse, and the only cure was to finish the walls as fast as men and money allowed.
It’s a lesson he states flatly in his book: once you start jetties at the mouth of a muddy river, you have to hurry them to completion. So they pushed. By about April 1, 1876, the whole West Jetty had been built up to the level of low water. And when the soundings for that first year were added up, the number made the misery worth it.
The current running between those walls had carried 1,711,200 cubic yards of the bar out into the Gulf of Mexico. The river was carrying away its own bar, exactly the way Eads had bet it would. The third place is the one that ended up with his name on it. Port Eads started as a work camp on the banks of the pass.
The reeds were cut back 75 feet from the water on both sides to make room for piles, lumber, stone, and coal, and for shops, houses, wharves, and walks. By September 15, 1875, they had 800 feet of mattress ways along the banks. Corthell wrote that banks that were “uninhabited and desolate in early June were now alive with men, ringing with axes, anvils, and pile drivers, and the whistles of the tugs and steamboats. ”
At the back of his book, Corthell listed the people he wanted remembered.
W. L. Wright was the chief clerk and paymaster at Port Eads. J.
H. Stockley was the resident physician. Henry Carey was superintendent of the mattress work. Three telegraph operators kept the line to New Orleans open.
And J. T. Heston was the leadsman — the man who dropped the lead line and called out the depth, the number this whole bet ran on. Eads wanted to mark the first anniversary of the jetty act by sending the first seagoing vessel out through the jetties.
On March 4, 1876, the three-masted schooner Mattie Alwood came down the pass bound for Revel, Russia, carrying 2,150 bales of cotton and drawing 13 feet 6 inches. She was delayed at the head of the passes, and by the time she reached the jetties, the tide had fallen several inches. The channel was still crooked and changeable. The pilot couldn’t keep her in the deepest water, and she ran aground opposite station 80.
She sat on the bar all night with the tide still falling. At noon the next day, she went to sea. So the first ocean vessel through Eads’s walls got stuck on the way and still got through. The channel was real.
It just wasn’t straight yet. And about seven weeks later, that difference nearly cost Eads the confidence of his own backers. On April 26, 1876, a big excursion steamer called the Grand Republic left New Orleans for Port Eads. On board were friends and backers of the jetties from St.
Louis and New Orleans, coming to judge the work with their own eyes. Before they arrived, an Army steam launch came racing down from the head of the passes. It belonged to Major C. W.
Howell, the Army engineer working the mouth of the Southwest Pass, 30 miles away. His assistant ran the launch back and forth across the jetty channel, taking soundings. Then, once the excursion boat had run out into the Gulf and back to the wharf, the assistant took a stand in the steamer’s saloon and showed his chart to reporters. By his soundings, the channel came to about 12 feet.
Eads’s engineers were saying there was a channel of 16 feet through the jetties. Corthell wrote that those official-looking figures “created great distrust among the friends of the enterprise on that boat and among the jetty stockholders in New Orleans,” and that a large amount of stock subscribed to the work was soon offered for sale at half its face value. Eads was still waiting on a loan he needed. The only thing that could settle it in front of the backers was a real ship.
Captain E. E. Gager of the steamship Hudson of the Cromwell line had backed the jetties from the start and had said he wanted to run the first steamship through the new channel. When he sailed from New Orleans that April, he asked his bar pilot, Captain Richard Francis, to sound the jetty channel carefully before the Hudson’s return trip and telegraph him the result.
The Hudson was due off the bar on the afternoon of May 12. That morning, Francis sounded the channel thoroughly and satisfied himself it had the depth. She came in from the southeast around 2 in the afternoon. The Hudson was an iron steamship 280 feet long, drawing 14 feet 7 inches.
The pilot gave the captain the honest answer: at average flood tide, there was a 15-foot channel, but the tide had turned at 10 that morning. It was already 6 inches down and still falling, and it was pulling a strong current out through the jetties. Gager gave the order anyway. The pilot ran her straight up the channel instead of trying to follow the turns of the deepest water, and the captain rang for full speed.
