The Mobile River

THE MOBILE RIVER

THE

MOBILE RIVER

John S. Sledge

© 2015 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

Frontispiece illustration from Peter J. Hamilton,

Artwork of Mobile and Vicinity (Chicago, 1894).

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN: 978-1-61117-485-4 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-61117-487-8 (slipcase edition)

ISBN: 978-1-61117-486-1 (ebook)

Mobile River and Delta map © Nicholas Holmes III

Front Cover Illustration: Fishing along the Wharves, 1905,

Mobile, Ala., courtesy of John Hunter

Published through the generosity of the

A. S. Mitchell Foundation, Mobile, Alabama

For mom,

Jeanne Arceneaux Sledge

Always interested, supportive, and loving

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prologue: Downriver with Cap’n Joe

Introduction: A fine, large river

Part 1. Coming Ahead

1. Indian Stream to Entrada Española

2. Colonial Days and Ways

3. American Dawn

4. Calliope Song

5. Rebel River

6. Rebel Defeat

7. Mobile Harbor: What shall we do with it?

8. Modern Port, Beleaguered River

Part 2. Currents

9. Everything down there’s big enough to kill you

10. Pleasure and Peril

11. Diverse Legacies

Epilogue: Elegy for a Small Shipyard

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of Mobile Bay by Nicholas H. Holmes, 1937

Map of Mobile River and Delta by Nicholas H. Holmes III

Aerial view of the harbor, 1949

Rising tide

Busy Mobile River

Choctaw Indians

Pittman map, circa 1768

Plan of the Bay and Island of Mobile, 1763

Andrew Ellicott

Grand Mobile, circa 1835

Wrestling cotton

Mobile Harbor, 1851

Timothy Meaher

Admiral Franklin Buchanan

Hunley sketch by Alexander

CSS Florida

USS Hartford, circa 1900

Front Street, circa 1895

Dry dock, circa 1895

Mobile map, 1874

Wharf scene, 1887

Rooftop harbor view, 1896

Steamer John Quill

Launching SS Selma City, April 2, 1921

Sawmill at One Mile Creek

Alabama State Docks Commission tour

Aerial view Alabama State Docks, 1950

Cochrane Bridge, 1983

Gulf Shipbuilding aerial view, 1939

Ferry Alabama, January 1935

Mobile harbor dredging, 1988

ADDSCO diver

Lone sailor from aloft

Longshoreman, circa 1960

Officers line the rail of a Norwegian fruiter, circa 1895

Worker, banana docks, 1937

Sawmill advertisement, 1884

Shipbuilding

Chastang swimming pool

Duncan Place, 1906

Storm damage, 1916

Creole girls at play, 1951

Geronimo at Mount Vernon

Following page 162

Port of Mobile magazine cover, 1964

Map of Southeast, 1690

Henri de Tonti

Mobile town plan, 1702

Detail of David Taitt’s 1771 West Florida map

Mobile, 1842, by William Bennett

Lighthouse at Mobile

The Confederate ram Baltic

Hunley—The Beginning, by Paul Bender

Map of the Defenses of the City of Mobile

Detail of the magazine explosion aftermath at Mobile

Albert Stein

Mobile Waterfront, 1895, by William L. Challoner

City of Mobile, by R. D. Wilcox

Alabama State Docks postcard

Bankhead Tunnel under construction by Roderick MacKenzie

Cudjo Lewis

Mobile waterfront, 1984, painted by Lee Hoffman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

By far the greatest pleasure of writing this book has been the many wonderful people who helped me along the way. First and foremost, I must thank Joseph Meaher, who has long had an interest in this project. Joe knows the Mobile River like any familiar thing (as was once said of one of his forebears), and he helped me to know it as well through two boat trips and numerous queries answered. Joe encouraged me to seek the assistance of the A. S. Mitchell Foundation in underwriting the book’s production costs, and, happily, trustees Augustine Meaher III, David Dukes, Frank Vinson, and Kenneth Vinson agreed. I am indebted to all of them.

Second, I am profoundly grateful to the History Museum of Mobile for its commitment to this project at many levels, from acting as a pass-through for the subvention to scanning photographs and copying documents free of charge. Director David Alsobrook and staffers Scotty Kirkland, Jacqlyn Kirkland, Charles Torrey, Jacob Laurence, Sheila Flanagan, Ellie Skinner, Israel Lewis, and Kathlyn Scott never flagged and, in the process, have become like a second family to me. Quite simply, this book would not have been possible without their involvement.

Many other individuals at numerous local institutions and companies also provided vital and valuable assistance. They include Coll’ette King at Mobile County Probate Court; Jane Daugherty and Amy Beach at the Local History and Genealogy Branch of the Mobile Public Library; Edward (Ned) Harkins, Zennia Calhoun, Pamela Major, and Jane Pate at Mobile Municipal Archives; Carol Ellis, Chris Burroughs, Nick Beeson, Ben Lang, and Barbara Asmus at the University of South Alabama’s Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Greg Waselkov, Bonnie Gums, and Sarah Mattics at the University of South Alabama Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Social Work; Cartledge Blackwell at the Mobile Historic Development Commission; Rhonda Davis, formerly at the Historic Mobile Preservation Society; Judith Adams, Sheri Reid, Jimmy Orum, and James Lyons at the Alabama State Port Authority; Captain Terry D. Gilbreath, harbormaster; Shirley Lampley and Alvin Campbell of the Alabama Department of Transportation; William Harrison III of Harrison Brothers Dry Dock and Shipbuilding; John Hunter of Dockside Services; Patrick J. Wilson and Cap’n Joe Ollinger of the Mobile Bar Pilots; Casi Callaway of Mobile Baykeeper; Jocko Potts, Judy Culbreth, and Lawren Largue at Mobile Bay magazine; and Joan Gardner and David Cooper of Cooper/T. Smith Corporation. All of these folks lead busy professional lives but were unfailingly courteous when I came calling.

