Chapter Seven

Pioneers

To—Lt John Mackay

Adjt 2^nd Regt U.S. Artillery

Cherokee Agency near Calhoun
                    &nb sp;   Tennessee

St. Louis 27 th June 1838

Will you tell me my dear Jack, where the “Cherokee Agency near Calhoun Tenn.” is? Is it in these United States, or to what country does it belong? Are all avenues of information closed, shut up and cut off; and is there no method of learning what is doing in the world? I tremble my friend least you have been smuggled off the continent, buried alive, and your days lost to you, yea and your nights too. Why you do not know that I am a sojourner in the “Western Metropolis”! Well! the whereabouts of the great can be but little noted in the “Agency”, and a man can be better reconciled not to be famous. It is as true Jack as that I am living, that I am here: And what is more my dame and the little Lees are with me. It is a rough country to bring them to I acknowledge, but they smooth it to me most marvelously. You will now know why your letters have been so long reaching me. The first, March 11 th must have nearly died of fatigue; as that of May 18 th was treading closely on its heels. This last reached me just as I was on the eve of setting off to the Rapids, about a fortnight since; and I sat down and penned a note instantu to the Genl. to know what was the State of the Appr for the impt of the Savannah river; the intention of the Dept in regard to it; the prospect of the work going on &c and whether they wanted a good man & true like yourself to take charge of the business. This of course was done in [an] unofficial way, and I know the Genl will give me all the information in his power, which when recd I shall lose no time in handing over to you. But it will take time, Mackay, it will take time.

Why do you allow the “Sovereigns” to bother you? Don’t spare them a thought. Do you recollect the Don’s injunctions to Sancho, after he had slid from his mule through fright, upon his being questioned as to the cause of certain odours that reached his Highness’ nose? “Let it alone Sancho I tell you, the more that you stir it, the more it will stink.” I believe though I can appreciate the feelings which have led you to think this seriously of the step you have in view. The manner in which the Army is considered and treated by the Country and those whose business it is to nourish and take care of it, is enough to disgust every one with the Service, and has the effect of driving every good soldier from it, and rendering those who remain, discontented, careless and negligent. The instance that you mention in your own person of the Authorities at W. listening to the miserable slanders of dirty tergivsators and then acting upon such filthy ex-parti evidence is an insult to the Army, and shews in what light its feelings are estimated—and its rights sacrificed at the shrine of popularity. But I am getting angry Mackay and will stop, else I shall be no better than those who have excited my bile. If you could have converted the Mississippi into the Savannah and you had been willing to lend a hand in the manner you speak of, I think together we should have been able to put the rivers in such a state, that Boats would navigate of themselves, if they could only induce the Captain & Engr not to blow them up.

I found Bliss, you know Horace, in Baltimore this spring laying on his oars and looking out for Rail Roads; and proposed to him to come out with me and take charge of the immediate supr of the operations at the Rapids, whereupon he packed up his trunk and came. He is now there getting all things in readiness by the time the river falls. The object is to endeavor to get a channel through the Rapids for S[team] Boats during the stages of low water and will consist in blasting the rock under water and rem[oving] it from the channel. The Lower Rapids are 11 miles long and 250 miles above this. The upper are 14 miles Long and 150 above the Lower. Besides this they have set me to work to do something for this Harbor. There is a large bar as they call it, or rather Island upwards of 200 acres in extent, covered with a growth of cotton wood, which has been growing from year to year, situated at the lower part of the city, and threatens to shut up their Harbor; and Cong. has made an appr of 50,000 to remedy the evil, and which is about enough to commence it. One half is already spent in S. Boats, Store Boats, Pile drivers &c and we are now at work in building a pier to give direction to the current. I have been also directed to do something to the Missouri, but they have given as yet no money and of course nothing has been done. I wish all were done and I was back again in Virginia. I volunteered my services last year to get rid of the office in W. and the Genl at last agreed to my going—I was cognizant of so much iniquity in more ways than one, that I feared for my morality, at no time strong, and had been trying for two years to quit—

