PARCEL POST

 

I hate to tell you this, but, contrary to common belief, we are the ones living in a “simpler time”.  For the first two million years of human evolution the top limit on communication was the sum of the speed of sound divided by the speed of walking, divided by the number, width and depth of rivers and oceans, and the height of mountains and width of deserts separating you from the persons you wished to speak with. Those kinds of obstacles and those kinds of delays made the world a very complicated place.

When the Battle of New Orleans was fought on 8 January, 1815, the War of 1812 had been over since the Treaty of Ghent had been signed on 24 December, 1814. That was three years you needed to refer to,  while thinking about just one battle, because of the delays in communications. How much more complicated can you get than that?

Mail was the first technological invention in long distance communications. Cyrus the Great of Persia invented pony express riders to carry “words” to bound his empire together. According to the first great historian, Herodotus, these civil service riders were so dedicated that “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”; which is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service. The U.S. Postal service has no official motto. Maybe they should have gotten one before E-mail put them out of business. But I'm getting ahead of myself

The next major technical advance in communication didn’t come along until 1792, when Claude Chappe invented a ‘semaphone’ network in France. In his sales brochures he called it a “telegraph” (Greek for “far writing”). It required a series of towers spaced 20 miles apart, upon each of which were erected stone towers supporting two short movable arms connected by a longer movable arm. A Chappe telegraph operator repeated the 174 different combinations of arm positions to relay up to two words a minute. This was such a dependable system that the Swedes kept theirs running until 1880. However, Chappe never saw it turn a profit, for two reasons. First he threw himself down a well in 1805. And second, it never turned a profit. Worse yet, for Chappe’s family, he copyrighted every thing about his brilliant invention except the name.

In 1837 a failed Calvinist minister, a pro-slavery Federalist, a pedantic anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy freak named Samuel Fineley Breese Morse, co-opted the name for his “electronic telegraph” which he copyrighted from top to bottom, including the name "telegraph". The first recorded “Mores Code” telegraphed dot and dash was “A patient waiter is no loser”, in 1838.  The more famous message, “What hath God Wrought”, was telegraphed as a publicity stunt in 1844 and was suggested by Anne Ellsworth from my home town of Lafayette, Indiana. She was married at the time to Mr. Roswell, who gave his name to the New Mexico town where, in 1947, space aliens supposedly attempted to communicate with humans. Their message appears to have been the alien equivalent of “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” But, so far nobody has answered that message. 

The perfect expression of this more complicated communication is the traditional or “snail” mail service I grew up with. The complexities involved stagger the imagination. You write a letter, usually by hand. You take the letter to a collection point, a post office or a mail box. A representative of the United States Postal Service (your stand in) and his or her fellow employees then physically carries the actual letter to your friend’s home. There, your friend reads your words from the very paper you once held. It sounds fraught with opportunity for delays and errors, and it is. And yet it worked in America for two centuries. Until the Trump administration. And what is most amazing is that we expected it to work, and complained when it didn’t.  But then things began to change.

In 2005 the USPS (as it likes to refer to itself) processed (i.e. delivered) almost 46 billion individual first class letters. A decade later that number had dropped by over half - to 22.5 billion letters . In the year 2000 they employed 787, 538 people. By 2014 they employed less than half a million. But the U.S. Post Office still sends 7,000 men and women out on the streets to personally deliver 513 million letters six days a week, while costing the American tax payer NOTHING,  but generating $68 billion in revenue. What a bunch of "Big Government" people these "pro-mail" people are.

The ultimate complication of that ancient ultimately complicated communication system was Parcel Post, in which individuals were encouraged to send not only words from one end of the nation to another, but goods as well. The service was started in 1912 as an attempt to encourage economic development in rural America. And it worked.

But the first small flaw in the plan became visible when Postal authorities introduced "live parcel post" - mailing live baby chicks (in special containers) for which were delivered from anywhere to anywhere for just 53 cents apiece. Now, farmers could order chicks from breeders and they would be delivered, cheaply and reliably, right to the farmer's front door. It was a great boon to the egg industry nationwide. But problems arose when some of the little cheeps in every shipment died in their boxes en route, and the customers sought reimbursement from the Post Office. The rules denied the customer’s appeals, but they appealed anyway. What was not noticed at the time, was another  flaw in the logic of “live” parcel post.