Corthell and the engineers watched her come. As long as she carried that white wave at her bow, they knew she had found more than 12 feet — and she carried it the whole 2¼ miles between the walls until she slowed in the deep water off Port Eads. Corthell says that one passage restored confidence in the jetties, and the loan came through soon afterward. The next crisis was slower, and it was about money.
By the end of 1876, the lead line had found 20 feet, and the first payment of $500,000 came due on December 27. The government paid it in February, and every dollar went straight to debts that couldn’t wait any longer. Month after month, notes had to be renewed, and suppliers asked to wait. By August 1877, the payrolls at Port Eads were two months overdue, and Eads and Andrews, up north trying to arrange more money, had run through every source they had.
On August 7, they telegraphed Corthell, now the resident engineer. The message read: “Discharge the whole force except those necessary to protect property unless they are willing to work for certificates payable on receipt of the 22 ft payment. ” In plain terms: stay and work for a paper promise, and that promise would only be good if the river cut two more feet. Every man on the payroll was called to the office.
The situation was explained to them in a few words. Nobody tried to talk them into anything. The men willing to stay on those terms were asked to step forward and sign. Two refused.
Seventy-four signed. Corthell tried to explain why. The men had been treated fairly. Until that summer, they had always been paid on time.
Every month they could see the channel getting better. And every day they watched what he called “the rush and whirl of the swift waters” cutting through the sand and clay toward the deep water of the Gulf. Those 74 men were making the same bet Eads had made, with a great deal less to bet. Corthell was born in 1840 in South Abington, Massachusetts.
When the Civil War started, he was a sophomore at Brown University, and he left to enlist as a private in the First Rhode Island Light Artillery. He served four years in the campaigns in Virginia and North Carolina, and came out commanding a battery. Then he went back and finished at Brown. In 1875 he took charge for Eads of the engineering and construction of the jetties, and he stayed four years.
The history he published afterward is the reason we can follow this work by dates, depths, and names. His records show that for a long time the walls leaked. They had been built up to about the level of average flood tide, but a wall of willow mattresses is not watertight. Float observations showed that at least 30% of the water passing East Point was escaping through and over the mattress work before it ever reached the sea end.
Every bit of that was current that wasn’t scouring the channel. The fix was the same trick turned sideways. They built wing dams to slow the leaking water down. And slow water can’t hold its load.
So the river dropped its own mud along the sides of the jetties, season after season, and built a bank against the walls that rose higher and higher until in many places it reached the surface. Every cubic foot of mud laid down there held more water in the channel. The river was sealing its own walls. The other end of the pass had its own version of the problem.
About 13 miles upriver, at the head of passes, the Mississippi splits three ways, and where it divides it is 11,000 feet across — more than two miles. The South Pass takes off in the middle, the smallest of the three, squeezed between two far bigger outlets, and a shoal sat right at its entrance. Corthell wrote that getting the water into that little pass was a far harder problem than getting it out at the mouth. They used the same principle there.
Dams and dikes of willow mattress and stone steered more of the river toward the South Pass and checked the current wherever they wanted it to drop its sand. In January 1879, a board of Army engineers reported a channel 22 feet deep at the head of the passes, over a shoal that had carried only 14 or 15 feet. And by 1880, Corthell wrote that several of those works were already completely buried in sediment, with reeds, grasses, and willows growing where deep water had flowed. Down at the jetties, the soundings kept climbing.
They found 22 feet, 200 feet wide, and the second $500,000 came due on December 15, 1877. That was the payment the men’s certificates had been written against. But 1878 brought the fight back to Washington. On May 1, General Humphreys wrote to the chairman of the House Committee on Mississippi Levees, arguing that the bar beyond the jetties was advancing into the Gulf, that the results fell far short of what Eads claimed, and that the engineer officers who had predicted a new bar at the sea end had been proved right.
Eads answered with the Army’s own inspection report. He could only quote it because of an earlier fight: in the first year, the official soundings of his channel were kept from him. After Eads protested in 1876, the Secretary of War ordered the results given to him and ordered Humphreys and Howell to stop interfering with the work. In the report dated August 1, 1877, Captain Brown had found that the 20-foot depth line off the jetties had receded about 200 feet on average, the 30-foot line about 300, and the 40-foot line had stayed nearly where it was.
