e in helping to support his family and
in getting his own education, while he was still so young a lad, was
the school in which he learned self-reliance. It is pleasant to know
that the earnestness of life did not take all of his boyishness away
from him, for it must have been while he was hard at work that he built
a real steamboat, six feet long, and navigated it on Chouteau's Pond.

For five years he was a clerk in the dry-goods house. At the end of
that time, probably because he was in poor health, he left that
position for one that would take him more into the open air. Though his
health was not strong, he was by no means an invalid; for at nineteen
his muscles were solid and his fund of nervous energy was
inexhaustible. So, with the natural taste of a boy for a more exciting
life, he took a position as clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat.
While he had nothing to do with actually running the boat, he certainly
kept his eyes open to everything going on both on board and in the
river; and began then to make an acquaintance with the stream which was
later to be the scene of his greatest labors. If ever Nature played a
prominent part in the life of a man, the Mississippi did in that of
Eads; for it became the opportunity for three of his chief works, and
from it he learned perhaps more of the laws of science than from all
the books he ever read. To understand his life, one must have some idea
of the huge river, which seems to flow sluggishly or rapidly through
his whole career.

The Mississippi River, with its branches, drains the larger part of the
whole United States,--that is, from the Alleghanies on the east to the
Rockies on the west. The main stream, 4200 miles long, and in some
places over a mile wide, flows along with tremendous force, ceaselessly
eating away its yellow clay banks. The water, full of sediment, is of a
thick dull brown color. The clay that it washes off in the bends it
deposits on the juts of land, thus forming greater and greater curves;
so that often the distance between two points is very much less by land
than by water. Sometimes there are only a few yards across the neck of
a peninsula, around which the channel distance is many miles; and on
one side the level of the river is several feet higher than on the
other. Gradually the water keeps eating its way, until it forces a
passage through the neck, and then the torrent rushes through in a
cascade, with a roar that can be heard for miles