The path to Parcel Post ad nausea was first made visible on the morning of 19 February,  1914, when Mrs. John E. Pierstroff of Grangeville, Idaho, loaded her four year old daughter, May Pierstroff (above), into the mail car of a train bound for Lewiston, Idaho, 55 miles away. A few moments later Harry Morris, the train's conductor, stumbled upon the little girl sitting quietly atop a pile of mail bags. Morris checked the 56 cents postage on the tag tied to May’s coat, and since the mother was no where to be seen, allowed the girl to ride in the mail car to Lewiston. There, mail clerk Leonard Mochel delivered May to her destination, the home of Mrs. Vennigerholz,  the girl’s grandmother.

It was the beginning of a disturbing trend. Later that same year postal workers in Stillwell, Indiana accepted a parcel post box marked, “live infant”. Without opening it, they delivered the box to South Bend, Indiana, where the “package” was accepted and opened by the infant’s divorced father. Cost for the trip was 17 cents. The infant arrived safely. The next year a Pensacola, Florida probation officer shipped six year old Edna Neff to her father, 728 miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia. The postage was 15 cents.

The public was unsettled by this mailing of live children, since the percentage of child molesters among the population in 1914 was about the same as it is today. The negative publicity (and a world war) probably prevented another child mailing until 1919. 

That was the year a press agent for the Aluminum Company of America arraigned for the mailing of five year old Marmi Hood and four year old Evan Hedge to their respective scab fathers, who were locked down inside in the company’s plant in Alco Tennessee. 

At the time the plant was surrounded by union picket lines. After a two hour tearful visit, heavily documented by the company publicity department, the children were “mailed Special Delivery” back to the Alco, Tennessee Post Office, where their mothers were anxiously waiting for them. Postage for the stunt both ways was $2.26 cents.  On Monday, 14 June, 1920 The US Post Office issued new rules, announcing that children would no longer be accepted as live parcel post.

The coda to this regulation was the C.O.D. package mailed to an undertaker in Albany, New York. It arrived on Monday, 20 November, 1922,  and carried no “return address”. In the box was the body of a child who appeared to have had died of natural causes. Her tombstone (above),  now weathered by almost a century of acid rain,  once read, "Parcella Post. An infant whose unknown parents sent the little body by mail...buried here through the kindness of individuals”.  How could you call such a world as that, "simpler" than ours? 

As you would expect from people living in such complicated times, the denizens of that ancient confusion were able to predict the problems and solutions faced by our current, “simpler", electronic age. It turns out the philosophical antithesis to Facebook was written in 1854, not long after the Mores telegraph hinted at the self obsessed simplicity which was to follow. 

It was written by that old fogey, Henry David Thoreau. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys”, wrote Henry David, “which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” And, what with a recent Texas Governor advocating their  re-secession from the union of states, and a recent Governor of Florida  advocating everybody just go to hell,  it would appear that our modern politicians are leading the way by getting simpler and simpler all the time. 

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FEET OF CLAY - The Chicago Sanitary Canal

 

I think it might be the most important two feet of clay in the entire world, 14 inches of clinging, grasping wet sticky ooze that made Teddy Roosevelt a two term President, inspired the effort that created the American century, and offers a lesson in the history of the world we live in - that we all have feet of clay.

The two feet had to be clay because clay holds water, and this particular clay was created over thousands of years by limestone being eroded by the dark acidic waters of a lake surrounded by a dense forest, such as in today’s Wisconsin Dells (above). This particular ancient dell has been called  "Lake Chicago", and if the clay it produced had been less than two feet high, then the clay would not have mattered.

If it had been much thicker than two feet then in 1674 Lois Jolliet (above) would have returned from his exploration of the Mississippi by a different route and the history of the United States of America would have been very, very different. Two feet was just thick enough to be difficult to overcome, but it could be over come. And although Monsier Jolliet was the first European to see the clay, he did not really see it. 

Jolliet wrote his superiors back in France that there was a easy way to travel from the inland fresh water sea the native Americans called the as Michi gami to the Mississippi River  "We could go with facility to Florida in a bark (canoe), and by very easy navigation, " wrote Jolliet.. "It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through but half a league (about a mile)  of prairie."  

But Jolliet had arrived at the edge of Lake Michigan (the ancient "Lake Chicago")  when most of the clay was hidden from view by the spring runoff. So the obstacle and the advantage of the clay would have to wait over a century to be revealed to the Europeans.

In the summer of 1818 fur trader Gurdon Hubbard, retracing Jolliet's route for the American Fur Company, made his first trip up the south fork of the ‘Shikaakwa’ (or skunk weed) River from the village of “Chicago” on the western shore of Lake Michigan (above) . 

