New Life on the River

"Mississippi steamboating," Mark Twain once observed sadly, "was born about 1812; at, the end of 30 years it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than 30 more it was dead. A strangely short life for so majestic a creature."

Like reports of his own death, Twain's dirge for riverboating turns out to be greatly exaggerated. Today the 29,000 miles of rivers, canals and intracoastal passages that constitute the U.S. Inland Waterways System are churning as never before. While railroads and airlines make more noise fighting one another, the inland waterways' share of U.S. freight traffic has climbed from 3% to almost 10% in the last 15 years. This past year, for the first time in U.S. history, river barges carried more Midwestern grain to export ports than the railroads.

Away from the Sea. Steadily expanded since World War I by the Army Engineers, the inland waterways today link together an amazing amount of the nation (see chart). In the East they include De Witt Clinton's historic New York State Barge Canal, the Hudson River, and the sheltered coastal route that amateur sailors take south to Florida. In the U.S. heartland, the Mississippi and its tributaries afford unbroken passage from Pittsburgh west to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and from Minneapolis south to the Gulf. In the Far West, locks built into the McNary and Bonneville dams allow riverboats to chuff through bleak coulees 365 miles into the interior of Washington.

In the past decade, nearly 4,500 new enterprises have located themselves along the inland waterways. Such proud East Coast seaports as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore are losing cargo tonnage, but river and canal ports steadily gain. Brownsville, Texas, in 1961 handled an astounding 4,100,000 tons of cotton, chemicals, citrus fruit and coffee. Columbia River towns like Pasco and Umatilla have become blossoming grain ports. Biggest winner of all is bustling New Orleans, which in 1961 boosted its cargo business 8% to a record 61.3 million tons. Serving as the connecting point between the Mississippi River complex and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, New Orleans boasts that at least a thousand barges are always within half a day's travel of its docks.

Longer Than the Queen. In many respects, life on the river remains much as it was in the days when Mark Twain leaned out of a filigreed pilothouse to spot his passage. But some things have changed. Nowadays, when rivermen hit New Orleans after the 18-day voyage down from Pittsburgh, they rush to make the quickest turnaround possible with new cargo bound upriver, often leave within a couple of hours.

The 17,000 barges and 4,100 towboats that ply the inland waterways are less gaudy and singular but more practical than the old sternwheelers. Today's towboats (which actually push rather than pull their tows) have radar, depth recorders, six rudders and two propellers. Their diesel engines generate as much as 9,000 h.p., and can handle strings of barges longer than the Queen Mary.

Memphis to South America. The cargo that today's rivermen supervise is often exotic: wine gurgles along in stainless steel tanks, and other specially designed barges carry molten sulphur at 280DEG, methane chilled to --258DEG, and chlorine under 250 lbs. of pressure per sq. in. The Saturn missile stages designed to travel faster than sound move in and out of Huntsville, Ala., by river.

Most river traffic is still in commonplace bulk items for which barge rates are unbeatably low (an average of 2 mills a ton. v. 16 mills by rail and 6.5-c-by truck). Grain barges moving down to New Orleans from Minneapolis pass inbound South American bauxite ore moving upriver to Kaiser, Alcoa and Olin Mathieson aluminum plants on the Ohio. The bauxite ore is transshipped from seagoing ships at New Orleans, but recently Captain Jesse Brent, head of a Greenville, Miss, towing company, bought a shallow-draft, 180-ft. vessel in which he hauls insecticides, feed and fertilizers direct from Memphis to South America. On the return voyage, Brent brings up meat and frozen foods.

Blasting Round the Bend. Despite the heavy traffic on the rivers, barge operators talk poor mouth out of a fear of a proposal to levy a 2-c--a-gallon fuel tax on users of the waterways, which have hitherto been toll free. The rivermen are even more upset over a threat from the nation's railroads, which whenever they run parallel to barge traffic are required by federal law to charge 6% more for freight than the barges. Arguing that federal maintenance of the waterways amounts to a subsidy to barge operators, the railroads have asked ICC permission to match barge prices on bulk shipment.

For all the bargemen's forebodings, inland waterways traffic seems sure to grow. The Corps of Engineers is about to spend $1.2 billion to open up a 516-mile stretch of the Arkansas River between the Mississippi and Catoosa, Okla., and is planning to connect the Tennessee and the Warrior-Tombigbee river systems. Mark Twain would be impressed by that one: to cut the connecting channel, the engineers are considering atomic blasting.

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