Other people were helpful on particular aspects of the Mobile’s sprawling history. They include Sidney Schell and John Ellis on the Confederate navy, David Smithweck on lighthouses, Sam Hodges and Bill Finch on the delta, Sylviane Diouf on African Town, David Bagwell on water lots, Hudson McDonald on Plateau, Melissa Mutert on the railroad tracks riverside, and Richard Chastang, Noel Andry Sr., Henry Andry, Robert Curtis Andry, and Rudolph Andry on the upriver Creoles.

Others provided help or friendship during the long grind. They include Joey Guess and John Harper at the Promised Land; Anna Guess, who sent fantastic preserves after my river trips; and E. C. LeVert, Tom McGehee, Roy Hoffman, Douglas Kearley, David Newell, Hardy Jackson, Spencer Callahan, Ken Niemeyer, Debby Stearns, Nicholas Holmes Jr., Malcolm Steves, and Ken McElhaney. Special thanks are due Nicholas Holmes III for his fabulous Mobile River Delta map. When I began this project, I knew that I wanted to engage Nick to produce such a map as an accompaniment to the classic Mobile Bay chart his grandfather drew back in 1937, itself never before published in a book. To my great joy, Nick accepted the task, even though I could only pay him for a fraction of his time. Over the course of a long year we compared notes and progress as I composed and he drew, and the collaboration proved one of the most rewarding of my life.

This is now my second book with the University of South Carolina Press, and I appreciate the staff’s professionalism and thoroughness more than ever. To Walter Edgar, thanks for introducing them to me, and heartfelt gratitude to Director Jonathan Haupt, Marketing Director Suzanne Axland, Assistant Director for Operations Linda Haines Fogle, and Managing Editor Bill Adams for their marvelous care and skill.

Last, as ever, my family has been my rock. My lovely wife Lynn edited this monster with her usual grace and eagle eye. Our children Matthew and Elena, both out of the nest, used Facebook to express their support and interest from afar. My mother Jeanne Arceneaux Sledge was this book’s first reader, and her enthusiastic, early, and continued encouragement has meant a great deal. Though she is my mother, she insists that she knows a good book when she sees it, and so I dedicate this volume to her. Of course, any errors of fact herein are to be laid solely at my door.

Mobile Bay by Nicholas H. Holmes, 1937

Mobile River and Delta by Nicholas Holmes III, 2013

Prologue

DOWNRIVER WITH CAP’N JOE

Joe Meaher is something of a legend on the Mobile River. His family history has unfolded along its banks, upstream and down, in country, swamp, and city. A descendent of the controversial Timothy Meaher—Mainer, sawmill owner, boat builder, steamboat captain, filibuster financier, slave runner, blockade-runner, and businessman—Joe is a vigorous seventy, deeply versed in river incident and lore and extensively involved in managing his family’s timber, farming, and real estate interests. No complete narrative of the underappreciated and fascinating waterway on which he lives is possible without his participation.

Our families go way back. My grandfather and father hunted with his father in the 1930s, 40s, and later when Cap’n Joe was young. In the mid-1970s, his brother Augustine bought my grandmother’s Spring Hill Avenue home, Georgia Cottage. The A. S. Mitchell Foundation, with which his family is involved, helped fund all three of my previous Mobile books, the profits of which have gone to the Mobile Historic Development Commission, and over the years Joe or Augustine has consulted me on preservation issues related to historic houses on both sides of the bay as well as at two cemeteries. After my third book, The Pillared City, Joe, knowing my enduring love for local history, naturally inquired what was next. The Mobile River, I replied.

Have you been on it? he asked.

The answer was a qualified yes. I have always nurtured an interest in the Mobile River and have my own connections to it, though of a markedly different and less intimate character than Joe’s. During the 1960s, for example, my grandmother often took me down to the docks to watch the stevedores at work. This was always a favorite outing. While other young boys dreamed of growing up to be firemen, policemen, baseball players, or soldiers, I wanted to be a stevedore and spend my days manhandling exotic cargoes from the holds of salt-streaked freighters.

Ultimately I took a different path but have remained drawn to the waterfront, regularly spending lunch hours at the foot of Government Street to watch the container ships, tugs, and barges ply back and forth. Occasionally there has been the added excitement of touring an accurately reconstructed historic sailing vessel like the Bounty or the Golden Hind in port, and in the summer of 2002, during the city’s tricentennial celebration, I stood with my family on the ninth floor of Government Plaza and thrilled to the tall ships’ stately parade.

Ships and harbor craft are not the river’s only attractions for me, however. As an inveterate seafood lover, I have long delighted in going to Southern Fish and Oyster at 1 Eslava, a funky riverbank operation that dates back half a century. Standing on the perennially wet concrete floor as rubber-booted and aproned employees drag boxes filled with iced fish and deftly filet the catch or head shrimp, I am taken with the realization that such scenes are immemorial in this town. So I have been beside the river.

