The situation, as I understand it, is this: The old dams and locks, completed in 1926, provided a six-and-a-half-foot channel from the Black River to Camden. The new system was finished in 1985 and provides a nine-foot channel with new dams and locks at Calion and Felsenthal in Arkansas, and Columbia and Jonesville in Louisiana. The locks will accommodate four standard barges tied two abreast ahead of a tugboat. Some of the bends in the river, however, are so tight that these four-barge units can’t negotiate them. The shorter, two-barge units, are said not to be commercially feasible. To remedy this, Mrs. Platt and the Corps of Engineers want to lop off some of the meanders, most of them in Arkansas.
“They say we’re trying to make a muddy ditch out of the river,” she said. “Well, that’s just not true. We’re talking about a total of 14 bend widenings and eight cutoffs, out of what, more than 300 bends in the river? We’re talking about a total of 341 acres of land. That’s all that will be used. I’m trying to help the river, not hurt it. I’m an environmentalist too. I’m just as much an environ mentalist as Richard Mason is.”
Mr. Mason, of El Dorado, co-chairman of the Businessmen’s Coalition to Save the Ouachita, agrees with the numbers but thinks they are misleading. He said, “Some of those cutoffs are huge and will really take in as many as seven smaller bends. Look, every conservation and wildlife group in the state is against this thing—every single one.” He also thinks it’s a waste of money. “An obvious pork barrel proposition, nothing else. You could make that river as straight as an arrow and nobody would use it.” It is much cheaper, he claims, to haul goods by truck from Crossett to Greenville, Miss., or from Camden to Pine Bluff, on the Arkansas, and offload on barges there, than to ship down the Ouachita. As for the El Dorado petroleum products, there are existing pipelines. “You can’t ship cheaper than a pipeline.”
The cutoff project is now hanging fire, pending acquisition of the 341 acres, which the five affected counties in Arkansas must pay for. In Louisiana, the state government must pay. I came away with the impression that Mrs. Platt is right about the predicted damage to the river being exaggerated, and that Mr. Mason is right when he says that the prospects for high-volume barge traffic are not very good. [The project was not completed.—Ed.]
* * *
When Dunbar came through here in 1804 he noted the presence of a trail through the woods: “…the road of the Cadadoquis Indian Nation [Caddo] leading to the Arcansa Nation; a little beyond this is the Ecor a Fabri [Fabri’s Cliffs] 80 to 100 feet high: it is reported that a line of demarkation run between the french and spanish provinces, when the former possessed Louisiana, crossed the river at this place; and it is said that Fabri, a french-man and perhaps the supposed Engineer deposited lead near the cliff in the direction of the line…The additional rapidity of the current indicates that we are ascending into a higher country. The water of the river now becomes extremely clear and is equal to any in its very agreeable taste as to drinking water…The general breadth of the river today has been about 80 yards.”
The Ouachita remains about the same width but the bluff is not half that high today, having been trimmed down over the years by railroads and other developers.
Again, the question arises: Was DeSoto here? The DeSoto Commission thought so, tracking the expedition south along the Little Missouri and the Ouachita, as the Spaniards made their way back toward the Great River in late 1541. Camden, or perhaps Calion, says the report, was very probably the Autiamque of Elvas, or Utiangue, as Garcilaso has it. Here is Elvas:
“The next day they came to Autiamque. They found much Maiz laid up in store, and French beanes [?] and walnuts, and prunes, great store of all sorts. They took some Indians which were gathering together the stuffe which their wives had hidden. This was a Champion countrie, and well inhabited. The Governor [DeSoto] lodged in the best part of the towne, and commanded presently to make a fense of timber round about the Campe distant from the houses, that the Indians might not hurt them without by fire…hard by this town passed a River, that came out of the Province of Cayas…”
So far, so good. The puzzling part comes next. Elvas tells us that they spent the winter at Autiamque, three months in all, with plenty of food. The Indians showed them how to snare rabbits, both cottontails and another breed which were “as big as great Hares, longer, and having greater loines.” These may have been swamp rabbits, whose loines are great indeed.
