hazardous, while downstream, debris-choked islets close to St. Louis threatened boats with grounding at low tide and the city with flooding should a storm surge force the water into the narrowing channel.
âIt is astonishingly hot here,â Lee wrote to his wifeâninety-seven in the shade. Hot or not, there were the two lieutenants, Lee and Meigs, paddling their dugout canoe on the deceptively sluggish stream, sketching its capricious course, and taking soundings while being devoured by mosquitoes. Leeâs report recommended blasting a way through the upper reaches of the river and building dikes made from pilings enveloped in stone and brush, which would sieve much of the debris without forcing the current too far from its regular course. A small dam diagonal to St. Louis would push away some of the silt, scouring a deeper channel for the boats to navigate when the river was low. Fastidious, beautiful maps were drawn; data collected; recommendations made for a little fleet of âsnagboatsâ that periodically would cleanse the passages made. The two menâof markedly different tempers, the handsome, swart-bearded Lee even then rather grand in his manner; Meigs, nine years his junior, six foot one in his boots, pale and high-browed, energetic to the point of bumptiousnessâwere forced into close and constant proximity. They shared log cabins, talked with the Chippewa, made do in reeking rooms in St. Louis, where moldy whitewash hung in limp strips from the wall, mysterious odors defeating the cologne that the elegant Lee had brought in his traveling bag. Though the intense, inexhaustible Meigs made Lee uneasy, a fellowship was born. Though Lee thought the whole area, âwinning womenâ apart, âbloody humbug,â he sportingly adjusted to it, and the two comrades shot wild turkey from horseback, Missouri-fashion, and caught whiskery catfish âalmost three feet long,â monstrously ugly but fine eating.
Even someone as self-assured as Lee could not help taking careful stock of Montgomery Meigs, whom he declared, wryly, to be âa host [of men] in himself.â After graduating fifth in his class from West Point in 1836, Meigs had been briefly assigned to the artillery but had then been transferred into the Army Corps of Engineers, regarded in every way as the military elite. He was twenty-one, still smooth-faced, but with the imperial brow and dark eyes that were to be the bane of lesser mortals rash enough to get in the way of the public virtues that necessarily came with the old name of Meigs.
Â
The chronicle of the Meigs dynasty tracked the history of America. The patriarch, Vincent Meigs, had sailed from Dorset, England, with his wife, Elizabeth, in 1636 to the territory that would become Connecticut. It must have been the radical politics of English religion that had sent them across the Atlantic, for thirty years later, Vincent and Elizabeth took in Puritan regicides who had voted for the execution of King Charles I and who were subsequently being called to account by the Restoration courts. Montgomeryâs great-grandfather had been the first Return Jonathan Meigs, a name which colored the Christian sobriety of the family with a little harmless romance. In the early eighteenth century, in Middletown, Connecticut, a young Meigs had been repeatedly rebuffed by the object of his ardor, a demure Quaker. Mournfully resigned to his fate, he was mounting his horse when, as was her prerogative, the lady abruptly changed her mind, recalling him with a cry of âReturn Jonathan Meigs.â Embedded in his heart as the phrase that had altered his life, he felt compelled to call the first fruit of his happy union Return Jonathan, who, bearing a moniker requiring daily explanation to strangers, had no choice, really, but to become a hero.
In 1777, two years into the revolution, Return Jonathan Meigs marched to Quebec with Benedict Arnold (still the bright star of the
âIt is astonishingly hot here,â Lee wrote to his wifeâninety-seven in the shade. Hot or not, there were the two lieutenants, Lee and Meigs, paddling their dugout canoe on the deceptively sluggish stream, sketching its capricious course, and taking soundings while being devoured by mosquitoes. Leeâs report recommended blasting a way through the upper reaches of the river and building dikes made from pilings enveloped in stone and brush, which would sieve much of the debris without forcing the current too far from its regular course. A small dam diagonal to St. Louis would push away some of the silt, scouring a deeper channel for the boats to navigate when the river was low. Fastidious, beautiful maps were drawn; data collected; recommendations made for a little fleet of âsnagboatsâ that periodically would cleanse the passages made. The two menâof markedly different tempers, the handsome, swart-bearded Lee even then rather grand in his manner; Meigs, nine years his junior, six foot one in his boots, pale and high-browed, energetic to the point of bumptiousnessâwere forced into close and constant proximity. They shared log cabins, talked with the Chippewa, made do in reeking rooms in St. Louis, where moldy whitewash hung in limp strips from the wall, mysterious odors defeating the cologne that the elegant Lee had brought in his traveling bag. Though the intense, inexhaustible Meigs made Lee uneasy, a fellowship was born. Though Lee thought the whole area, âwinning womenâ apart, âbloody humbug,â he sportingly adjusted to it, and the two comrades shot wild turkey from horseback, Missouri-fashion, and caught whiskery catfish âalmost three feet long,â monstrously ugly but fine eating.
Even someone as self-assured as Lee could not help taking careful stock of Montgomery Meigs, whom he declared, wryly, to be âa host [of men] in himself.â After graduating fifth in his class from West Point in 1836, Meigs had been briefly assigned to the artillery but had then been transferred into the Army Corps of Engineers, regarded in every way as the military elite. He was twenty-one, still smooth-faced, but with the imperial brow and dark eyes that were to be the bane of lesser mortals rash enough to get in the way of the public virtues that necessarily came with the old name of Meigs.
Â
The chronicle of the Meigs dynasty tracked the history of America. The patriarch, Vincent Meigs, had sailed from Dorset, England, with his wife, Elizabeth, in 1636 to the territory that would become Connecticut. It must have been the radical politics of English religion that had sent them across the Atlantic, for thirty years later, Vincent and Elizabeth took in Puritan regicides who had voted for the execution of King Charles I and who were subsequently being called to account by the Restoration courts. Montgomeryâs great-grandfather had been the first Return Jonathan Meigs, a name which colored the Christian sobriety of the family with a little harmless romance. In the early eighteenth century, in Middletown, Connecticut, a young Meigs had been repeatedly rebuffed by the object of his ardor, a demure Quaker. Mournfully resigned to his fate, he was mounting his horse when, as was her prerogative, the lady abruptly changed her mind, recalling him with a cry of âReturn Jonathan Meigs.â Embedded in his heart as the phrase that had altered his life, he felt compelled to call the first fruit of his happy union Return Jonathan, who, bearing a moniker requiring daily explanation to strangers, had no choice, really, but to become a hero.
In 1777, two years into the revolution, Return Jonathan Meigs marched to Quebec with Benedict Arnold (still the bright star of the
Similar Books
