Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 7

AYS had gone by and no word had reached Mr. and Mrs. Carruth about the whereabouts of Sibley. From all along the valley, where the rains had fallen and the streams were still rising, there was news of the fight to save people and property. It was a terrific struggle, taxing the strength and resources of whole states, and the National Government itself was making special efforts, Congress having passed an emergency appropriation to rescue those in jeopardy and help the sufferers. There was plenty of work for Mrs. Carruth in helping to care for refugees who had been brought away from their homes, and were now weak and suffering from exposure and illness. Mr. Carruth, a practical river-man, was needed in the toilsome work of driving cattle from mounds where they had taken refuge, across to the river ridges.

As long as the upper Mississippi continued to rise, skiffs and launches were kept busy in the inundated territory, moving cattle and furniture and farm implements. The flood had begun in March. Moderately high waters, which covered lowlands but jeopardized few people, had appeared in the Missouri, the upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee rivers.

Little by little, the flood waves joined at the stream forks, and the stream channels could not carry away the volume of water fast enough, and so the high water spread out across the wide bottom-lands and pressed against the levees raised to protect valuable farm fields from inundation and washes, as well as to prevent waves of sand and gravel from flowing over the rich soil and ruining it.

Inadequate private or local levees above Cape Girardeau gave way before the upper Mississippi tide, and below the Cape the flood swept through the insecure embankments on the west side, spreading over the cleared or wooded bottoms on the way into the swampland streams, Little River, the St. Francis, Lake Nicormy Swamps, and a hundred tortuous bayous and wide waters.

The floods of the great tributaries of the Mississippi flowed together in the main channel and made the highest overflow ever known below the forks of the Ohio. More than seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in the upper Mississippi flowed past Cape Girardeau in a second. More than nine hundred thousand cubic feet of water poured in a second out of the Ohio River into this upper river flood. The vast tide swept down into the lower-river bottoms; most of it was in the main channel, but there were currents out in the overflow, pouring down through the woods, across fields, and in the channels of bayous and stream-beds sufficient to supply a hundred lesser rivers with flood waters for many a day.

Crowley’s Ridge in the Mississippi bottoms formed the western limit of the flood tide as far down as Helena, Arkansas, and shunted the overflow torrents back into the main channel of the Mississippi there, where the Tunica County levee held the flood to a width of less than two and a half miles. Through these narrows the mighty volume of water rushed at the rate of twelve miles an hour in midstream. The water was a hundred and thirteen feet deep, and the cross-section of the stream was two hundred and thirty-eight thousand square feet. In one second over two million cubic feet of water rushed by the Helena gage, when the flood rose to a height of forty-six feet above low-water mark—say about four stories high!

The flood threatened fourteen hundred and sixty-six miles of levee below Cairo, along more than a thousand miles of river. The levees, containing more than two hundred and forty million cubic yards of dirt have been built to keep floods off the lowlands and out of the towns and plantations, and Bermuda grass has been planted on the levees to protect them from the water-wash. But now whole armies of men were fighting on the levee-tops against the attack of the flood.

Year after year, since 1717, when De la Tour, the French engineer who planned the city of New Orleans, built the first protection along the city’s waterfront, the struggle against the annual flood has been waged on its top, as the levee has been extended up the bottoms. Men, settlements, states, and at last the United States have fought for mastery over the Mississippi, with the issue always doubtful. Sometimes it has been victory for the humans, and sometimes for the river, when a break in the earth barrier let the water through to inundate the backlands with the overflow.

Year after year a hundred thousand levee builders, with forty thousand teams of mules or so, and operating huge dredging-machines, repair the damage of the spring tides, build new levees, raise old ones, and pave the banks with revetment—great Willow-tree carpets or rugs covered with broken stone to keep the flood in bounds by stopping the washing away of the soft river banks and the undermining of the protection.

Despite all efforts, crevasses occur and sometimes a mile or so of the levee is washed out, and must be rebuilt, like the break at Reelfoot through which Sibley Carruth and Jimmy Veraine rode to rescue the homesteaders in the Reelfoot Bottoms.

