Lt. Lee Moves the River

Robert E. Lee pictured as a Lieutenant General

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 than 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.