As a commuter into downtown from Baldwin County, I cross the Mobile River twice every day through the Bankhead Tunnel, an engineering marvel when it first opened in 1941. Sometimes, if running late, I’ll use Interstate 10’s George Wallace Tunnel, just south of the Bankhead. It’s more recently constructed (1973) and faster but less interesting visually and far more frightening with its hurtling traffic. Whichever tunnel I take though, descending down and down through the well-lit and tiled tubes, the river never even glimpsed either upon entering or exiting, it is nonetheless impossible for me not to contemplate the bulbous prowed ships ghosting just above the Mardi Gras beads swaying from my rearview mirror. So I have been under the Mobile River.

There are also two highway bridges over the river, one on Interstate 65 in northern Mobile County, miles from the city, and the other immediately north of downtown on Highway 90/98, heavily travelled by trucks carrying hazardous loads that are not allowed in the tunnels. On trips upstate or returning, I use the I-65 bridge, officially known as the General W. K. Wilson Jr. Bridge but popularly as the Dolly Parton Bridge for the soaring twin support arches that from certain approach angles look for all the world like, well, what the bridge’s nickname implies. Driving across this bridge can feel like flying, with inspiring vistas over the sprawling Mobile River Delta, the second largest in the United States and a natural wonderland of extensive swamps and labyrinthine streams and bayous. Closer to my daily round, when the tunnels are congested by holiday traffic or a wreck, I will sometimes take 90/98’s Cochrane/Africatown USA Bridge, sweeping high above the heavily industrialized harbor and then precipitously dropping onto Blakeley Island with its tank farms, retention ponds and forty-foot-high dredge spoil dikes. So I have been over the Mobile River.

But to more directly address Cap’n Joe’s query, I had enjoyed a half-dozen water-borne harbor tours up to the time of his telephone call, limited jaunts that departed from the Alabama State Docks, proceeded a few miles to the river’s mouth and then returned. The most memorable of these was aboard a small hovercraft that jounced over the chop and, amazingly, onto and around the actual shoreline of Battery McIntosh, or Goat Island, as it’s now called, site of a Confederate battery that guarded the city’s watery approaches. And, while these are not part of the Mobile’s main channel but rather of its delta, I could boast of two visits to the Bottle Creek Indian mounds, an extraordinary prehistoric complex only reachable by water, most directly via the Tensaw River on the bay’s eastern side. So, yes, I had been on the Mobile River. On it, beside it downtown, under it, over it, and into the heart of its delta, but of the upper stream, beyond the Cochrane/Africatown USA Bridge where high-rise views show a sinuous, silvery ribbon spooling horizon-ward through marsh and forest, I had no direct meaningful experience.

There matters lay for months, the book project simmering in the back of my mind but a distant prospect given the press of other obligations. Until one summer afternoon Cap’n Joe telephoned out of the blue and invited a colleague and me on a personal guided survey of the entire river, all forty-five incredible miles from Nannahubba Bluff down to Choctaw Point. Hardly believing the opportunity or his amazing generosity, we met him and one of his men on the appointed morning at a Mount Vernon parking lot. Follow us to the Promised Land, they called from the truck window. There our journey began.

Joe’s pride in the Promised Land is evident in virtually everything he says and does. Consisting of acreage on both sides of the river and including farm, swamp, and timberland, this remarkable place is so called because it was customary to name land grants for the closest religious holiday, usually a Saint’s day, to the date of the transfer. Joe’s family acquired their tract on the Feast of the First Fruits, a celebration of spring harvest and the Children of Israel’s crossing the Red Sea into the Promised Land. As we followed the big pickup through a farm gate and down a three-mile-long graveled road, the appellation certainly seemed apt. The land was green, well-tended, and pretty, dotted with grazing sheep and carefully maintained buildings and plantings.¹

That this cultivated and settled part of the allotment would never flood became evident when we saw the drop-off down to the private landing, a rectangular cut into the riverbank with a small wharf and a few pilings. Here another of Joe’s employees met us, and after greetings all around we climbed aboard our conveyance, a twenty-foot aluminum haul ass boat with 120 horsepower engines that could easily deliver twenty-five miles per hour. A comfortable and commodious pilothouse promised relief from the fierce sun if such was wanted. Joe’s men dexterously stowed several large gas containers, necessary because there are no refueling depots on the river, and some ice chests before casting off and idling out into the main channel. The landing is situated just below the place where the Mobile’s main stem divides into two branches, the Mobile snaking southwesterly and the Tensaw trending southeasterly. A large low island between them is part of the Promised Land and the heart of the famed delta. Joe informed us that we would explore the island later on four-wheelers, dwarfed amid giant cypresses and ramrod straight oaks.²

As we roared southward, the boat settling gently in the stern and throwing out a large green and white wake, Joe began a running commentary on river history and facts. Like most anyone who has frequented local waterways over a period of decades, he was bitingly critical of the Corps of Engineers in general and the Claiborne Lock and Dam (located in Monroe County on the Alabama River, well above our location) and the Tenn-Tom Waterway (234 miles of locks and dams connecting the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers) specifically. These twentieth-century engineering marvels have radically altered the age-old natural patterns of flooding, sedimentation, and salinity throughout the delta. Joe’s men nodded in grim confirmation, the pilot explaining that he can now catch flounder off Joe’s dock, something unheard of historically, but they taste muddy and are unappetizing. Joe is convinced that this man-made monkeying has allowed a far greater than normal buildup of silt in the swamps, to the tune of several feet in a year in places, and significant incursion of salt-water tides into the lower delta, to the detriment of what used to be good timber.³