I spent last winter in W[ashington] partly on duty and partly not. Had a pleasant time with my friends in Virginia, and am now here working for my country—I have got through with my paper and have hardly commenced talking to you—We really must have a meeting Mackay, for this letter business is all a humbug. Your acct of the Cherokees &c., was very interesting to me. I hope you will be able to arrange matters peacebly. I see the Sav[annah] Papers are throwing out some commendations upon Genl Scott so I suppose his course is satisfactory to them—The Rumours of the disturbances on the N. Frontier you get from the papers. The boys in Wash. hold out hopes of the passage of the Army Bill and think it will go—I hope so but am dubious—I was glad to hear of all in Broughton Street. I think of them every day. The increase of the Gr^dchildren is delightful but who is doing it Mackay—Mrs. L. joins me in much love to all of them. Your true friend RE Lee.¹

LIEUTENANT ROBERT E. Lee loved to banter with his West Point friend Jack Mackay, and the jocular tone of this message is so pleasing that it nearly overshadows some revealing remarks about the emerging U.S. Army. The scope of the army’s work expanded in the Jacksonian period, yet mistrust of a strong professional military force also grew during these years. The army bill that Lee casually mentions at the end of his letter did go through, enlarging the army for the first time in two decades, but it was hotly debated and highly politicized. The increased bureaucratization and partisan infighting alienated the young soldier until, “fearing for his morality,” as he lightheartedly told Mackay, he begged Charles Gratiot, the chief engineer, to let him escape Washington and aid in the improvement of western navigation systems.²

For all Lee’s facetiousness, it was an important period of maturation for the army. Lee would also personally develop during this time, for he had been sent to the “great Western metropolis” to redirect the channel of the Mississippi River, one of the most demanding engineering projects of the day. Lee’s struggle with the stubborn current offers a fascinating snapshot of him as a young scientist. Though later generations have seldom associated him with experimental ecological engineering, Lee was in the very vanguard of American attempts to redesign nature. Reverence for innovation and action, and the desire to exploit the continent’s huge potential, was taking hold in the national psyche. Lee and his colleagues in the army may have dreamt of military pageantry and the valor of war, but they were destined to play an equally critical role on a different stage. With their technical education, their discipline and tenacity, the Corps of Engineers would become a driving force in the development of technology and the westward expansion of the nation.

Thirty-year-old Lieutenant Lee arrived in St. Louis at the worst time of year. It was late summer, oppressive with heat, mosquitoes, and the stench of garbage. Cholera and bilious fever were common, and shopkeepers shuttered their windows against choking clouds of dust. “It is astonishingly hot here,” he told his wife, calculating that it was 97 degrees in the shade and that the powdery dirt was ankle deep in the streets.³ By 1837 the invention of the steamboat had made the Mississippi River one of the most profitable transportation routes in the country, and St. Louis was a boomtown. The population had more than quadrupled in two decades, and included a colorful array of French trappers, Spanish treasure hunters, and German peasants. Indians also strolled through the streets, demonstrating their skill with the bow and arrow by shooting at the passing crowd. Lee was unimpressed, finding the city dirty, expensive, and chaotic, with inhabitants who were “powerful at a promise, but don’t mention the fulfillment.”⁴ Depressed, he remarked that it was a good thing he had “seen several pretty girls,” otherwise he would pronounce St. Louis’s prospects “a ‘bloody humbug.’”⁵

Still, as he acknowledged, it was a self-imposed exile, for Lee had jumped at the opportunity to go west. In the chief engineer’s office he had heard rumors that the prosperity of St. Louis was about to be undercut by the capriciousness of the river. The Mississippi’s current made it a powerfully evolving force, which severed its own branches and carved new bends—in human, not geological, time. At St. Louis deposits had begun to collect as early as 1815, silting up the deep channel and creating obstacles that blocked the port. By the mid-1830s one sandbar, Duncan’s Island, had grown into a 200-acre prominence covered with cottonwood trees; another, named Bloody Island, after the hotheads who rowed there to fight duels, had become a notable feature of local lore. The Illinois shore of the river was caving in, and the channel was widening and deepening on that side, raising the possibility of competition from new wharves. Well aware that the course of the river would dictate the course of investments and immigration, city leaders tried to stop the progress of the bars. They dropped tons of sand in wooden boxes at the head of Bloody Island to throw the current toward St. Louis, but the river smashed the boxes and the sand increased the bar. There were primitive attempts at dredging with ox teams, but more silt was deposited and more steamboats grounded. Then, in 1831, St. Louis was made a port of entry for the United States, and the federal government began to have a stake in the efforts. Chief Engineer Gratiot, who came from an old St. Louis family, went out to assess the situation and personally examined the various proposals to halt the damage. After a long lobbying effort by Missouri’s powerful senator Thomas Hart Benton, Congress made the first of several appropriations to redirect the river’s current, improve navigation, and save the port.⁶

