COMAIERCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SHALLOW STREAMS 



39 



A fleet of boats, consisting of a shal- 

 low draft towboat of 500 horsepower, 

 drawing perhaps twenty-four inches of 

 water, with her engines and fuel on 

 board ; and three or four steel barges 

 of a smaller size than I have indicated, 

 and suited for the smaller channels, but 

 carrying 500 tons on five feet of water, 

 so that tows of 1,500 to 2,000 tons can 

 be propelled at a time, will cost a total 

 of $150,000. This is the sort of in- 

 vestment you have got to start with in 

 making your rivers commercially profit- 

 able, and when you have done this your 

 railways rates will go down from the 

 Montgomery standard to the Mobile 

 standard. You are able to locate your 

 factory where fuel is cheap, where 

 raw material is cheap, and where 

 labor is cheap and taxes are low ; 

 and then, with this small equipment 

 for transportation, put your outgoing- 

 freights over the shipside at the 

 mouth of the river which serves you 

 and send them away to South Amer- 

 ica, or through the Panama Canal to 

 the Orient, with the assurance that 

 they are not handicapped in this inter- 

 national competition by an enormous 

 local charge in reaching the seaboard. 



Finally, as to the value of shallow 

 streams, it is perhaps necessary to em- 

 phasize this value because there has 

 grown up a very considerable school 

 of people, and of newspapers, who do 

 not believe that the shoal streams are of 

 any value whatever, and I am going to 

 begin this statement with some very re- 

 markable examples of the use of shal- 

 low streams. 



The first of these is the River Loire, 

 in France. About a year ago I called 

 on the members of the firm of Oreille, 

 who build shallow draft vessels in 

 France, and they gave me the details 

 of their plans for the Loire. This river 

 is very shallow, owing to the deforesta- 

 tion of the Central Plateau of France, 

 the washing down of the sand from the 

 upper hills into the lower river. France 

 is not very far advanced in the control 

 of its rivers, having spent most of its 

 time heretofore in canalizing their up- 

 per reaches and building canals parallel 

 to the lower reaches. The Loire is an 



important river, having the chief harbor 

 of Brittany at Nantes, and forming a 

 channel from there almost all the way 

 to Paris, the head of that channel being 

 at Orleans. In this reach of the river 

 at low water there is frequently but 

 eleven inches of water over the bars. 

 The firm of Oreille constructed for use 

 in this channel a fleet of barges which 

 drew only four or five inches light, and 

 carried eighty tons each on eleven 

 inches of water ; and a set of towboats 

 which were built with twin screws set in 

 tunnels amidships, so that they could 

 be reached from overhead by removing 

 the deck of the tunnel, and these tow- 

 boats drew ten and one-half inches with 

 their fuel on board, and pulled a fleet of 

 five loaded barges in still water at the 

 rate of six miles an hour, thus being 

 able to go four miles an hour over the 

 current pulling 400 tons of freight be- 

 hind them. 



This set of barges is not now in 

 operation because the Loire had other 

 difficulties besides its shoalness. It shift- 

 ed its channel so frequently that the 

 pilots could not keep track of it, but 

 there was no difficulty in carrying 

 freight on eleven inches of water. The 

 towboat was able to do so and to com- 

 pete with the railroads alongside the 

 river. 



An additional evidence of the value 

 of shallow streams is offered bv the 

 Oder River at Breslau, in Germany. 

 This river before improvement had less 

 than a foot of water at low water, and 

 since improvement its summer depth is 

 from thirty to thirty-six inches, thirty 

 inches being a very good navigable 

 depth in this river. On this draft trafik 

 continues steadily and the river handles 

 to-day three and one-half million tons 

 of freight a year in a channel so narrow 

 that barges can pass only in special 

 places. 



Coming to our own country, the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley Tranportation Company 

 has been preparing figures and designs ' 

 for the shoal streams we shall have 

 to serve. We are going after the 

 grain of the upper Missouri, where 

 there is only thirty inches of water in 

 simnmer. rnd we have many little 



