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The Mississippi River: St. Louis' Friend or Foe?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Abstract
Professor Lemly explores the blind loyalty of a city to a river, describes the ambivalence that characterized the city's leaders when railroads offered an alternate means of inter-regional transporty and analyzes the eventual efforts of St. Louis to make the most of both river and rails.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Business History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1: Special Transportation Issue , Spring 1965 , pp. 7 - 15
- Copyright
- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1965
References
* Robert Nelson Greenlaw, writing in the St. Louis Republican, February 3, 1919. Greenlaw spent a major portion of his life in the railroad industry in the St. Louis region and had a unique opportunity over a period of years to study the problems of rail development in that area. Prior to writing the article from which the quotation is taken, he left his rail employment but continued to live in St. Louis. In late 1918 he was commissioned by the St. Louis Republic to write “as many articles about St. Louis and the rail problem as he thought was needed.” These articles appeared in the Republic for about thirteen weeks and made a profound impression on the commercial leaders of the city.
1 The writer recognizes that the title of this article is provocative, and he also will be the first to say that it can be true only in a relative sense that the Mississippi could be considered an enemy of St. Louis or of any city on the banks of this great river. The article does attempt to point out that primary dependence upon only one form of transportation, in an era when several forms are available, does limit the service which a city can render to its citizens and to its trade territory.
No attempt is made in this article to point to all of the difficulties which confronted St. Louis, nor is any attempt made to focus attention on all of the advantages possessed by neighboring cities in the period when the valley was being settled and the struggle for economic dominance was at its peak. It is the contention of the writer, however, that St. Louis might have altered the outcome of the contest, or at least might have emerged more nearly equal to Chicago in size and economic power, if very early in the struggle a majority of her citizens had seen the need for railroads more clearly and if they had acted sooner and with greater determination to secure more complete rail service to all parts of the United States.
2 “Now (1841) it stretched more than a mile along the river, and several blocks inland — a city of sixteen thousand people. An impressive line of steamboats reared their blunt, unenclosed bows above the levee. There were nearly three hundred steamboats on the Mississippi now, the largest and finest of them in the St. Louis trade. St. Louis might not become, as Pierre Laclede had fondly planned, the most beautiful city in America, but it was the principal port of the middle country. With boats the prime means of transportation throughout the world, only a port could hope to become a metropolis. A few visionaries dreamed that this place might some day rival New Orleans.” Dorsey, Florence L., Master of the Mississippi (Boston, 1941), p. 211.Google Scholar
3 In Missouri, as in most of the other states, the year 1836 climaxed a series of promotional drives for internal improvements which more and more called for railroad construction rather than other forms of development. A state convention was held in St. Louis during the month of April, and a plan was adopted which called for development of two railroads to the west and south of St. Louis. State aid and federal assistance were assumed to be necessary to the completion of the projects. Unfortunately, the great panic or depression of 1837 stopped almost all rail development activity for a number of years. See Primm, James Neal, Economic Policy in the Development of a Western State, Missouri, 1820–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 78 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 The city of St. Louis, notwithstanding the fact that her commercial supremacy might already be questioned, remained as yet very complacent in matters of commercial rivalry. “Her natural position” was her great heritage. “Knowing her wealth as well as the activity and proverbial industry of her citizens,” St. Louis viewed “with no jealous eye the efforts made in the state of Illinois and elsewhere to carry out railroad enterprises such as the Central Railroad from Chicago and Dubuque to Cairo and various cross lines that were being extended from the Lake to the Mississippi.” Million, John W., State Aid to Railways in Missouri (Chicago, 1896), p. 53.Google Scholar
5 “The current of commerce will flow from the equator in the direction of the poles, carrying the luxuries of the tropics to the inhabitants of colder climes, and returning with the more substantial products of the temperate zones. Thus the bounties of nature will be divided among the inhabitants of every clime; and, by the agency of commerce the physical comforts of every region will be increased.” From the Western Journal, II (1849), pp. 1–2. Quoted by Belcher, Wyatt W., The Economic Rivalry Between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850–1880 (New York, 1947).Google Scholar
Others who lived during this era were not blind to East-West trade potential. Thomas Hart Benton, among others, continued to press for a rail line from St. Louis to the West, so that the Middle Valley could trade with California, the Pacific, and Asia. Also, see Footnote 8.
6 Nothing, it was believed, could ever lessen the river steamboat traffic. The Erie Canal, opened seventeen years before, and the later Weiland Canal, had hardly dented Valley boating. St. Louis could still deliver grain and metal to Europe, by way of the Mississippi and New Orleans, more cheaply than they could be carried over any other route. As for the railroads, the few and insignificant lines in existence fed steamboat traffic; most of them had been constructed to carry ore, coal, or stone to the nearest navigable stream. Dorsey, Master of the Mississippi, p. 212.
7 Quoted by Belcher, Economic Rivalry, p. 53.
8 “Henry Shreve had become a staunch advocate of railroads. He believed, as many steamboat men did, that railroads would substantially serve the waterways by bringing the remote parts of the country in touch with the Mississippi. Men generally considered railroads as crude auxiliaries to the water-roads. The Valley river transportation tonnage was more than twenty times as great as all other United States steam tonnage. It was the most powerful and useful trade factor in existence. A railroad to the Pacific would be a sound adjunct to it, Shreve maintained.” Dorsey, Master of the Mississippi, p. 241.