General Gratiot had a personal interest in rescuing St. Louis, but that was not the reason the army engineers were given the task. By the time Congress approved the Mississippi River project, the army had spent more than a decade working on the internal improvement of the nation. The Corps of Engineers had originally been established in 1802 to construct defensive fortifications. However, as the United States acquired territory, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun realized that the country could never hold the land unless it was surveyed and made accessible to settlement. Calhoun increasingly came to see military needs as indistinguishable from public works. In 1824 he pressured Congress to place the construction of canals and improvement of rivers and harbors under the direction of the army. During the next twenty years the Corps of Engineers became an irreplaceable source of expertise on the waterways, as it would be for exploration, management of territorial lands and native peoples, accurate mapping, and internal communications.⁷

At the time Robert Lee entered West Point, army engineers were charting the Great Lakes, surveying canal routes, and contributing innovative technical and managerial skills to the earliest American railways. Before 1830 the Corps of Engineers could take credit for fourteen roads totaling some 1,900 miles, including the National Road. In 1831 the War Department was given primary authority for topographical work. This came to include the establishment of boundaries and observation of weather conditions and natural resources, as well as recommendations for likely military sites. It was under this aegis that Lee was assigned for several months in 1835 to survey the frontier between Michigan and Ohio, an excursion he enjoyed. In 1838 a distinct Topographical Corps was created. Lee thought this branch of the service appealing and seems to have hoped that he, like his friends Jack Mackay and Joe Johnston, might be tapped for it. “Give me your hand My friend…,” Lee exclaimed to Mackay when he heard of his appointment, “you are in the Topogs, which perhaps offers the most pleasant duty of any corps in the Service. It will introduce you to the community at large, give you an opportunity of visiting all parts of the Country, enable you to practice what you have learned, stimulate your farther efforts in science &c….”⁸ The military contribution to developing the vast, uncharted American territory was so extensive that warrior Zachary Taylor would drily note: “The ax, pick, saw and trowel, has become more the implement of the American soldier, than the cannon, musket or sword.” At least one historian believes that the western expansion of the country would have been delayed by a decade without the work of the U.S. Army.⁹

Lee, Johnston, Mackay, and their fellow officers were uniquely fitted for this work. West Point was for many years the only academic institution in the United States that stressed mathematical and scientific training. Higher education in the early nineteenth century was still thought to be a process of memorizing classic literature, or studying ancient languages and history, with only the slightest nod to practical application. Harvard did not require students to have even a passing knowledge of arithmetic before 1802, and until 1835 West Point was the only school in America that offered a degree in engineering. West Point also pioneered the American teaching of such subjects as architecture, geology, astronomy, and mineralogy, and Thayer weighted examination points to favor the more exacting technical subjects. It was a measure of Robert Lee’s ability that he was chosen in his second year at the academy to be an assistant professor of mathematics, for his fellow professors were in the forefront of the nation’s nascent scientific endeavors. If important books were unavailable in English, West Point faculty translated them or wrote their own, and these works became the basis for the study of engineering in many other academic institutions. As colleges slowly adopted similar courses, they hired graduates of the military academy to teach and direct them. Both Harvard and Yale, for example, selected West Pointers to head their first schools of engineering, founded nearly four decades after the academy opened its doors.¹⁰ When Robert E. Lee was commissioned in the Corps of Engineers in 1829, he was as prepared as anyone in the country to embrace the new field of “technology”—a word just introduced into the common vocabulary that same year.¹¹