There was also a dredgeboat, the G. W. R. Bailey, and Humphreys argued that one of Captain Brown’s favorable reports came right after a new dredge had worked the bar for a month.
But the commission of engineers that looked into the question called the amount of dredging done at the jetties “utterly insignificant. ”
Humphreys was right that this river builds new land at its mouths, and in time it would bury much of this work. But Captain Brown’s surveys showed nothing like the 1,200 feet per year he had calculated. And two of the Army’s own senior engineers, Generals Barnard and Wright, who had served on the commissions that inspected the work, wrote that it was being built according to the spirit of the act and ought to be pushed “with the utmost possible vigor.
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That June, Congress voted Eads a million dollars, half of it to be spent on the work, and set up a commission to keep watching. The money side of the jetties was finally on solid ground. It lasted about a month. In the middle of July, yellow fever reached New Orleans.
Port Eads tried to shut it out. Every route into the camp was put under strict quarantine, and the rules were enforced against the pilots, the towboats, and even the mailboats. It didn’t hold. The camp still needed materials and supplies, so one of the jetty company’s own boats had to go up to New Orleans — and it brought a case of the fever back.
A few days later, on August 6, 1878, three new cases appeared. The next day, there were nine. Corthell had to decide fast. The workmen lived in crowded quarters, far from enough medical help, and if the fever swept through, the work would have to stop anyway.
So on August 6 and 7, he discharged the entire force except for a few acclimated people — the ones considered safe from the disease — and sent everyone else away before the place could become infected. Even so, some of the men who left fell sick in New Orleans or St. Louis, and some of them died at Port Eads. The fever spread until 64 people, about half of everyone still there, were sick.
Eleven of them died. One of the dead was O. D. Parmley, the assistant Captain Brown had left in charge of the government’s interests at the jetties.
Corthell called him a “most efficient and faithful engineer,” a man everyone who knew him held in high regard. Another was Captain William S. Nelson, who died in St. Louis.
Nelson had been connected with Eads for many years, above all in the old wrecking business of raising sunken steamboats, and he had superintended the construction of Eads’s ironclads during the Civil War. At the jetties, he commanded the dredgeboat. Corthell wrote that Nelson never shrank from the hardest and most exposed work, and that in his death, Eads lost one of his most faithful assistants and one of his best friends. Corthell also wrote that some of the jetty workmen lie buried in the sand near Kip Signal Station, where the west wall meets the shore, keeping watch, as he put it, over the work they stood by until death cut them down.
Once the fever had run its course, the work turned to the one place the Gulf could still beat them: the sea ends of the jetties. Storms had been tearing at the ends from the start. In September 1877, one had battered the jetties for three days with winds up to 57 miles an hour. So they armored the ends with slopes of mattress and crib work.
Along the tops of the walls, they set concrete in enormous blocks. Near the landward end, the blocks were 3½ feet wide, 3 feet thick, and 16 feet long. At the sea end of the east jetty, they were 13 feet wide, 5 feet thick, and 55 feet long. The heaviest weighed more than 260 tons apiece.
Corthell wrote that once the slopes, the crib work, and the concrete were in place, the works suffered no more loss or damage, even though several violent storms threw terrific waves against them. Then the lead line started moving fast. Between January 20 and April 8, 1879, while the concrete crept out toward the sea ends, the depth over the bar went from 23. 9 feet to 27.
2. The spring floods pushed the scouring along the whole length of the jetties. On April 7, Captain Brown certified a channel 25 feet deep and 200 feet wide. By June 18, it was 26 feet.
And on July 10, 1879, he wrote the certificate this whole bet had been aimed at: “I certify that on the 8th day of July 1879, there was a channel at the mouth of South Pass through the jetties, 30 feet in depth without regard to width, measured at average flood tide. ” The river had cut 30 feet through its own bar. Even before that certificate, the Lighthouse Board had noted in 1878 that the jetties had made the South Pass the principal entrance to the great river. In May 1880, the steamship Australian sailed from New Orleans drawing 23½ feet, with a cargo equal to 8,220 bales of cotton.
