The things we do!

Then the mouth
(thus obtained) was found too shallow for the demands of commerce, and
there followed what some one with poetic instincts has called the battle
of the shoals, a battle in which General Eads, who had bridged the river
at St. Louis, compelled the river by means of jetties to run deeper and
carry heavier burdens.
But the future battle-fields are perceived to lie toward the sources, at
the eaves, as it were, of the watersheds, the headwaters of its
tributaries as well as its own. No deepening, embanking, straightening,
canalization of the river is to be permanently effective until all danger
of flood can be removed.
Wandering among those tributaries, seeing the trickling fountains of
several of them, watching the timid stream in the naked, deforested fields
(not knowing quite which way to go, east or west, north or south), I have
been strongly appealed to by the plan of impounding in reservoirs these
first waters, whose freedom (no longer restrained in youth by the sage
forests) makes them libertines and wantons in the distant valleys below.


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