It was with this background that the young engineer began his struggle to constrain the Mississippi’s currents. He had only a vague idea how to accomplish it. Navigational engineering was still at a tentative stage. All previous attempts to curb the river’s natural inclinations had failed. Army engineers who had begun a similar venture to deepen channels in the Hudson River reported to Congress that the experiment “was a bold one and its success doubtful.”¹² Lee learned some lessons from the Hudson project, however, including the need to construct barriers that could channel a current without creating such resistance that the dykes were eventually destroyed. He called on his former boss, Captain Andrew Talcott, who had worked on the Hudson River improvements, for advice, admitting that he was “in despair,” he had “so many things to ask.”¹³ Ultimately, a combination of fragile precedent and trial and error would guide Lee’s work.

As Lee told Mackay, he had, in fact, been handed several assignments at once. In addition to the crisis at St. Louis, commercial lobbyists were hoping to clear obstructions that were impeding navigation along the upper reaches of the river. The chief obstacle was a series of rapids 200 miles north of St. Louis, with a high velocity and hidden rock formations that made that section impassable in times of low water.¹⁴ In August 1837 Lee set out to survey the area, map it, and write a preliminary report on both projects. He was accompanied by another army engineer, Montgomery Meigs, whose booming confidence led Lee to declare him “a host in himself.”¹⁵ Together they conducted operations from a dugout canoe, Meigs consulting the compass and level lines, making watercolor sketches of the topography, and producing the final maps. Lee recorded the depths and currents of the river and designed a comprehensive plan. Their base camps were “the worst kind of small log cabin,” or a filthy room in St. Louis that caused Lee to break out a bottle of cologne and Meigs to declare: “The atmosphere is phaugh!” Together they caught yard-long catfish, hunted wild turkeys from horseback, and encountered a group of Indian chiefs “in full costume…with scarlet blankets & Buffalo robes and painted faces—not caricatures.” Given the sorrowful part Meigs would play in Lee’s later life, one reads of their exuberant adventures with some wistfulness.¹⁶

But that was a quarter century hence. In late 1837, the work season closed, Lee and Meigs drew their precise and beautiful maps, elaborated their plans, turned east, and made their case to a tightfisted Congress. To overcome the rapids, Lee advocated following the natural channel of the river and blasting out as much rock as necessary to allow steamboats to pass at low water. This was a deviation from earlier plans that had suggested skirting the rapids by building a parallel canal. To salvage the port of St. Louis, he recommended building dikes at either end of Bloody Island, which would prevent the river from cutting a larger channel on the Illinois side and force the water to flow along a prescribed path. Lee also suggested the construction of a wing dam, some 1,300 feet long, that would project diagonally toward the city, pushing away the accumulated sand from Duncan’s Island and creating a deep new shipping lane. The dikes were to be built of pilings, surrounded by stones, and filled with brush that would allow for filtration to dissipate the river’s force, but also catch its notorious silt and floating branches to stabilize the structures. There was little original in this proposal. The use of dikes, wing dams, and blasting were the standard processes for water management, and many of the techniques had been known in Europe since the eighteenth century. Lee’s plan drew heavily on a French textbook on hydrodynamics that had been used at West Point for twenty years, and on recommendations made by Henry Shreve, a celebrated inventor and river man, who had earlier assessed the situation near St. Louis. Only the little innovation of using brush to catchdebris that would reinforce the dikes lent a ring of originality to the proposal. Still, it was persuasive enough that the Congress agreed (thoug hambivalently) to fund the endeavor for two years.¹⁷