This was all useful information, but the boat engines were loud, and for long stretches no one spoke, content to take in the scenery and the abundant wildlife. Just south of the landing we saw a mature bald eagle alight, and osprey, egrets, great blue herons, gulls, terns, and brown pelicans were common the entire way. The pilot assured us that, flounder aside, plentiful and edible fish were here for the taking and boasted that he had recently caught a big river cat weighing in at some forty pounds. Other creatures swim these waters too. Scary ones. Only weeks after our trip an eleven-foot-eight-inch alligator weighing a quarter ton was hauled out of the Mobile during a state sanctioned hunt, and grown bull sharks, which can tolerate fresh water, have been tracked upriver as far as Claiborne.⁴ Joe was less enthusiastic about eating fish out of the river and vowed that he would certainly no longer swim in the Mobile. This is perhaps a sagacious position, not only because of alligators and bull sharks but because of past pollution issues as well.⁵

We proceeded south, passing the occasional tugboat and barge but few pleasure craft, and the riverbanks displayed an unfolding panorama of spaced wooded bluffs—Chastang’s, Seymour’s, Twenty-Seven Mile, and Twenty-One Mile—on the western side and luxuriant swamps on the eastern. At times it looked like we were in Louisiana or Florida, the character of the landscape changing from hardwoods and pine to bald cypress, tupelo gum, laurel oak, and palmetto to, just north of the city, open marsh with stunted and scattered trees that stood like mute sentinels, confirmation of Joe’s belief that salt-water incursion was killing them. Twelve Mile Island, a nine-hundred-acre onion-shaped mudflat so named for its distance north of the river’s mouth, was once heavily timbered but now displayed only a few unhealthy-looking trees amid the bullwhips and palmetto. This is where Big Bayou Canot joins the Mobile, a place notorious for several singularly dark incidents in two different centuries. Rather than take the more commonly used western channel around the island Cap’n Joe chose the eastern one. Our pilot idled back on our speed because, according to Joe, this less-traveled branch has become a graveyard for old barges, some just under the surface and potential navigational hazards. The island yielded little of interest that we could see, but Joe claimed that there was an Indian mound smack in the middle. Walking to it in the heat and through snake- and alligator-inhabited tangles was unthinkable, however.

South of the island, the view broadened, with the Cochrane/Africatown USA Bridge and downtown’s skyline set like a miniature tinker toy and play blocks amid a world equal parts land, water, and sky. The Mobile River has four personalities, Joe said, giving voice to something already dawning on me. Upland hardwoods, upper swamp, lower swamp, and harbor. That one river could exhibit so many attributes over such a short distance, with concomitant histories to match, struck me as remarkable. It seemed even more remarkable that no one had yet written a book devoted solely to the history of this fascinating stream and its people. The delta and the bay, the Eastern Shore and the area’s teeming fish and game are all popular subjects, but the Mobile River gets no respect. It is a workingman’s river, broad shouldered, unglamorous, dirty, and rarely considered.⁶

Passing under the bridge, we were now in the harbor, an almost five-mile stretch of industry, commerce, and shipping. Here the river is hemmed by railroad yards, shipyards, concrete wharves, big ships, tugs, cranes, tank farms, silos, warehouses, and loading docks stacked with steel, pipe, wood products, and containers. This is a promised land of a different sort, and Joe’s family has interests and holdings here too. Pointing toward a nondescript section on the city side, Joe began dog-cussing a family that had done the Meahers wrong during Reconstruction. Old Mobile is like that. Roots are deep and memories run long. Families have their distinctive quirks, personalities, and relationships that can carry across generations. A bastard who plagued your family in 1870 was as likely to have sired a bastard who sired a bastard and so on down to the bastard who’s plaguing you now.

The river widens through the harbor with its turning basins, but we again slowed down, and one of Joe’s men took the bow to watch for the big logs that were now more frequent. Having slid downstream for miles, these uprooted, scuffed, and algae-slicked trees bob along and have always posed terrifying risks to navigators on the Mobile. If a boat strikes one at speed the occupants can be thrown overboard or the propellers smashed. Sometimes these trunks are so waterlogged that they partially submerge on end and seesaw up and down with the current. Known as sawyers, deadheads, or sinkers, they are capable of inflicting serious damage.

There is also more traffic in the harbor—push boats behind strings of barges, oceangoing tugs with growling 4,000-horsepower diesel engines, and ships from every corner of the globe. As we glided past the towering hulks of these black and barn-red hulled behemoths with their streams of water, Mobile’s importance as an international port and an integral cog in the global economy became evident. Among the vessels we saw that day were the Torm Camilla, a 600-foot Danish chemical tanker; the Tai Honesty, a Panamanian-flagged 623-foot cargo ship; the E. R. Boston, a Liberian-registered ship that is a staggering 958 feet long (that’s better than three football fields) and nearly 150 wide; and ungainly-looking in dry dock, the 480-foot pipe-laying ship Caesar Helix, brand spanking new with a red hull, white superstructure over the bow, a helo deck atop that, and astern a 300-ton metric crane.⁷

But most impressive was the navy’s littoral combat ship Coronado, under construction at the Austal shipyard on Blakeley Island, opposite downtown’s convention center. The highly polished metallic prow of this 417-foot craft, all angles, peeked menacingly out of its construction bay, looking very much like a modern-day Rebel ironcad (the CSS Tennessee was exactly half as long). No doubt Admiral Franklin Buchanan would have preferred this awesome vessel to the underpowered and poorly designed Tennessee when he steamed among Farragut’s ships. Now completed, the Coronado is capable of top speeds around fifty knots, though the official figure is classified, and her capabilities include antisubmarine warfare and mine clearing.⁸

From the bow I caught a good view of Southern Fish and Oyster’s tin building, perched precariously at the water, where fishing boats pull right up and offload their bounty. Minutes later we passed the McDuffie Island coal terminal with its conveyors and heaping black mounds and Little Sand Island with its derelict ship used by the Coast Guard for fire-suppression practice. The chop increased, we moved about more carefully, and open water suddenly stretched to all horizons as we entered the bay. Just south a giant cargo ship was approaching, nudged along by tugs, and our pilot deemed it prudent to turn around and head north.