They passed the winter there resting and trapping rabbits “which until that time they knew not how to catch…The Indians taught them how to take them: which was, with great springes, which lifted their feete from the ground: and the snare was made with a strong string, whereunto was fastened a knot of cane, which ran close about the neck of the conie, because they should not gnaw the string. They took many in the fields of Maiz, especiallie when it freezed or snowed. The Christians staied there one whole moneth so inclosed with snow, that they went not out of towne…”
Snowbound in Camden for a month? Or Calion? Garcilaso puts it at six months:
“There was much snow that year in this province, and for a month and a half they were unable to venture into the countryside because of the extensive amount that had fallen. Nevertheless, with the great luxury of firewood and provisions, they passed the best of all winters they experienced in Florida, and they themselves confessed that they could not have been more comfortable in the dwellings of their families in Spain…”
DeSoto left Autiamque-Camden in March of 1542, moving down the Ouachita, and after 10 days’ journey, which would put him somewhere in Louisiana, “there fell out such weather, that foure daies he could not travell for snow…” Snowbound in Louisiana in March?
An exceptionally severe winter. Either the geography is all wrong or the weather, over 450 years, has changed. Knowing nothing about changing weather patterns, but, being a journalist and thus having no scruples about commenting on the matter, I think they may well have changed. It was, after all, not quite 200 years ago when Dunbar and his men were besieged with snow and ice near Hot Springs, with temperatures in the single digits.
Two months after leaving Camden, somewhere on the Great River in the Ferriday-Natchez area, Hernando DeSoto died on May 21, 1542, of malaria or fatigue or despair. The soldiers hid the body so the Indians couldn’t see that this Childe of the Sunne (as he had introduced himself) was mortal, and then they placed it in a hollow live-oak log, or in a shroud weighted with sand (the accounts differ), and by night rowed it out into the Mississippi, at a place where it was 19 fathoms or 114 feet deep. “…They lowered him in the center of the river, and commending his soul to God, watched him sink at once to its depths.”
I asked about local historians and was directed to a lawyer, Col. John Norman Warnock, U.S. Army, Retired, who is al most 80 years old. He lives south of Camden in the community of Elliott and kindly agreed to see me. His house had recently burned, he told me over the telephone, and he was now living and working in a trailer.
I took this to mean a mobile home, but it was in fact a trailer, a blue and white 28-footer that you could hook up to your stretched black Cadillac limousine, if you had one, and be off with in short order, with a good laugh for everybody left behind. The Colonel has two of these extra long Cadillacs, a 1974 and a 1979 model. The battery and the alternator—“that big, $180 alternator”—had been stolen from the ’74, and one tire was flat, but the ’79 was running fine.
“I buy them from a man in Dallas,” he said. “I like the protection and comfort of a big car.”
The trailer was parked in the shade of big pinoak trees. Two shaggy little Pomeranian dogs yapped at me. There were eight Rhode Island Red hens in the yard. They were older chickens, laying hens who no longer laid eggs, but who were still proving useful in their retirement years. “Look. See how they peck at everything that moves? They keep this yard completely free of ticks.”
The Colonel, who retired from the army in 1965, is a small, dapper man with soft white hair. He reminded me of Lew Ayres,
the actor. He wore a tan cord suit, tan shirt, and tan bow tie. His manner was quiet, polite, very Southern. The trailer was packed to the roof with boxes, files, books, clothes, leaving only a tiny space at one end for his office. His secretary, a young lady, was typing away at something. She sat at a little shelf-like table similar to the ones used by flight engineers on the smaller Boeings. The Colonel graciously gave me the only other seat, a stool, and he stood as we talked about the Ouachita. I believe there would have been more room in one of the Cadillacs, as there was no more than 18 inches of space between us.
His family, he said, both the Warnocks and the Moons, had been in Ouachita County since the 1830s, and an enormous amount of valuable documents and memorabilia had been lost in the house fire. Did he plan to rebuild? He said he didn’t know, hinting at certain dark obstacles, “You lend people money, and they won’t pay you back.”