The levee-builders, when the spring tide came booming down, that memorable March, were too few to cope with the flood along the fourteen hundred and sixty-six miles of jeopardized bottom-lands; so sawmills were shut down, farm work was halted, logging-camps were deserted, and all efforts were diverted from private tasks to the common cause. Thousands of teams of mules and horses were brought, where the ground was firm enough to bear them, while on the levees where the weight of animals might weaken or disturb the top, the broad backs of men carried the burdens of cotton sacks filled with earth, to build up the bank, to stack around the boils, and sipe-holes or leaks and to partition off the areas of slough.

Little armies of convicts from the prison farms and jails were marched out on the levees and put to work in sections where their toil was needed. Railroads sent their section gangs and bridge-builders, and brought crews from cities back in the hills and uplands. There could be no idlers when the year’s income of thousands of square miles depended on the levee holding in the districts, protecting whole counties—the whole geographical division of river-bottoms.

Mississippi River Commission engineers, levee boards, and local authorities took charge of the levee system, district by district. The districts were broken up into sections, and over each section some one stood in command. Assistants had charge of little crews who worked where they were needed.

Long stretches of levee were firm and high, but guards patrolled them to watch for boils where the water worked through under the levee foundation, or sloughed off the back of the levee, or siped through soft places, or washed through muskrat or crawfish holes. The guards carried guns, and if they found a leak, fired a shot to summon help. And they had to guard against treachery, too, for in times of peril and stress, with fortunes threatened and lives jeopardized, the men on a weakening levee have been known to seek to relieve the strain on their own side of the river, by breaking a strong levee opposite, shoveling through, or even blowing it up with dynamite.

Not all the workers could be spared for fighting at the levee, however. There must be rescuers to go out into the bottoms, to get those in imminent peril, to carry food to those marooned on house-tops or mounds, or ridges, and to swim or ferry thousands of heads of cattle, hogs, mules, and horses to the highlands. The property in abandoned houses, and the heaps of household and other goods, the live stock and the other portable property had to be protected against river pirates as well as against destruction by water.

Millions of people were affected by the flood, and the newspapers and magazines of the whole world recorded its incidents and features, though none, nor all of them together were able to give an adequate impression of the spectacle of power, the fearsomeness and the grandeur of that majestic flow of water.

When the refugees began to return to their abandoned homes, as they did the moment the water began to fluctuate at what the Weather Bureau said was the crest, Mr. and Mrs. Carruth had more time to think of their own trouble. They decided that the best thing to do was to get a small house-boat and go down the river, seeking along the way any bit of information that might have been caught at some town, or fisherman’s boat, or drifter’s eddy.

The local papers carried page after page of accounts of the flood. From every town and almost every levee section came word of incidents and jeopardies, disasters, crevasses; frightened appeals for help; grim announcements that "The levee still holds!" But there was nothing the Carruths could do to help, at the moment. They had taken their share of the burden as their kind always do in any emergency. It did not occur to them that their own worry could be made an excuse for neglecting the obvious things to be done. Some people who had lost horses or hogs might wonder how the Carruths could bear their son’s disappearance with so little display of emotion; but some could understand.

Captain Tracone had thanked them both for their instant willingness in joining his corps of flood-workers. He was reading the St. Louis paper, only a few hours old, one evening, when he discovered a paragraph in the flood items that startled him. It read:

Captain Tracone leaped to his feet and hurried to search for the Carruths. He found them in a boarding-house where they were staying till they could secure a house-boat.

"Look at this, folkses!" Tracone cried. "Look here!"

"New Madrid—a motor-boat!" Carruth exclaimed, and Mrs. Carruth sobbed with joy.

They read the second paragraph of the item:

Mr. and Mrs. Carruth were suddenly comforted. Sibley had escaped, then! Sibley was away down the river at New Madrid!

"Wonder where he found the motor-boat!" Mr. Carruth exclaimed. "Probably he drifted it!"

The Veraine boys, too, were found, and Mrs. Carruth thought of the father who had come down the river, through the terror of Grand Tower Suck, and, heartsick, with no word of his two sons, had gone back up the river.

"If we could only get word to him—to Veraine!" she said, and Mr. Carruth ran his thoughts up to the mouth of the Meramec, where that other river-man was patiently at work.