9 “The Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, in 1853, had begun a wooden bridge across the Mississippi at Davenport, Iowa. It was built in the face of powerful opposition and a prohibitive ruling by Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, for it crossed a government reservation. Soon after this bridge was finished (in 1856), the steamboat Effie Afton swung against it; the galley stove tipped over and a fire broke out. The boat's owner sued the Railroad Bridge Company. The case came up in the Circuit Court in September of 1857, Abraham Lincoln acting as attorney for the bridge company. The jury failed to agree and was discharged. There were hints that the Effie Afton disaster had been staged to provide a suit. In May of 1858, James Ward, a steamboat owner of St. Louis, filed a bill in the United States District Court, Southern Division of Iowa, praying that the bridge be declared a nuisance and ordered removed. Steamboat men continued to complain that the bridge obstructed navigation. Congress, in 1866, finally passed an act requiring that this bridge be replaced by another, half the cost to be paid by the United States.” Ibid., p. 264. For Chicago's side of this story see Pierce, Bessie Louise, A History of Chicago, 1848–1871 (New York, 1937), pp. 41 ff.Google Scholar
10 “As well may St. Louis attempt to dam up the Mississippi as to prevent the bridging of that river at half a score of points where the necessities of commerce will soon demand it. … We tell St. Louis once for all that not Chicago but the genius of the age demands the bridging of the Mississippi and the Missouri. Instead therefore of opposing this decree of ‘Manifest destiny’ we again commend to the serious attention of St. Louis the project of building a bridge at her own doors.” Belcher, Economic Rivalry, p. 64.
11 All this had come about though Chicago as a city had made no railroad investments, and Chicagoans as a whole had not unduly loosed their purse strings to finance railway construction. It appeared unnecessary for Chicago to pour her resources into what others seemed anxious to finance. Pierce, History of Chicago, p. 75.
12 New Orleans had its best commerce in 1859. In that year it received from the river 2,187,560 tons of freight. But shippers there were not deceived by these figures. The freight was comparatively local in origin, most of it coming from no farther north than Red River. The importance of that city as an export base was on the wane. The growing railroad lines were forcing it to a position of insignificance as an exit for the Valley trade.
St. Louis was thriving on the new Upper River trade. The number of passengers carried on steamboats to and from that port in the year that ended in September, 1855, was reported as 1,045,269. In 1859, 3,658 steamboats arrived there. Dorsey, Master of the Mississippi, p. 257.
13 For a discussion of the effects of the war on commerce in the region, see Coulter, E. Merton, “Effects of Secession upon the Commerce of the Mississippi Valley,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. III (June, 1916), pp. 275–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 By 1870 the dominant rail pattern was clearly developing along an east-west axis. The greatest force in this action was New York and its need for a western partner along the water level route. Once Chicago became the midwest key point, the lines west of Chicago, to the Northwest, to the Central West, and to the Southwest, all tended to focus on this key position at the foot of Lake Michigan. Kansas City, for example, emerged as a significant city largely because of her rail ties within the pathway of the Chicago-Southwest traffic flow.
15 This project here in the river metropolis was more difficult than other bridges over the Mississippi. The waters of the Missouri and the Illinois, joined with the Mississippi, made a formidable barrier to construction progress.
16 Unfortunately for St. Louis, the volume of traffic across the Eads Bridge in its early years was not as great as bad been hoped. Fares paid for use of the bridge were not sufficient to pay interest on the bonds and the bridge was sold at foreclosure. With this action the bridge ceased to be free to all potential users, and for a time a monopolistic situation was created. Again, the Mississippi became, in a very real sense, a barrier to easy development of ties with the eastern half of the United States. Partly as a result, St. Louis began to concentrate her attention on the Southwest and, to some extent, seemed to reduce her contacts with the East.
17 A little more than a score of years had thus seen Chicago emerge from a dependence on two water routes, the lake and the canal. Throughout the state more miles of railroad were constructed than could be found in any other commonwealth of the Union, and railway systems of some ten thousand miles bound her to all the important commercial centers of the country. Indeed, by the late sixties no farm in Illinois was more than fifty miles from a railroad station and the average distance was seven. So far-flung was the Chicago rail network that no less than sixteen points on the Mississippi had railroad communications with the city. Every fifteen minutes a passenger train whistled arrival or departure. From 820 locomotives and 14,681 cars in 1864, the eight major carriers in 1870 had 1,473 locomotives and 32,130 cars, while gross earnings from passenger fares and freight receipts had skyrocketed from $39,521,101 to $64,758,434. Pierce, History of Chicago, p. 75.
18 “Within the St. Louis Metropolitan district — within the confines of Greater St. Louis — there lies, on the east side of the river, in Illinois, a vast undeveloped industrial territory. … St. Louis has no greater asset, in the race for commercial supremacy, than is this great industrial district which lies at its door. … East St Louis, it is true, owes much to St. Louis. It cannot reach the fullest measure of growth and prosperity … unless this fact is recognized. St. Louis, it is equally true, owes much to East St. Louis. … The time is not far distant when the intelligent citizenship of both communities will see the folly of any lack of harmony and unity between the two; …” Greenlaw, St. Louis Republic, April 7, 1919.