On the return trip we took the channel on the west side of Twelve Mile Island and once again powered up to full speed. By this time the westering sun, the buffeting, and the constant motion had lulled everyone into a trance, and we each kept our own thoughts. For my part I remained in the bow, leaned against the pilothouse, and propped my feet against an ice chest. As the varying scene unrolled in reverse—harbor, bridge, marsh, tree line, bluffs, upper swamp—I fell into a quasi-melancholy reverie haunted by the shades of this river’s colorful and rich past: Le Dos Grillé, the Choctaw Indian chief shot through the cheek in ambuscade who calmly plucked the bloody ball out of his mouth, rolled it into the barrel of his own musket, and dispatched his attacker; the iron-handed French explorer Henri de Tonti, vomiting black bile in the last stages of yellow fever at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff; Aaron Burr held captive at Fort Stoddert, charming the lonely officers’ wives while his dreams of empire fled on the icy February wind; young Kazoola, fresh from Africa, naked and terrified as he was hustled off the Clotilda, her reeking hulk shielded from prying eyes by Twelve Mile Island’s looming mass; Commodore Ebenezer Farrand and his bedraggled Rebel sailors and marines fleeing upriver as spring exploded all along the banks; Albert Stein, the German hydraulic engineer fiercely defending his wrongheaded scouring theory to the bitter end; Madam Rosa Lee and her painted octoroons lounging on plush red divans, ready to relieve sailor boys of their lust and hard-earned gold; General William Sibert coaxed out of Kentucky retirement to oversee the transformation of a swamp into a modern sea port. And so many more, some famous, most not, who made a region and a city and a culture—Indian women and children, coureurs de bois and coopers, redcoats and pirates, flatboat rowdies and steamboat roustabouts, soldiers and generals, jack tars and admirals from too many wars, swampers and cartographers, river rats and railroad lawyers, slaves and teachers, sail makers and oyster shuckers, engineers and riveters, charlatans and healers, politicos and rum runners, bank presidents and society women, architects, musicians and novelists and painters and poets and even a historian or two. All of them actors in a uniquely American pageant of conflict, struggle, and endless opportunity along a river that gave a city its name.

Coasting back into Joe’s boat slip at the end of this long and satisfying day, I was grateful to him for such an unusual and stimulating trip and resolved that no matter what other obligations and commitments crowded my horizon this was a story I very much had to tell.

Introduction

A FINE, LARGE RIVER

The Mobile River proper—that is, the forty-five miles from Nannahubba Bluff to Choctaw Point and the focus of this book—is one of Alabama’s shortest rivers. Out of thirty-six, it is an underwhelming twenty-fifth in length, exceeding only such feeble contenders as the Little Warrior (7 miles), Dog (8 miles), Fowl (14 miles), Duck (19 miles), Fish (28 miles), and Styx (41 miles). Comfortably ranking above it on the list are even such little-known streams as the North (77 miles), the Noxubee (140 miles), and the Pea (154 miles), while the Alabama, Chattahoochee, Coosa, Tallapoosa, Tennessee, and Tombigbee—all boasting near or better than two hundred riverine miles within the state’s borders—command the top spots.

The Mobile first appears on the map full and wide at Nannahubba, where the Alabama and the Tombigbee meet, but because it empties their waters into Mobile Bay and subsequently the Gulf of Mexico, it usurps them and their multitudinous tributaries. If all of the rivers, creeks, streams, bayous, bogues, branches, swamps, sloughs, rivulets, and trickles that ultimately pour into Mobile Bay are factored into the equation, the Mobile assumes awesome importance and becomes the outlet for the sixth-largest river basin in the United States and the largest emptying into the gulf east of the Mississippi River.

From this broader perspective, the Mobile River Basin encompasses more than forty thousand square miles, including significant portions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and a little piece of east Tennessee. Its headwaters can be traced into the Appalachian Mountains at Tickanetley Creek, a fine trout stream in Gilmer County, Georgia, roughly eighty miles north of Atlanta and more than seven hundred river miles—that is, measuring by all the twists and turns—from Mobile Bay. If this entire distance is counted as the Mobile’s official length—as it often is by geographers, scientists, and the federal government—the river ranks an astonishing twentieth overall among North American watercourses, behind the Tennessee and the Colorado but ahead of the Kansas and the Yellowstone systems.¹

Aerial view of the harbor, looking south where the river meets the bay, 1949. History Museum of Mobile Collection. Courtesy of the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama.

