that game.

The wrecking business was full of life and action. Here and there, up
and down the river, and into its branches, wherever a boat was wrecked
or burned or run aground, the Submarine hurried off to reach the spot
before other wreckers. Under their bell the divers got at the engines,
boilers, and freight, while the pumps, worked from above, cleared away
the sand; and sometimes by means of great chains and derricks the very
hull itself would be lifted and towed ashore. But on that huge river,
which at times would suddenly rise three feet in a single night, and
whose strong current played such giant pranks as turning over a wreck
in the chains that were raising it, there was need of eternal vigilance
and agility. However, Eads was more on his own ground on the river than
on the shore, and his business so increased that he was soon running
four diving-bell boats. In 1849 twenty-nine boats were burned at the
levee in Saint Louis in one big fire, and most of their remains were
removed by him. Winter as well as summer the work went on; and the task
of cutting out a vessel wrecked in an ice-gorge, or of raising one from
beneath the ice, must have been as trying as walking the river bottom
in search of a wreck. Eads himself, years later, thus describes one of
his many experiences: "Five miles below Cairo, I searched the river
bottom for the wreck of the Neptune, for more than sixty days, and in a
distance of three miles. My boat was held by a long anchor line, and
was swung from side to side of the channel, over a distance of 500
feet, by side anchor lines, while I walked on the river bottom under
the bell across the channel. The boat was then dropped twenty feet
farther down stream, and I then walked back again as she was hauled
towards the other shore. In this way I walked on the bottom four hours
at least, every day (Sundays excepted) during that time." For a day's
work the city of Saint Louis gave him $80, out of which he paid his own
workmen. He was so prosperous that, as he wrote to his wife, there was
no need for him to join the rush to California to get gold; and his
success caused much envy among his rivals. He began to clear the
channel of the Mississippi from some of its obstructions and to improve
the harbor of Saint Louis.

In 1856 he knew his work so well that he went to Washington and
proposed to Congress to remove all the snags and wrecks from the
Western rivers,--the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ar