Hubbard followed the river upstream until the open water gave out. From there, unlike Jolliet,  Hubbard was forced to portaged for seven miles. This was because Hubbard was traveling in the summer, when the water level was low.

“Our empty boats were pulled up the channel," wrote Hubbard, "...until the Mud Lake (above)  was reached, where we found mud thick and deep, but only at rare intervals was there water….”

Fighting off schools of leeches and clouds of mosquitoes, it took Hubbard three days to cross the 7 miles of clay and mud before reaching the clear flowing water of the Des Plaines River on the other side of the Valporaso morraine.  But as Jolliet had said, the Des Plaines River ran into the Illinois River, which joined the Mississippi River, which carried Hubbard and his bateau’s 12 tons of trade goods into the very hinterland of the continent. And perhaps this might be a good point to pause and explain why this was where the clay gathered.

Three times over the last 300,000 years glaciers have ground southward across North America, successively plowing the landscape bare and then recreating it on their retreat. When the penultimate of the glaciers paused here 25,000 years ago, they bulldozed a 10 foot high north-south ridge of clay (above, foreground) from the bed of the  ancient Lake Chicago. This ridge is called the “Valparaiso Terminal Moraine”. 

Chicago writer Libby Hill has noted this moraine is not a mountain range, but  "a very slight rise of maybe about 10 feet that...in times of low water... a subcontinental divide"(above), between the drainage to the Atlantic and drainage to the Mississippi river.   The  24 inch high ridge of clay was the cap on the moraine which kept the present Lake Michigan from draining to the west and south down the Des Paines River into the center of the continent.  Instead the waters of Lake Michigan were forced to find a another path to the ocean , eastward, toward the Saint Laurence River, and giving birth 12,000 years ago, to Niagara Falls.  But from the moment Hubbard clawed his way through the sucking, engulfing clay, Americans were anxious to dig through it. 

The dream of breaching that moraine was first achieved by the 96 mile long "Illinois and Michigan Canal", begun 1836, discontinued in the panic of 1837,  and not completed until 1848. It drained the Mud Lake and provided locks (above) to lift the narrow canal boats and their 100 ton loads 35 feet up to the level of the Des Plaines River at Jolliet.  

From there another series of locks provided an easy journey so Michigan apples could be sold in St. Louis and New Orleans. That first canal established Chicago as a transportation hub.

But the growth of Chicago presented its own challenges. By 1867, the 300,000 citizens of Chicago had so fouled their Lake Michigan shoreline that to reach clean drinking water they were required to tunnel two miles out under the lake. 

The success of such a "big government project", like the water tunnels and the "Illinois  and Michigan" canal encouraged the locals to dream of breaching the moraine in a more grand fashion,  and of converting Chicago from a mere lake port into a seaport. 

To sell the plan to conservative voters, politicians  also pitched the idea of reversing the flow of the Chicago River, to carry Chicago’s waste away from the lake, which was the source of the cities’ drinking water. Pumps would draw lake water into the Chicago River, and then send it up and over the "Valparaiso Moraine" before sending it down the new "Sanitary and Ship Canal". 

So on Saturday, 3 September, 1892,  Frank Wenter, President of the new Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago, turned the first ceremonial shovel of earth in the village of Lemont, Illinois (above), which was to be the central point of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, because it was one of the highest elevations between the rivers and a good source of stone, for lining the canal.

The new canal, built in the name of progress and “clean water”, would excavate 44 million cubic yards of clay and stone...

...to create a passage 28 miles long, 202 feet wide and 24 feet deep, which would terminate, for the time being, in a dam and the first in a series of locks at a new town named Lockport, Illinois. These locks could take ships and barges up to 600 feet long and 110 feet wide. Using steam power it would take eight years to finish the initial work and the final cost of this version of the canal would prove to be $45 million.

The New York World newspaper examined the social changes this ‘progress’ brought to the sleepy village of Lemont (below). Out of the town's 9,000 residents, wrote the paper,  “…4,000 are gamblers, thieves, murderers or disorderly women. There are 100 saloons, 40 gambling houses, 20 dance houses and three theaters…Everything is running wide open and licensed...Within three months 30 dead bodies have been found…and no one has been punished…"

The paper then added, "Every Sunday excursions of the worst classes go to Lemont from Chicago.”