"I could probably run up to Kimmswick, and then walk up to the Meramec," Carruth mused. "It would be only a hundred miles by train and two or three miles’ walk. I’d be glad if some one else did that for me."

"That’s what I was thinking!" his wife exclaimed.

So Mr. Carruth went by train up through the mountains to Kimmswick, and walked along the railway track till he could see a little house boat out in the overflow, with a man rowing up the eddy ready to dart out after any bit of salvage. A river yell brought the man over to the embankment, and Carruth called:

"News for you!"

Veraine pulled ashore, where he heard that his two sons had landed safely at New Madrid, in the Carruth house-boat, and that Jimmy was doing rescue work with Sibley in a launch.

"Jep’s taking care of a baby they caught in the drift," Carruth added, and then read the item from the St. Louis newspaper. "Thank you," the man said, controlling his voice. "They’re good kids, my boys, and Jep—You never saw anybody could take care of a baby better than he can! His mother says so, too. Seems like he knows what to do. And they’re at New Madrid?"

"Jep is, according to this. Sib and Jimmy, are—They went over to the Reelfoot levee. It’s crevassed. They were asked to go there."

"Yes, sir. I understand. Come over to my boat. I’ve a good fire, and it’ll be right warm and comfortable. Stranger, a man cain’t exactly thank anybody—not right!—for this favor. A man thinks more about such things than he can talk."

"You’d have done it for me," Carruth reminded him.

"Yes—likely. River people are apt to carry good news, thataway. Sho! And they landed at New Madrid? That’s two hundred and forty miles down—and through Grand Tower Suck! Seems like Old Mississip must have been feelin’ friendly towards us all, eh?"

They drew up at the shanty-boat resting in the back-water, moored to Chesley Island willow-trees, which were half their height under water. It was a comfortable boat, and clean. A soft coal fire was burning in the heater, and Veraine, looking at his watch, decided it was time to have a snack. Carruth, hungry enough, did not object to the meal in preparation.

"I had great luck yesterday, somebody’s bad luck," Veraine declared. "I picked up a case o’ canned goods that was just awash. I swung in that log raft, too. There’s fifty-five good logs. I’ve got more ’n three hundred logs, now, and several skiffs, and one twenty-foot boat with a two-horse-power motor in it. There’s quite a bit o’ salvage lumber, too. But the best thing I’ve caught is a big barge. It come down the edge the current, and I got a handy-line on it, and snubbed it into the willows all the way down the island, and I swung it across the current at the foot of First Island. I landed it right against the railroad bank, there. Likely you noticed it?"

"I saw it—with a hawser made fast to a stump?"

"Yes; that rope was on board. I’ll get some good money for that barge, perhaps, two or three hundred dollars, on account of its bein’ so far down. It’s one o’ those railroad sand barges from up the Missouri."

After eating their snack Veraine rowed his visitor down the island chutes to the foot of the slack water, as Mr. Carruth wished to catch the train to the Cape.

"It sure was friendly, comin’ to tell me about those boys!" Veraine declared. "I hadn’t writ and told their mother about it, yet. She’d prob’ly worried, the way women do when their little chaps turn up missin’ or anything; and now maybe I won’t have to tell her much about it till they get home. I hate to write to her, and I’m glad I didn’t. Well, s’long!"

Thus they parted. There was more news in the St. Louis papers that Mr. Carruth bought on the train. The rescue work at the Reelfoot levee crevasse had been difficult and required skill and courage. The trouble had been overcome, and good work had been done.

"The first boat down through the gap was an open motor-launch driven by two river lads, volunteers in the rescue work," the Hickman report said, "and they saved many families, the first one as the house collapsed on its foundations before the rushing waters. The rescuers, Carruth and Veraine, were sent over from New Madrid, after an appeal had been gotten across the river to the telephone from some point up the river, and they worked all night and all day, without rest, not stopping till all those in jeopardy from the swift current had been taken out."

Carruth read the account with misty eyes, and wondering. It seemed unbelievable that his boy—that jolly, book-reading lad who had been such a little boy just the other day, or not so very long ago, anyhow—had stepped into a man’s task!

"He always did like river work," he mused; "always wanted to know about it, and he must be happy, now, being sent out to special work, rescuing! And I know his mother will be proud!"