snag-boat fleet. Afterwards Eads
proposed the strong and swift Missouri River steamboats. But neither of
these suited his colleague, who at last went to Cincinnati, and buying
three boats there, armed them himself: and very useful boats they were.

The gunboat scheme had been first proposed in April; it was now June,
and excepting these three wooden boats, nothing seemed to have come of
it. So in July the quartermaster-general advertised for bids for
ironclad gunboats. In 1861 ironclads were a rather new thing. France
and England had a few of them, but at the time the Merrimac was begun
no ironclad had been finished in America. On August 5, when the bids
were opened, that of Eads was found not only to be the lowest, but to
promise the quickest work. On August 7 the contract was signed for
seven gunboats to be delivered at Cairo on October 10,--sixty-four days
later. This contract, it has been said, would under ordinary
circumstances have been thought by most men impossible to fulfill. And
the circumstances then were anything but ordinary: it was a time of
great financial distress; in the border slave States the pursuits of
peace were interrupted; all was in turmoil and confusion;
rolling-mills, machine-shops, foundries, forges, and sawmills were all
idle, and many of the mechanics had gone to the war. The timber for the
boats was still growing in the forests; the iron was not yet
manufactured. And so short was the time that two or three factories
alone, no matter how well equipped they might be, were not to be
depended upon. Yet Eads had undertaken to start up the factories, to
gather the materials, and to build his boats in two months. Never were
the self-reliance and the energy of the man better exhibited; but his
keen business sense might have hesitated, had not his patriotism shown
him that the Union needed the boats quickly.

Most of the machine-shops and foundries of Saint Louis were at once set
to work night and day; and for hours at a time the telegraph wires to
Pittsburg and to Cincinnati were in use. Twenty-one steam-engines and
thirty-five boilers were needed. Prepared timber was brought from eight
different States, and the first iron plating used in the war was rolled
not only in Saint Louis and Cincinnati, but in small towns in Ohio and
Kentucky. Within two weeks 4000 men were at work in places miles
apart,--working by night and seven days a week. To the workmen on the
hulls who should stick to the task ti