He, too, like Dee Brown, rode the steam boat Ouachita in the 1920s, and he remembers how it would stop to pick up driftwood for the boiler furnace. It got stuck on a sandbar once, and by the time it reached Camden all the bananas had turned brown. “They sold them for 25 cents—a stalk! The boys around here got sick stuffing them selves with soft bananas.”
As he recalls, this last gasp of steamboat service came in right after the locks and dams were built in 1926. “That was old Captain Cooley [L.V. Cooley] who started it, and I believe it all died with him too, around 1934 or ’35. It was quite a thing, the band playing, the dancing at night on the river. All this was cotton country then. Gins everywhere. A lot of cotton was shipped out of here. Now it’s all in pine trees.”
Colonel Warnock himself brought a boat up to Camden from New Orleans at the end of World War II. He bought it in Germany, a 40-foot cruiser with a steel hull, and had it shipped to New Orleans on the deck of a merchant vessel. “It drew three feet of water, about the same as the steamboats. I came up in June and had no trouble at all.” The “liquor” discharge from the local paper mill damaged the hull, he claims, and some years back he sent it to Louisiana for repairs. It remains there, beached, in some sort of legal limbo “at a Lebanese-Italian boat-yard in Morgan City.”
I asked him why Camden did not make more of its history. There is, for example, no DeSoto Street.
“No, they don’t make much of anything around here. You try to put on some Civil War thing and nobody’s interested. Why, there were more Civil War battles fought around here than around Natchez. Small ones, yes, but still.”
The oil country begins a few miles south at Louann. There are stripper wells along the highway. The horsehead pumping units bow and rise ever so slowly as they pull up four or five barrels of crude a day. “The strippers have become drippers,” I was told in Smackover. Here in a downtown park, a metal plaque states that “…the French settlers called this area ‘Sumac Couvert.’ This was anglicized to ‘Smackover’ by later English settlers…” Covered with sumac? Sumac bower? Sumac shelter?
Perhaps, but I suspect Dunbar is more likely correct. He made this entry for November 20, 1804: “At 7 1/2 a.m. passed a creek which forms a deep ravine in the high lands and has been called ‘Chemin Couvert.’” This was Smackover Creek, where it enters the Ouachita from a deep cut. Dunbar was dealing with hunters, guides, settlers, soldiers, and such maps as there were, and he very probably got the name right, “Chemin Couvert,” covered way, which was soon corrupted into Smackover. Upstream from the creek he tells of seeing an alligator “which surprised us much at this late season and so far north.”
* * *
I paid $1.23 a gallon for regular gasoline at El Dorado, the oil city, more than at any other place along the way. On the other hand, my motel room cost only $21, and, a bonus, a man was practicing law in the next room. Two strange law offices in one day. This one, an ordinary motel room, had the lawyer’s shingle fastened to the door, just above the number, with a single screw in the middle. There were bits of Scotch tape on the ends to keep it from tilting, perhaps demoralizing his customers. I was all set if I woke up in the night with a start and the urgent feeling that I should dictate a codicil to my will. Against that piece of luck, however, I had to weigh this: The cafe I like in El Dorado was no longer serving an evening meal. The new, shorter serving hours were explained to me this way: “That woman that runs it, that was her sister that run it at night, and she got married and moved to Shreesport.”
El Dorado, of course, is not on the river, but is close enough, and the town had steamboat service in the 19th century by way of the Champagnolle Landing. At Calion I looked over the first of the four new dams on the river, this one named for the late H. K. Thatcher, who worked for many years as a lobbyist and gadfly for the project. It is a mighty work of concrete and steel. On the far side, the Calhoun County side, high water was streaming unchecked over the low part of the dam. No one was about. No boats were in view. The lock water appeared stagnant, as though it had been standing undisturbed for some time. A dead and bloated buffalo fish with a cloudy eye lay washing about in the debris. The river looked almost as wide as the Arkansas at Little Rock.
Because of the high water, the ferry at Moro Bay wasn’t running. I was to be denied another ferry ride south of Columbia, La., for the same reason. The Arkansas Highway Department has only two other ferries left in operation, at Spring Bank on the Red, and at Bull Shoals Lake. Here in the backwater at Moro Bay, I saw a moccasin about two feet long. He was swimming toward me and then stopped when he saw me, undulating in place, but not showing much fear.
