Rails Across the Mississippi: A History of the St. Louis Bridge
By Jackson, Robert '73

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An absorbing tale of grand dreams, shady politics, daring engineering experiments, greed, ambition, and westward expansion, Rails across the Mississippi is the first book-length history since 1881 to document the planning, financing, and construction of the first bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis, a national engineering landmark completed in 1874 that is now known as the Eads Bridge. Robert W. Jackson takes a fresh look at this monumental project, dispersing the myths and filling in the gaps left by earlier scholarship.

When James B. Eads outlined his plan for a bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, critics said that the genius did not exist in the country capable of erecting such a structure. Instead of the tried-and-true iron truss bridge, Eads--who was not a trained engineer and had no experience designing or building bridges--proposed a radical design that shattered engineering precedent: an arch bridge longer than any in existence using steel, a material thought unsuitable for long-span bridges by virtually every engineer in America and Europe.

Rails across the Mississippi explores how Eads took on the task of building the bridge as he envisioned it and how he met the obstacles presented by his tenacious fidelity to that vision. Jackson describes the incredible process of sinking the river piers using pneumatic caissons, which were essentially inverted boxes that burrowed down through the riverbed. Workers, sometimes fatally afflicted with "caisson disease," or decompression sickness, descended through the vertical, torchlit access shafts into the caisson air chambers to clear away the accumulated sand and silt, using innovative pumps designed by Eads. The superstructure, consisting of an upper deck for pedestrian, wagon, and streetcar traffic and a lower railroad deck, was erected by use of an ingenious new method of cantilever construction.

Parallel to the construction of the bridge, Andrew Carnegie and other ambitious capitalists engaged in a shell game of bond sales, multiple mortgages, and deferred interest that provided just enough capital to keep the project moving forward. Jackson brilliantly depicts the slick local politicking, international negotiations, and egregious conflicts of interest that were the hallmark of the Gilded Age of unregulated business.

A marvel of innovative engineering, the bridge was a fiasco as a business venture. Its success as an investment depended on its heavy use by railroads, which required not only a commitment from railroads terminating in St. Louis and East St. Louis but also the construction of a mile-long tunnel under downtown St. Louis, passenger and freight terminal facilities, and tracks connecting the bridge to these facilities. Completed three years late and more than $6 million over budget, the St. Louis Bridge never recovered its costs. Nonetheless, Eads's bridge still stands at the gateway to the West, a testament to the determination and resourcefulness of its chief engineer. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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