“Sketch of the Harbor of St. Louis,” drawn by Lee in 1837.
NATIONAL ARCH IVES

Lee returned to St. Louis in the spring of 1838, having persuaded seasoned army engineer Horace Bliss—the “Bliss, you know Horace” of his letter to Mackay—to replace Meigs. He was also confident in the expertise of Henry Kayser, a surveyor born and trained in Germany, who had worked for him the previous year. He hired eighty men to labor on the river, engaged a steamboat, two skiffs, and some large transportation boats, acquired a machine to drive pilings, and found lodging and provisions for the workers. It was a frustrating project, plagued by blistering heat, balky mules, and equally balky workmen, and water levels that seemed always to be either too high or too low to allow any progress. The editors of the Missouri Republican cheered them on, noting that since “the commencement of the work it has been prosecuted with great activity, and with unexpected dispatch, when the character of the locality, the scarcity of laborers and other difficulties are considered.”¹⁸ Another champion of the endeavor, St. Louis mayor John Darby, recalled many years later how “indefatigably” Lee had toiled. “He went in person with the hands every morning about sunrise, and worked day by day in the hot, broiling sun…[and] with his assistant, Henry Kayser, Esq., worked at his drawing, plans and estimates every night till eleven o’clock.”¹⁹ The punishing work seemed initially to be paying off: by late 1838 the channel near the wharves had gained both depth and breadth, and Duncan’s Island was moving downstream. At the Des Moines rapids Lee and his men had been able to blast and remove thousands of tons of stone, resulting in a passage as wide as eighty feet in some places. After three work seasons there was reason to be optimistic. But Lee was thwarted by the fickle Congress, which failed to appropriate sufficient funds after the panic of 1837, and the interference of irate citizens from Illinois, who had hopes of moving the lucrative channel to their shore. When cannons were fired deliberately at the crew, and an Illinois state court filed an injunction, the project was brought to a temporary halt. Frustrated, Lee told Mayor Darby of his “chagrin and mortification at being compelled to discontinue the work,” but, under orders, he returned to Washington in January 1839. When he visited St. Louis again the next year, it was only to see about the dispersal of government property and to tie up some dangling bureaucratic threads. His plans, he confided to Mackay, were “for the present dished.”²⁰

Much of Lee’s writing during this period consists of painstaking accounts of monies expended, the condition of equipment, the desire to hire “waders” who would be able to stand in the river all day, or the need for pressed spikes, tar, rice, and “manilla rope.”²¹ At first glance the letters seem to be little more than a tedious testament to Lee’s orderly nature. However, taken as a whole—and there are scores of such records—they reveal a fascinating side of the Mississippi River assignment. This undertaking was the first venture for which Lee had primary responsibility. Far from being the detached, cerebral designer, he was forced to wear many practical hats. In addition to being the chief procurement officer, he was quartermaster (“I shall…procure some Keel Boats to quarter the men in &c, have them fitted up for the purpose and bring along such utensils and implements as may be required”); comptroller (“I did not make the alteration as the vouchers were all numbered &c, but we must…return the amount this qtr.”); and technical expert (“The Pile Engine will have to be 30 to 35 ft. high, worked with a horse. Ram 1600 to 2000 lbs.”) ²² For the audience in Washington he had also to act as lobbyist for the continuation of funding, reminding Congress and the War Department that the benefits of the river improvement “would more than authorize ten times the sum, and that the community at large will be repaid an hundred fold.”²³ In short, he was the executive director of the project. As such, Lee typified one more contribution the army engineers made to civil society: the introduction of meticulous new methods of administration, groundbreaking for their day.

One of the many visionary reforms Calhoun brought to the army was the creation of an efficient management system that allowed the government to control the largest and most diverse set of enterprises of its day. The military’s interests were vast in their scope and ambition, encompassing field armies, Indian agencies (such as the one at which Jack Mackay was serving), coastal fortifications, the development of new munitions, and the bureaucracy of men and matériel—all over a huge, wild, and unknown geographical area. Calhoun, who had witnessed the disastrous inefficiencies of the Corps of Engineers during the War of 1812, was determined to devise a progressive administrative system that would forgo the old “craft” ethos that had relied on instinct and experience rather than clearly defined methods. Calhoun was joined in his task by Sylvanus Thayer, who saw the administrative reforms as a natural outgrowth of the precision he taught at West Point. General Winfield Scott, who would become one of Lee’s mentors, was another ally in the plan. In the early 1820s Scott had written the General Regulations for the Army (or “Institutes” as he preferred to call them), the first modern management manual published in the United States. It inaugurated a military culture that stressed responsibility, established a chain of command, and delineated a series of authorized procedures for reporting. Calhoun and Scott also devised standardized forms and regulations, so there was uniform accountability, whether at Washington headquarters or fighting the Seminole Indians in Florida. When a young officer such as Lee struggled at an outpost to complete forms in duplicate, to pay accounts to the half penny, or to maintain a daunting schedule of monthly, quarterly, and congressional reports, he was responding to structured management principles that would transform the way that business was conducted in America.²⁴