There are many name changes and mergers within this massive watershed, however, not to mention dramatic variations in the character of the landscape itself. From the mountain source, at more than 1,300 feet above sea level, the Tickanetley loses itself in the Cartecay River, which is joined by the Ellijay to form the Coosawattee River. That stream tumbles out of the Appalachian foothills and just north of Resaca meets with the Conasauga, and the Oostanaula River results. At Rome, elevation roughly six hundred feet, the Oostanaula and the Etowah join to make the Coosa, which crosses the Alabama line and continues southwest through forested ridge and valley country. Before all the big dams were built in the early twentieth century, the Coosa was famous for its many falls, rapids, and shoals. At Wetumka, six miles north of Montgomery and less than two hundred feet above sea level, the Tallapoosa flows out of the Georgia Piedmont and presses its muddy waters into those of the Coosa, and the mighty Alabama is formed. Fifty miles west of Montgomery, the Alabama absorbs the Cahaba and then carves its graceful path through a broad coastal plain of limestone, black loam, gravel, and sandy soil all the way to Nannahubba—only six feet above sea level—where it finds the Tombigbee through a series of swamps and tortuous meanderings, one of which is known as the Alabama River Cutoff. The Tombigbee, the dominant stream in the basin’s western half, arises in northern Mississippi and flows into Alabama at Pickens County, where it proceeds south, joined by the Black Warrior and Sipsey, as well as numerous other smaller watercourses before it reaches Nannahubba.²

A comprehensive historical survey of the Mobile River Basin would certainly have its place, but that is not my intention here. There are already several sweeping overviews of Alabama’s rivers, among them Rivers of Alabama (1968), by John C. Goodrum et al., and Alabama: The River State (1998), edited by Todd Keith, but these give the Mobile limited coverage. More detailed histories of selected rivers within the basin are also available—most notably Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba and Alabama (1995), by Harvey H. Jackson; The Tombigbee River Steamboats: Rollodores, Deadheads, and Sidewheelers (2010), by Rufus Ward; and Tenn-Tom Country: The Upper Tombigbee Valley (1987), by James F. Doster and David C. Weaver—but again the Mobile River is only occasionally mentioned. Jackson does not even give it an index entry in his book and glancingly refers to it and the Tensaw as ill-defined channels.³

So the Mobile it is, then, beginning at Nannahubba, and what a strange name that is. It comes, like so many Southern place names, from an Indian tribe—the Naniabas, or fish eaters, who lived in the Alabama and Tombigbee’s fork.⁴ This low, swampy land, in reality a large island, was habitable only part of the year, but the thirty-foot-high bluff nearby on the Tombigbee’s western bank, where ThyssenKrupp’s multibillion dollar plant now busily rolls steel, has never flooded and has long provided a handy northern limit for discussions of the Mobile River. As the nineteenth-century steamboat captains approached Nannahubba (and modern tugboat captains and pleasure boaters too, for that matter), they knew to bear right for the Alabama and Selma and left for the Tombigbee and Demopolis.

The Mobile’s northernmost stem—the five miles from Nannahubba down to the Promised Land, known as the Mount Vernon Stretch among watermen—is a truly impressive geographical feature, and if it held these dimensions all the way to the coast it might be a more respected and famous river than it is. Over one thousand feet wide and more than thirty feet deep, it channels a remarkable 39,300 million gallons of water per day as it begins a relatively straight push to the sea.⁵ But at the base of the Mount Vernon Stretch, the Mobile assumes a radically different character and splits into two main channels—Mobile west and Tensaw east. From here down to the head of Mobile Bay all of those millions of gallons of water become spread throughout one of the most extraordinary natural landscapes on the Gulf Coast—the Mobile River Delta.

Even experienced outdoorsmen will admit that the delta is damned confusing to navigate. Its 300 square miles include 20,000 acres of open water, 10,000 acres of marsh, 70,000 acres of swamp, and better than 85,000 acres of bottomland forest. There are more than 250 different waterways that loop and twist and thread through towering stands of cypress and tupelo gum and, closer to Mobile Bay, waving marshy expanses. Promising meanders can quickly become dead ends.⁶ Large and small islands, lakes, bays, bayous, and channels bear a bewildering plethora of names—some harkening back to Indian or colonial days, others to the nineteenth century when loggers penetrated the delta’s farthest recesses through arrow-straight canals they dug as they went. Feeding into the Mobile’s western main channel alone are to be found Alligator Bayou, Bayou Matche, Bear Creek, Black Bayou, Big Bayou Canot, Bayou Sara (originally Saw Mill Creek), Catfish Bayou, Dead Lake, Hog Bayou, Grog Hall Creek, Little Briar Creek, Big and Little Lizard Creeks (a corruption of Lizars, the name of an early French resident of the area); and approaching the city Chickasabogue (in more recent times Chickasaw Creek), Three Mile Creek, Choctaw Pass, and Pinto Pass. Within the vast alluvial plain east of the Mobile lie Alligator Lake, Big and Little Chippewa Lakes, Dominic Creek, Gravine Island, Mound Island, The Basin, Chuckfee Bay, Grand Bay, Lower Crab Creek, Middle River, Raft River, Big Bateau Bay, Chicory Bayou, and so many more.

Visitors have been suitably impressed by the Mobile River Delta since colonial times. The French referred to it as trembling land, and a nineteenth-century scientist elaborated when he wrote that much of it is impassable; some of it quakes and sinks beneath the tread, and is covered with tall grass and aquatic plants. In 1797 a geographer noted three broad divisions within its roughly forty-five-mile length—low rice lands, on or near the banks of the river, . . . level flat cane lands, about 4 or 5 feet higher than the low rice lands . . . and high upland or open country.⁷ Immediately after the Civil War, a native Vermonter waxed eloquent on huge bays and outspread fields of water, so labyrinthean that a stranger, involved in their mazes and impressed by their outré air, would be reminded of the Stygian regions of his classics.⁸ But perhaps no one conjured the delta so vividly as the Mobile folklorist and raconteur Julian Lee Rayford. In his 1941 novel Cottonmouth, Rayford compared the delta’s swamps to the people on their fringes, some grim, some bitter, some smelly, some sweet and full of sharp fragrance, some inviting, some harmless, some brooding and waiting like the glowering eyes of a wildcat.⁹

