. The banks dissolve
like sugar, and the next day steamboats can cross where the day before
were fields and may be houses. Besides this, the current is constantly
washing away and building up not only hidden bars on the river bottom,
but even islands above its surface. In the fall and in the spring it
rises with such terrifying rapidity that some years it quickly
overflows its banks in certain reaches till it is sixty miles wide.
Houses and trees torn from their places, and wrecks of boats, float or
protrude from the bottom of this brown lake. And when the flood
subsides, the current often chooses a new and changed channel. Amid the
ever-varying dangers of such a river the only safety for steamboats is
in a race of pilots so learned and so alert as to have the shifting
bars and courses always in their minds. In 1839, when steamboats were
the only means of rapid transit in the West, when there were more of
them in the harbor of the little town of Saint Louis than to-day when
it is a great city, this class of pilots was a large and a very
respectable one. Much of their knowledge of the river was what young
Eads learned while he was a clerk among them; and as time went on, he
came to realize that although the Mississippi seems so capricious in
its terrible games that one would think them the result of chance, yet
in truth, they "are controlled by laws as immutable as the Creator."

Despite all care that could be used, steamboats were every week sunk
and wrecked, and with their valuable engines, boilers, and cargoes were
often left where they lay in the ceaseless brown current. After he had
been for three years on the river, Eads gave up his clerkship to go
into the business of raising these boats, their machinery, and their
freight. In 1842, at the age of twenty-two, he formed a partnership
with Case & Nelson, boat-builders. His first appearance in the new
business was an experience that well shows his quick inventive genius,
his persistency, and his courage. While his diving-bell boat was
building, a barge loaded with pig-lead sank in the rapids at Keokuk,
212 miles from Saint Louis. A contract having been made with its
owners, Eads hurried up there to rescue the freight from fifteen feet
of water. He had no knowledge himself of diving-armor; but he had
engaged a skilled diver from the Great Lakes, who brought his own
apparatus. They set out in a barge and anchored over the wreck; but,
once there, they soon discovered tha