Army modernization spilled over into civilian life through the engineers’ participation in public projects. Corps members like Lee who were loaned to build canals, lighthouses, and railroads brought with them the methods being promoted in the military. Instead of relying on intuition or personal whim, army engineers calculated with an eye to efficiency and cost savings and used standardized measures and precise rules when planning their constructions. These concepts were not completely alien to American entrepreneurs, but virtually no business organization of the time could claim such a detailed corporate structure. The influence was particularly pronounced on the railroads, where military engineers inserted their own hierarchical arrangement into the corporations and infused them with the army’s ethos, procedures, and even its forms. Just as they lent their mechanical expertise to large public projects, the engineers ushered in a new way of thinking about professionalism and the running of diversified corporations.²⁵

While Lee was mastering these administrative procedures, he was also experiencing the new challenge of supervising large groups of men. He was still growing into his leadership. The workers were impressed, as was nearly everyone, with his fine physical presence and courtly ways, but he remained aloof, “never on any occasion becoming too familiar with the men.”²⁶ Despite his own conscientiousness and attempts to compensate for the rough conditions with double pay, he had trouble inspiring the workers and was plagued with absenteeism.²⁷ Once in frustration Lee asked Talcott, who was working on the lower river, to come and help him, plaintively asking him to leave his work “at the mouth of the Miss—you had better take hold in the middle.”²⁸ He essentially deferred to the ideas of Shreve and Chief Engineer Gratiot, rather than fighting for control of the operation.²⁹ The low-key style of management he later used so effectively was also still under development. Lee’s instructions to Henry Kayser, a respected professional peer who handled his boss’s personal finances in his absence, were often impatient, and though never insulting, were far from motivating.³⁰ This was the harsh note of inexperience. As he gained confidence and practice, Lee’s approach to command would grow gentler.

Robert E. Lee’s immersion into practical science was encouraged by the professional relationships he enjoyed in St. Louis. During his first visit to the city he met Dr. William Beaumont, a military surgeon who, as Lee wryly noted, was “at the head of the Profession here so that he can administer food and Physic in just proportions.”³¹ On his second sojourn in the city, when he had brought along his wife and sons Custis and Rooney, they shared quarters with the doctor’s family.³² A fly on the wall of their large parlor would have had a satisfying earful. In addition to Beaumont and his hospitable wife Debbie, they were often joined by Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a brilliant army officer who had taught Cadet Lee mathematics at West Point. Hitchcock was a fine conversationalist, famous for his disdain of “dullards,” whom he drove away by reading aloud from Spinoza and classical literature. Lee was also known as a good storyteller, and Dr. Beaumont, who was interested in Shakespeare and self-improvement as well as the makeup of gastric juices, was not only clever but wickedly outspoken.³³ Hitchcock and Lee vied in flirtation with Sarah “Tasy” Beaumont, the doctor’s lovely and amusing sixteen-year-old daughter. The group spent merry evenings with Tasy at the piano and Hitchcock joining in on the flute, while Lee turned the pages of the music book. The little Lee boys roared around the room pretending to be riverboats, until their father feared they would “keep on so heavy a pressure of steam…that they will burst their boilers.”³⁴