Along with its natural divisions, watery magnitude, and pungency, the Mobile River Delta’s incredibly diverse flora and fauna have provoked wondering commentary from a wide variety of observers, some well versed in the natural world and others simply awed travelers. In the fall of 1775 the British naturalist William Bartram departed Mobile’s rickety wharves in a trading boat and was conveyed upstream and across the delta to the vicinity of modern-day Stockton as a guest of Major Robert Farmar, the commandant of what was then British Mobile. Farmar lent Bartram a light canoe, and for several days the naturalist delightedly explored the environs. In his journal Bartram marveled at the abundant river cane which grew to a great height and thickness and fearlessly plunged into awful shades where he beheld stately columns of Magnolia grandiflora. Deeper in the delta’s swamps, the trees were by far the tallest, straightest, and every way the most enormous that he had ever encountered.¹⁰

Of all the trees that grow in the delta—bald cypress, water tupelo, red maple, sweet bay, Carolina ash, magnolia, water oak, and live oak to name but a few—the cypress and magnolia have elicited the most reaction. Shortly after the Civil War, Greville Chester, an English clergyman, collector, and amateur archaeologist visiting Mobile, pronounced the magnolia almost unrivalled in the vegetable world for its beauty and was intrigued by the forest floor gemmed by its glistening red berries. Almost eighty years later the decline of one of these majestic trees occasioned an article with an accompanying photograph in the Mobile Register. Situated at Magazine Point and towering more than one hundred feet high and measuring sixteen feet in circumference, it was known, appropriately enough, as the Great Magnolia Tree. It was thought to be then several hundred years old. The newspaper noted that the tree was a popular surveyor’s landmark, used to determine the boundaries of the 22,000 odd lots in what is known as the St. Louis land tract. While once a picture of woodland splendor, time and two lightning strikes had not been kind, and, in the words of a nearby resident, it was slowly dying.¹¹

Cypress trees garnered attention because of their height as well as their peculiar knobby knees that poked out of the water. In the eighteenth century the surveyor and naturalist Bernard Romans commented on their enormous size and wrote that swamps filled with them were nearly impassable for horses because of the extremely dangerous knees, or spurs, as he called them. In March of 1842 an English visitor to Mobile, James Silk Buckingham, wrote at length about the cypress trees—then displaying their winter brown rather than the rich green of high summer—that seemed to be everywhere around the city. He recorded their height at from eighty to ninety feet and their circumference at from fifteen to twenty feet. A cypress forest, he wrote, when viewed from the adjacent hills, with its numberless interlaced arms, covered with this dark brown foliage, has the aspect of a scaffolding of verdure in the air. And like many a newcomer to the Gulf Coast, he was beguiled by their mantles of Spanish moss, hanging, like a shroud of mourning wreaths, almost to the ground.¹²

Besides its magnificent trees, the delta hosts hundreds of other kinds of plants whose locations are dictated by the subtle and complex choreography of elevation, soil composition, wind, tide, and salinity within the delta. Among these growing things are grasses, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, and aquatic and subaquatic vegetation. A short list would have to include giant cane, big cord grass, saw grass, American holly, the nearly ubiquitous palmetto, trumpet creeper, poison ivy, pepper vine, green brier, wild grapes, yellow lotus, swamp hibiscus, ironweed, duckweed, alligator weed, and sea grass. Non-native and invasive species such as Chinese tallow and cogon grass have become major concerns in recent decades, and their impact is easily visible from the causeway across the bay’s northern end.

The delta and the bay are continually engaged in an epic ebb and flow that alternately favors salt water and then fresh as well as the respective plants and animals that depend on each. This cyclical flushing has historically followed a seasonal calendar, though upstream dams can radically alter the cycle. During the usually dry late-summer and autumn months, the river levels are low and the Gulf of Mexico advances, swollen by the sun’s heat, coaxed by the moon’s pull as it approaches Earth’s equator, and driven by prevailing southwesterly winds. The bay is brackish to the river mouths, and the lower delta’s salinity levels spike and creep upstream. By contrast, during winter and spring the rivers reign, dominating and overspreading the broad delta swamps for months. Salt water retreats, and fan-shaped plumes of fresh water and sediment balloon into the gulf. Historically, this was a most useful series of circumstances for the people who farmed the lower delta. An anonymous cartographer noted on the margin of one eighteenth-century map that the banks of the river . . . are generally overflowed in the rainy seasons, but it has been observed by persons who have cultivated them, that these inundations preserve the richness of the soil.¹³

The delta’s fauna is just as varied and prolific as its flora. There are 300 species of birds, 126 fishes, 46 mammals, 69 reptiles, and 30 amphibians.¹⁴ The birds are a glory, and the delta has long delighted serious watchers. The merest sampling must mention birds of prey such as the bald eagle, red-tailed hawk, screech owl, black vulture, and osprey; shore birds including the laughing gull, American white pelican, brown pelican, kingfisher, white ibis, great blue heron, little blue heron, night heron, snowy egret, and double-breasted cormorant; waterfowl such as the bufflehead duck, canvasback duck, ring-necked duck, harlequin duck, and Canada goose; and nesting songbirds including the brown thrasher, wood thrush, cardinal, bluebird, red-eyed vireo, Carolina wren, towhee, chipping sparrow, and Baltimore oriole. Among the fishes are largemouth bass, bowfin, banded pygmy sunfish, black madtom, bluegill, blacktale shiner, freshwater drum, black crappie, blue catfish, blue sucker, southern flounder, redfish, American eel, Alabama sturgeon, speckled trout, and mullet. The waters also harbor mollusks, marsh clams, oysters, gulf white shrimp, and crabs. The mammal species are not as numerous as the birds or fishes but are nonetheless diverse and intriguing. Among them are white-tail deer, squirrel, red fox, raccoon, opossum, rabbit, wild pig (dating from the Spanish entradas), bear, and bobcat. Aquatic mammals including the manatee sometimes visit the delta during the warm months, and when temperatures drop they huddle around the Barry Steam Plant outfall.¹⁵