The Saline River now comes in from the east to meet the Ouachita and form a kind of overflow swamp known locally as the Marie Saline. It is not named for a lady, as we used to think. Dunbar explains: “Between 11 and 12 o’clock passed on the right the ‘marais de la Saline’ (Salt-lick marsh). There is here a small marshy lake, but it is not intended by its name to convey any idea of a property of brackishness in the lake or marsh, but merely that it is contiguous to some of the licks.” It was the same for the Saline River, then going by the name of “the grand bayou de la Saline (Salt-lick Creek)…” Hunters, Dunbar says, took their boats some 300 river miles up the Saline, and “all agree that none of the springs which feed this Creek are salt; it has obtained its name from many buffalo salt licks which have been discovered near to the Creek.”
Here, where the river crosses into Louisiana, is the lowest point in Arkansas, with the state Geology Commission giving it as 55 feet above sea level and the Corps of Engineers at 43.8 feet. This water has fallen 1,550 feet since it left Polk County, and it still has a long way to go before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, and only another 50 feet to fall. All this low country is now the Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge, a swampy wilderness much like that of the White River Refuge, but with not quite so much hardwood timber.
West of Crossett near the Highway 82 bridge there is a new slack-water harbor, ready for business, with a wharf on concrete pilings and a new and empty warehouse. Again, no one was about. There were no boats. I drove the back roads above the Felsenthal Dam. Always at some point I would run into a body of water and have to turn around. These are deep woods. I saw a house on stilts near the river, not a hunting lodge but a home, with clothes on a line and broken toys in the yard. There was no power line, and no telephone line, television antenna, satellite dish, or mail box. Getting your news by barge might not be so bad.
I detected no immediate cultural change as I entered Louisiana, perhaps a bit more clear-cutting of timber, but not much more than I saw in the Huttig area. At Sterlington I did find an industry that uses the river for shipping, the Angus Chemical Co., which has little docks and terminal pipes projecting out from the river bank. But much of this plant was destroyed by an explosion and fire in May, in which nine workers were killed and more than a hundred injured.
All along the lower river I stopped in towns and asked about the tonnage shipped on the river. The current tonnage, I thought, when compared to the tonnage of bygone years and the projected tonnage of the future, w
ould give us all something to mull over. At city halls and chambers of commerce I would be shown into the office of a very courteous if puzzled man. He would tap a pencil on the desk. “Yes. Let’s see now. The tonnage. Brenda, why don’t you get Charles some coffee.” Brenda would later be sent here and there in search of an elusive folder that just might contain some river matter. Long after it became clear that no one knew or cared about the tonnage, I asked about the tonnage. I didn’t care either, but I felt a nagging dreary duty to come up with some figures.
Monroe is the biggest city on the Ouachita, with a population, including West Monroe, of 65,000. The river splits the two towns. There is a high bridge on Interstate 20, and three older bridges that can be raised or pivoted on turntables to allow river traffic to pass. But days go by at a time with no call to raise or swing the bridges, I was told by Bruce Fleming, planning director for Monroe, and there is no “Port of Monroe,” as such, though the city does own an excursion boat, the Twin City Queen, which it rents out to clubs.
It was getting through to me that people living on the Ouachita no longer see their river as a highway, in any important commercial sense. It is just there, every day, a pretty stream of water, handy for recreation, useful in dry years for irrigation, inconveniently overflowing every spring.
Somewhere along here in the pecan groves on Bayou DeSiard I stopped talking about tonnage and started asking people how they pronounced “bayou.” It came out “by-yoo” and “by-oo,” about half and half, with an occasional “bya.” We said “byo” in south east Arkansas, or “bya.” In defending this usage, I pointed out to a woman in Monroe that Hank Williams says “byo” in his song “Jambalaya.” Yes, she said, but Hank was forcing a cheap rhyme with “me-o-my-o.” I countered by informing her that Arkansas Post (1686, Tonti) is older than New Or leans (1718, Bienville). She didn’t believe me. Nor did she believe me when I informed her that “bayou” is not a French word.