When this canal opened the Mississippi River town of St. Louis would lose the race to become the railroad center of the nation, The new canal would allow Chicago grain and livestock markets to set prices for Missouri farmers. When the Missouri business interests finally awoke to the threat,  they realized a purely monetary argument against the canal lacked a sense of urgency.  So, as the Sanitary and Ship Canal got ready for an official opening set for the spring of 1900,  Missouri sued in federal court. The Missouri Attorney General claimed,   “The action of the Chicago authorities in turning their sewage into the Mississippi River for the people of St. Louis to drink ,is criminal, and Chicago knows it.”

Yea, maybe. But in response, in December of 1899, the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago released their own "scientific study" which "proved" all sewage had been cleansed by biological action by the time it reached Peoria, barely half way to St. Louis.  And besides, the Chicago lawyers argued, St. Louis drew most of its drinking water from the Missouri River, not the Mississippi. 

And besides that, the city of St Louis drained their own a sewage into the Mississippi River, above their own secondary intake (above) on the Mississippi.  If anybody was forcing the citizens of St. Louis to drink sewage, it was St. Louis, not Chicago! 

And to go further. in an attempt to present the United States Supreme Court with a faite accomplie on this issue, on 2 January 1900,  Chicago opened the new southern locks connecting the Des Plaines River with the Mississippi River, at Alton, Illinois.  Not to be deterred, on Wednesday, 17 January, 1900, Missouri filed a request for an injunction from the Supreme Court to stop new canal from being opened at the northern end. And suddenly the Chicago lawyers and politicians did not feel so certain about their case. 

To forestall the Supreme Court, on Sunday, 21 January, 1900, the directors of the Chicago Sanitary District tried to quietly produce another fait accompli (above). The Chicago Tribune explained why that did not prove a simple thing to achieve.

“…B.A. Eckhart was the first to reach the narrow watershed at Kedzie Avenue and Thirty-filth Street...Less than eight feet (of ice and frozen clay) separated the waters of the lakes from the waters of the Mississippi…It was exceedingly slow work, for the clay was (frozen) like a rock…Four large charges of dynamite were placed in the ridge…A few fugitive pieces of clay did fly into the air. But as a grand opening it was a failure…."

"Then the ambitious trustees, armed with their shovels, descended into the cut and began to push away the pieces of clay and ice which held back the lakes…With the regularity of a pendulum the arm of the dredge (above, top center) swung back and forth….The ice from the river rolled in and blocked the channel…"Push the ice...away with the arm." shouted the foreman…The (dredge) arm dropped behind the ice gorge and then with resistless motion swept the whole of it into the Mississippi Valley. .... "It is open! It is open!" went up from scores of throats as the water at last (flowed)…Like school boys on a vacation, the drainage officials waved their arms and shouted.”

Indeed, it was done.  On 2 May, 1900 Admiral George Dewey, hero of the battle of Manila Bay, dedicated the official opening. But it would not be until 1907 that a lock and power plant would be built (above) to power and control the 36 foot climb from the canal level at Lemont to the level of the Des Plaines  River, to complete the dream of ocean going ships reaching the Mississippi via Chicago.

Within a decade after the canal opened the construction techniques for the locks used to raise and lower ships over the Valparaiso Moraine (above)....

...would be used by many of the same engineers in the construction of the Panama Canal (above). It was that endeavor, championed by President Theodore Roosevelt, which ushered in the American Century. The lesson here is that no infrastructure, be it the creation of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, or manned space flight, or the creation of the interstate highway system, or a national Internet access system, is ever a wasted effort. It is the lessons learned from the endeavor that make the future possible. 

And the Chicago canal proved something else as well. As recorded by William C. Alden in the 1902 “Chicago Folio” for the U.S. Geological Survey Atlas of the United States (volume #81), excavations for the canal and its locks unearthed the history of the entire continent.Beneath the clay and beneath the limestone, the canal unearthed the bedrock of Chicago; “Potsdam Sand Stones”. So  the bedrock of Chicago is petrified beach sand, the bottom of an ancient shallow sea. We know it was shallow because corals left their fossils in the sand and their lime rich skeletons (above) hundreds of feet thick embedded in the sand stones. Over millions of years that sea had been replaced with a freshwater lake, surrounded by trees,  whose leaves fell into the waters, turning the waters acidic, and converting the top layer of the limestone into clay.And then the glaciers had come, and scrapped across the clay, piling it up in a terminal moraine, which prevented the glacial melt waters from finding their way to the Mississippi river, until humans arrived and stood upon their own two feet of clay and thought, "I shall do this". And it was done. It was not done without a paying a price, but life requires a price be paid even if you decide to do nothing.

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