The president of the Chamber of Commerce wrote that since the jetties were finished, nobody complained of being held at the mouth of the river. Freight rates on cotton and grain out of New Orleans fell, with grain dropping from 12 cents a bushel to 7. And he wrote that a grain elevator that had stood empty for years before the jetties was now full. But ships never stopped getting bigger, and in time 30 feet was not enough.
The same principle was later applied to the big Southwest Pass, and that pass — not the South Pass — is today the main seaward approach to the ports of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The South Pass stopped being maintained for deep-draft ships, and the maintenance contract that came with the jetties ended in 1901. Eads didn’t live to see any of that. Early in 1887, he was exhausted, and he followed his doctor’s orders and sailed to the Bahamas to rest, still pushing his next idea: a railway to carry ocean ships overland across Mexico.
A bill to charter it had passed the Senate, but the House never gave it the few minutes it needed for a vote. Eads died on March 8, 1887. Corthell outlived him by almost 30 years. He went on to advise Argentina on its harbors at Buenos Aires and Rosario, served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers and of the American Institute of Consulting Engineers at the same time, and died in Albany in May 1916 at 76.
You can still follow this story south on a map. Start in New Orleans and take Louisiana Highway 23 down through Plaquemines Parish along the river. About 77 miles later, the road runs out at Venice, the last community on the Mississippi you can reach by car. The last census counted 162 people there.
It has a nickname: “the end of the world. ” Past Venice, you need a boat. About 10 miles below it, on the east bank, a few miles above the head of passes, is Pilot Town, where the river pilots worked — built on piers over swampy ground and reachable only by water or helicopter. Twain skipped a visit there, and in Life on the Mississippi he described it as a place that stands on stilts “in the water, so they say,” where people went to weddings and funerals by skiff and canoe.
After Hurricane Katrina, one of the pilots associations moved its headquarters up to Venice, and the 2020 census counted nobody living in Pilot Town year-round. A few miles below Pilot Town is the head of passes, where the river splits into the Southwest Pass, the South Pass, and Pass A Loutre. That spot is mile zero. The river miles on the lower Mississippi are counted upstream from this place.
Mile zero is still a work site. Until about the end of May 2026, the Army Corps of Engineers had a cutterhead dredge called the Texas working the head of passes and on into the Southwest Pass, Pass A Loutre, and the South Pass. In August, another dredge, the Frederick Paup, was working the Southwest Pass from miles zero out to about 22 miles below the head of passes. The river still leaves mud at its mouth, and somebody still has to come and move it.
The channel up to New Orleans is now dredged for far more than 30 feet. Since 2022, it has taken ships drawing up to 50 feet as far as the Huey P. Long Bridge at mile 106. Now go down the middle pass — the little one — to the place that carries his name.
There isn’t much of Port Eads left to see. Hurricane Katrina devastated it in 2005, and the camp from the 1870s is long gone. But the South Pass Lighthouse is still there, an iron tower first lit on August 25, 1881, a little more than two years after Captain Brown’s 30-foot certificate. It’s still an active light.
Its keepers left in 1971, and the Coast Guard owns it now. The jetties are still out there, too, even though you can’t see them. Almost the whole outer west jetty and up to a third of the east jetty are covered with sand, a process that started before 1900. The concrete blocks and stonework are most likely still there, well beneath the surface of the water.
Twain, who had learned the Mississippi as a steamboat pilot, wrote a few years after the certificate that Captain Eads with his jetties had done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi that “seemed clearly impossible. ”
Which brings the story back to the bet. Every dollar Congress paid out under that act was paid for depth, read off a weighted line by an army officer two feet at a time. The walls were only there to keep the river running fast, and the river did the digging.
The records show it worked the other way, too. Once the big ships had moved to the Southwest Pass, and the South Pass was no longer kept up for them, the river went back to work on its old bar. By the early 1990s, there were only 8 feet of water in that channel — the same 8 feet that sat on the bar when Eads made his bet.
In 1999, the Army began dredging it again.