Of the reptiles and amphibians, there are more inhabiting the delta than just about any place else in the United States. The bountiful snakes include the deadly cottonmouth and diamondback rattler, as well as the benign banded water snake, hognosed snake, and ribbon snake. There are also gopher tortoises, box turtles, and the endangered Alabama red-bellied turtle. But of all the critters that crowd the delta, none has excited as much attention as the alligator. Bartram spied big ones basking on the shores and swimming in the river and lagoons at the Mobile and Tensaw fork.¹⁶ That these monsters knew no fear was frighteningly demonstrated for a French marine captain on an upriver trip in 1759. Just above the fork on the Tombigbee, he and his men stopped for the night, pitching their camp on the riverbank. The officer, Jean Bernard Bossu, spread out his bearskin and put a large fish the Indians had given him at his feet for the night. After about an hour’s sleep, he awoke with a start as his bedding was dragged toward the water. I thought the devil was carrying me off, he declared later. But the demon proved to be an enormous alligator—twenty feet by Bossu’s estimation. The Frenchman managed to scamper out of his bedding, but his fish was lost. This story, plain as it is, may pass for a prodigy among those who love the marvelous, he laconically concluded.¹⁷

Even more astonishing was the experience of a young Connecticut merchant in 1806. William Robertson boarded a small schooner in Spanish Mobile with some trade goods and headed upriver for the American garrison at Fort Stoddert. Near Twenty-One Mile Bluff (roughly where the Dolly Parton Bridge today crosses the delta), the wind died and the vessel lost headway. With her sails hanging limp and the men too tired to pull at the sweeps, the anchor was let go and the schooner lay quietly mid-river. But in what must have been an unnerving sight, Robertson reported that the water was literally alive with alligators, and many more rested on the shore. Incredibly, the crew took no precautions, leaving the sweeps extended into the water and posting no watch. As a big, bright moon arose and bathed the sails in its ghostly light, the men bedded down on deck. Robertson placed his mattress between the hatch and the mainmast with a mosquito net rigged from the boom. Directly at his head, he recalled, there was a coop of fowls, and toward morning I was awakened by their extraordinary noise. To his horror he discovered himself sandwiched between two tremendous alligators, and when he scrambled out from under his mosquito net, he saw five more on the main deck and one on each sweep. Heart pounding, Robertson shouted, The vessel is in the possession of the alligators! In a twinkling the clamor of confused shouts and bare feet thumping the wooden deck yielded to musket shots and enough alligator meat to feed an army. The danger conquered and the chickens saved, the crew made loud fun of Robertson’s two companions on the mattress. Having learned their lesson, however, they pulled the sweeps aboard for what little remained of the night.¹⁸

Far less spectacular than the alligator but certainly fascinating are the delta’s many amphibians—the Southern cricket frog, bird-voiced tree frog, barking tree frog, American bullfrog, Southeastern slimy salamander, Gulf Coast water dog, and the Eastern newt, among others. More visible, and in some cases far more troublesome to even casual observers, are the many insects that make the delta buzz, hum, and whine in summer—gnats and flies; the incredibly riotous cicadas, loudest of all the insects; grasshoppers; primitive dragonflies thrumming the air; beautiful butterflies of many varieties—palamedes swallowtails, sulphers, monarchs; stinging and biting pests such as the fire ant (an unwelcome immigrant through the Port of Mobile, circa 1930), yellow jacket, wasp, and hornet; and, most dreaded of all, the mosquito. In the early sixteenth-century the Spanish castaway Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca said that he encountered three kinds of them on the Gulf Coast. They poison and inflame, he wrote, and during the greater part of the summer gave us great annoyance. The Indians were just as plagued by them, and Cabeza de Vaca reported that when covered with bites they resembled lepers. The Aedes aegypti, or yellow fever mosquito, that later wrought havoc on Mobile’s colonial and early American residents, has of course earned its own particularly grim place in history.¹⁹ Then there are the arachnids, some just as irritating and dangerous as the stinging and biting insects, if not more so—chiggers, mites, ticks, scorpions, black widow spiders, wolf spiders, and the gorgeous golden orb spiders, big as a logger’s hand.

Contained by red hill escarpments as high as two hundred and fifty feet to the east and west, the Mobile’s magnificent delta exists as a dynamic and exotic ecosystem, continually spilling sediment and debris—mud, sand, logs, river cane—into the head of Mobile Bay, growing itself ever southward by degrees—nine hundred feet a century, by one estimation.²⁰ Thus the big river that begins with such powerful promise at Nannahubba eventually enters its bay in diffuse and complicated fashion through five principal mouths—from east to west the Blakeley, Apalachee, Tensaw, Spanish, and Mobile Rivers. Other than the Tensaw, which at thirty-six miles long nearly rivals the Mobile’s main channel, these streams are incredibly short—the Apalachee branches off the Tensaw and is six miles long, while the Blakeley splits off the Apalachee and is only three miles in length. The Spanish