The Cairo Bulletin

MEMPHIS FOLLOWING CAIRO'S EXAMPLE.

City Engineer Meigs, of Memphis, in obedience to a resolution of the General Council of that city, has prepared a memorial to Congress urging an appropriation for the purpose of preventing the destruction of the river front at that point. The memorial is quite lengthy and elaborate.

Destructive abrasions by the river have done great injury to the northern half of the shore line of the harbor, a distance of about five hundred feet. This has been going on since 1859. Within a period of twenty-one years, acres of ground have been washed away. Forty city lots, occupied in part by cotton warehouses, a coal yard and an iron foundry, were part of this ground, the value of which was $90,000. A large coal landing, valuable mills and large buildings on the west side of Promenade street, are now in danger; and it is the opinion of Engineer Meigs that if the river advances at the rate of twenty-two feet yearly, as it has done for the past eighteen years, the entire steamboat landing of the city will be engulfed. It needed no engineer to tell us this.

The length of the alluvial bank at Memphis requiring protection at this time is 7,500 feet, and the engineering expenses of this proposed work are far beyond the present means of the city. Therefore is Congress to be asked for an appropriation.

We sincerely hope Congress will give to Memphis the needed protection. She is entitled to it, and should have it furnished without delay. But if Memphis is entitled to the appropriation she proposes to ask for, how much more is Cairo entitled to the appropriation she is asking for? Memphis will ask an appropriation to protect her river front from abrasion by the river: Cairo asks an appropriation in the interest of improved navigation on the Mississippi. She urges it, with great vigor—or ought to—because while, by the appropriation, navigation at this point will be greatly improved, her levees will receive from it incidental protection. In 1873, Col. Reynolds of the U. S. Engineers, reported to the War Department the results of a reconnoissance made by him in 1872 of the Mississippi river, between the mouth of the Ohio and the mouth of the Illinois, and recommended, in the interest of navigation, a dam below Dickey's island, left bank, 1,500 feet long and 16 feet high, and a dike at Greenfield's ferry, left bank, 1,500 feet long and 16 feet high. In January, 1875, Col. J. H. Simpson, Corps of Engineers, upon part of the third sub-division of the Mississippi route, as designated by the Senate Select Committee on Transportation Routes to the Sea-board, recommended and urged the improvement of the river, this place; and in his special report on his survey in connection with the improvement of the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo: dated February 5, 1876, insists on an immediate appropriation of $197,500 for the improvement of the river in the vicinity of this city. "The necessity," says the Colonel, "for protective works at both these localities [the bend below Dickey's Island and the bend on the Missouri shore nearer the mouth of the Ohio] is immediate in the interest of improved navigation: because the position, slope and depth of channel throughout the part of the river shown in the map, are now favorable, and could be rendered permanent with as little cost as will ever be possible in the future, and conditions equally favorable may not occur again if the work is deferred; moreover, delay will assuredly result in transforming the spur dikes [the trustees' protective stone walls from beneficial structures to dangers similar to the Bacon Rock lately removed under the authority of Congress, after having caused many disasters to boats." Besides this, every steamboatman—captain, clerk and pilot—is earnest in saying the Mississippi at Cairo should be improved.

Leaving therefore out of view the good results that would come to Cairo from the proposed improvement—the fact that the safety of the city demands that the improvement shall be made, and that the making of it would go far towards building up a great city at this point—it will be seen that the appropriation now being asked for to improve the Mississippi at Cairo, should be made without delay in the interest of improved navigation.

Memphis has a right to ask the appropriation she wishes for; Cairo has a right to demand the one she is interested in. Mr. Hereford, the chairman of the Committee on Commerce in the House, and the members of that committee, should not any longer neglect this matter. It is the duty of that committee to investigate these subjects, and its tardiness in doing its duty in this regard is creating not a little comment in "the valley."