Rivers: Competition for the Catfish

It rises as a cold, clear mountain torrent in Colorado. It dwindles and almost dies while crossing the Kansas plains. Fed by tributaries, it meanders in great twists and turns through Oklahoma and Arkansas. It is one of America’s muddiest rivers. Because of its sewage, silt and salt, the water is not fit for swimming, drinking or irrigation. In fact, the 1,450-mile Arkansas River is good only for the huge channel catfish, which have literally pulled fishermen into its muck.

But all this will change. Under way in the Arkansas basin is one of the most costly river-development programs in U.S. history. To be completed in 1970, the project will spend $1.2 billion (against $1 billion for the St. Lawrence Seaway) to create a navigable channel 9 ft. deep with a width of 150-250 ft. all the way from the Mississippi 516 miles west to the town of Catoosa, Okla.

Looking Up. At the moment, Catoosa (pop. 638) has neither a water nor a sewage system. Most of its streets are unpaved. Many of its stores are abandoned. No passenger trains stop at the forlorn depot; no freight has been moved out since a local coal mine shut down a year or so ago. Catoosa is not even on the Arkansas, which passes 15 miles away at Tulsa. But the river at Tulsa is so impossible that engineers threw up their hands, decided to branch off the Arkansas and dredge their channel up the Verdigris River, a tributary, to Catoosa. Things are already looking up for Catoosa: North American Aviation has bought several hundred acres for a possible plant site.

The project should do as much or more for the impoverished, scantily settled areas of western Arkansas, the Ozark region of hillbilly fame. There, in towns such as Dardanelle (pop. 2,098) and Houston (pop. 206), barefoot youngsters ride bareback through the dirt streets and the old folks rock on their front porches and wave at the infrequent cars passing through. In Perry County, where the population is just nine people per square mile, the Toad Suck Ferry, a side-wheeler operated by the state, moves lazily from willowed bank to willowed bank.

Cheaper by Water. To shore up the sandy, crumbling banks of the Arkansas, the project will spend $118.5 million alone on dikes and retaining walls. To control the silt, two large dams will be built on major tributaries to the Arkansas: the Eufaula on the Canadian River and the Oologah on the Verdigris. Finally, to make the shallow, shifting Arkansas navigable, engineers will build a series of 18 locks and dams along the 516-mile route, including the $90 million Dardanelle lock and dam (see map).

When the project is completed, oil and coal from Oklahoma and bauxite from central Arkansas will move to market bv water. Shippers will save as much as $2.30 a ton on rock phosphate, 13¢ a bushel on wheat, up to $10 a ton on steel compared to present rail rates. In all, the Corps of Engineers estimates that the rebuilt Arkansas River will carry 13 million tons of cargo at an annual savings of $40 million under train costs.

Nimble Logroller. This is the kind of growth Oklahoma’s Democratic Senator Robert S. Kerr vowed the project would bring to the region when he set out to sell the program to a skeptical Senate. As chairman of the Senate’s Rivers and Harbors Subcommittee. Kerr had plenty of logrolling power to win over colleagues who wanted dams and dikes for their own states.

Fortnight ago, Kerr climbed into the seat of a snorting bulldozer and broke ground near Muskogee, Okla.. for a $5,000,000 harbor that will be built to handle future traffic on the broad stream that now dawdles by. Declared Kerr: “I can see an area developing which can take its place in the sun of modern America, developing an economy that will be the finest the people in this valley have ever known.” As Kerr rhapsodized about the future, a lone fisherman in a flat-bottomed boat drifted by on the Arkansas, angling for catfish.