North point of Bloody Island South point of Bloody Island Image Credits |
Lt. Lee Moves the River
Robert E. Lee pictured as a Lieutenant General
Charles Gratiot, Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, first
assigned Henry Shreve, the Superintendent of
the Western Rivers the task of planning and building
a wing dam at the top of Bloody Island,
a large sandbar that was causing the St. Louis side of the Mississippi
River to silt up, threatening to close the
city's river front.
Shreve began work in 1836 but could not devote his full attention
to it so Gratiot sent a young lieutenant assigned to a Washington
desk job and eager to be in the field. In 1837 Lieutenant Robert
E. Lee and Second Lieutenant Montgomery C. Meigs began to study
the feasibility of the project.
Looking back, it is interesting to note that Lee became the military
leader of the Confederate States of America and Meigs became the
Quartermaster-General for the Union army during the Civil War.
Lee proposed building two dams, one at the top of Bloody Island
and one at the bottom to further direct the water flow into Duncan's
Island, the sandbar that was filling up the St. Louis river front.
Lee began in 1838 with the dam at the base of Bloody Island because
it promised the most immediate effect on Duncan's Island. The
dam was 2500 feet long and made from two parallel rows of piles
forty feet apart with the distance between each pile being about
four to five feet. The forty feet between the rows was filled
with brush and rocks that a build-up of silt further secured.
The dam construction started in June and by October more tha
seven hundred feet of Duncan's Island had been washed away. Lee
was unable to complete the top dam because Congress was not willing
to appropriate funds for continued work and because an Illinois
land owner near the upper dam obtained an injunction against Lee,
arguing that the dam threatened the value of his property by diverting
the river. However, Lee had already accomplished the eradication
of Duncan's Island and deepened the river around St. Louis' river
front.
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