There was serious talk, too, sometimes of army affairs, sometimes of religion or local issues. After a dinner with Senator Benton they compared shocked notes about the untamed Missouri political scene, but they were also well aware of the country’s potential and quickly joined the excited speculation on real estate. Beaumont’s home had been part of a museum housing the Indian and natural artifacts collected on the Lewis and Clark expedition, and this association heightened their inquisitiveness about the region.³⁵ It was an age in which scientific method revolved around observation, cataloging natural objects and meticulously recording facts. The exploration and description of North America was a landmark event in scientific circles, and Lee and his fellow officers were contributors to the westward advance of rigorous investigation. Though one Lee biographer has proclaimed him “an engineer, not a naturalist,” in fact he was a keen observer, and painstakingly noted the features for which the prairies would become celebrated.³⁶ Not only did he provide some of the earliest accurate soundings of the Mississippi, he carefully examined nature in all its forms. To Jack Mackay he enthused over land teeming with game: “Why man, in a half an hour you can put up 200 prairie hens, and have a prairie 60 miles in extent to shoot them in. As to partridges you can hardly keep from stumbling over them, and hares and squirrels are out of number.”³⁷ He dug three and a half feet into the soil, found it still rich and black—utterly unlike the familiar Virginia clay—and reported that it was so friable “you could cultivate it with your feet.” He wondered at the size and beauty of the black walnut and sugar maple trees, and precisely noted their measurements. Lee was also curious about human life, and along with his catalog of the region’s physical features, he remarked on the dangers of vigilante law and appreciated the qualities of the brave pioneer “wimming.” “The people are rough, but they will polish,” he remarked, and pronounced Missouri “a great country, which will one day be a grand one.”³⁸

Lee’s appreciation for critical observation was reinforced by his relationship with William Beaumont, for the doctor had conducted landmark experiments in physiology that had given him an international reputation. In the early 1820s, while stationed on Mackinac Island, Beaumont treated a wounded French-Canadian fur trader named Alexis St. Martin, who had been shot in the upper abdomen. The damage was extensive, leaving a hole the size of a man’s hand, and St. Martin had not been expected to live. Beaumont’s skill saved him, but the doctor was not able to completely close the wound, and it healed with an opening between the surface of the body and the stomach. A few years later, Beaumont began to take advantage of the unusual “window” to do experiments on human digestion. He attached pieces of salt pork, stale bread, and cabbage to silk threads, then dangled them in and out of the hole, chronicling the rate of digestion, the temperature of the organ, and the effects of alcohol and exercise on the stomach’s action. He established for the first time that the stomach worked alone to digest food; that it was an acidic chemical process; and that the contents of the stomach were digested together, rather than one item at a time. His observations that meat and starchy foods were more easily digested than vegetables, that digestion was aided by mild exercise, and that most people consumed far more than their bodies needed provided a basis for prudent dietary health that is still prevalent today.³⁹ Beaumont also extracted gastric juice to perform some early “test tube” experiments, and attempted to analyze its composition.⁴⁰ For nearly seven years he persuaded the reluctant St. Martin to continue the research. In 1833 Beaumont published a book entitled Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. The findings were immediately embraced by European and American scientists, with even the popular press acknowledging their value.⁴¹

Beaumont’s revelations were extremely important at a time when virtually nothing was known about bodily processes or the causation of disease. Once more it had been the foresight of the military that had given a push to scientific advance. Notable here was Army Surgeon General Joseph Lowell, who had encouraged his doctors to conduct such experiments.⁴² There were few things doctors of this day could be counted on to facilitate competently—they could give smallpox vaccinations, for example, and knew how to set bones, and they had drugs at their disposal that would alleviate pain or relieve constipation. But medical schools were few and driven by commercial interests, and no research hospitals existed at the time.⁴³ Dissension and competition among practitioners was high, and chicanery was common. Beaumont himself once characterized his contemporaries as buffoons, quacks, or eccentrics.⁴⁴ The prevailing remedies for everything that ailed a person—from cholera to arthritis—were those that provoked a visible reaction, positive or not. Hence the bloodletting that might temporarily induce an artificial calm or lower the body temperature; purgatives that showed the quick effect of vomiting or diarrhea; or the “blistering” that was thought to release noxious elements from a raised pustule. Many of these methods were dangerous or even lethal. All were ineffective, pointing up the helplessness of doctors in the face of infection and disease.⁴⁵ The Lee family suffered under this ignorance along with everyone else in their society. For years Robert Lee’s wallet held a “Prescription for Yellow Fever” that proposed curing the mosquito-borne virus with a purgative to clear the bowels, water and vinegar-soaked cloths to the fevered brow, and, when all else failed, mustard plasters on the soles of the feet. His cousin Hill Carter had a similarly elaborate recipe for reversing the onset of a miscarriage: “copious” bleeding, a grain of opium, and the elevation of the patient’s hips above her head. If things turned worse, she was to be “plugged up” and given a mixture of sugar and lead every two hours. Hill Carter’s wife lost seven babes in her first dozen pregnancies.⁴⁶

The result was a reliance on home nursing and a general disdain of doctors, which Robert Lee shared. “I have lost a good deal of confidence in Drs & medicine for any protracted sickness,” he wrote when in his thirties; and later, when suffering from a bad case of the flu: “I am now under the operation of the mustard plasters & blisters. Tomorrow I am to have 20 leeches & the next day God knows what.” Though he would affectionately remember Beaumont, “in his shirt sleeves, with a dose of rhubarb in one hand & a glass of toddy in the other,” Lee remained a skeptic and generally advised suffering friends to avoid doctors and embrace exercise and a healthy diet.⁴⁷

Lee enjoyed a promotion to captain while working in St. Louis, and honed skills that would be important for him in the future, notably the ability to cope with changing circumstances and disparate variables, and to synthesize them as he directed an ambitious project. Still, the uncertainty of funding and the endless delays frustrated him, and he grew weary of the project. In addition, despite his curiosity, at heart he was no frontiersman. On his first journey toward St. Louis he had already expressed a nostalgia for Virginia that never really left him.⁴⁸ He was alarmed when Indians stopped being picturesque and tried to snatch away two-year-old Rooney—he sent the children home with his wife a few months later.⁴⁹ Finally, in 1840, he savored the announcement of his “escape from the West.” “I felt so elated when I again found myself within the confines of the Ancient Dominion,” he told Cousin Hill Carter, “that I nodded to all the old trees as I passed, chatted with the drivers and stable boys, shook hands with the land lords, and in the fullness of my heart—don’t tell Cousin Mary—wanted to kiss all the pretty girls I met.”⁵⁰

The river work was left unfinished. Lee recognized and lamented this, but the whims of the waterway, the inadequacy of congressional appropriations, and the experimental nature of the effort dictated that it would be so. Already in 1840 Lee acknowledged that he was “much concerned to find that the river was making an effort to resume its former channel & would probably succeed.” The Mississippi had begun to tear breaches in the dikes and to fill up sections of the channel, and he suggested strengthening the pier in front of the town.⁵¹ By 1844 the harbor was again seriously threatened, and the river had apparently worn another channel, again sending water to the Illinois side. Even though he had cleared an impressive pathway through the rapids north of the city, it was still far from navigable. Mark Twain, who knew the Mississippi River with a famous intimacy, could have predicted that Lee’s improvements in St. Louis would be temporary. It was near to impossible, Twain averred, to “tame that lawless stream…curb it or confine it…the West Point Engineers have not their superiors anywhere…they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him…[they] might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave….”⁵² At a distance Lee could do little, and essentially retired from the project, leaving it to the city to find a way to stabilize the reinforcements.⁵³ Kayser and Mayor Darby devised temporary strategies to keep ahead of the river until 1853, when a new city engineer, Samuel R. Curtis, made essential modifications to Lee’s plan and finally secured the port.⁵⁴

Nonetheless, by drawing on previous advances on the Hudson River, refining the work of Henry Shreve, and building up a body of data, Robert Lee had contributed to the future of St. Louis. What he accomplished was to buy time and provide a foundation for those who would find the permanent solution—the time-honored cumulative approach for success in engineering.⁵⁵ For this he was remembered with respect, and after the Civil War with proud affection. In his memoirs Mayor Darby thought of Lee as he described the final stretch of a 1,200-mile Mississippi steamboat race that ended at St. Louis on July 4, 1870. Telegraph operators reported the thrilling progress of the great vessels as they roared up the river, faster than the speed of the railroad. The contest could not have taken place, Darby maintained, but for the deep water channeled by a sunburned army lieutenant, attempting to redirect nature against many odds. Newspapers depicted the climactic scene of the race so evocatively that it became firmly fixed in American consciousness and even in popular song. With an enthusiasm that challenged police control, more than a million people crowded onto the levee: all waiting for the boat that bore the young engineer’s name—waiting for the boat that would smash every record to win the day—waiting for the Robert E. Lee.⁵⁶