Unlocking the Arkansas

Rising in the Rockies and meandering listlessly through four states, the silt-strangled Arkansas River has brought devastating floods and fascinating legends to the hapless people along its banks, but not much else. Boatmen in the 1840s stopped near Conway to soak up liquor and lie in the sun until they swelled like toads, giving Toadsuck Ferry its name. At Dwight Mission, the Cherokee sage, Sequoyah, developed his syllabary in 1828, providing a written Indian language. Now Toadsuck Ferry is gone, replaced by a bridge, and Dwight Mission lies under the waters of a reservoir. Both are victims of one of the most ambitious and controversial public-works schemes in U.S. history--the $1.2 billion Arkansas Basin Navigation Project. Formally dedicated in Little Rock last week, the project has been both praised as a plan to revolutionize the region and assailed as a silly extravagance.

Down to the Sea. Oklahoma's Will Rogers once cracked: "When the Arkansas, Red River, Salt Fork, Verdigris, Caney, Cat Creek, Possum Creek, Dog Creek and Skunk Branch all are up after a rain, we got more seacoast than Australia." Despite its tendency to burst its banks, the Arkansas was nonetheless a busy waterway. Keelboats explored it in the early 1800s. By the 1820s side-wheelers pushed past the Fort Smith sandbars. Before going to Texas, Sam Houston steamed up a tributary in Oklahoma to wed his Cherokee beauty. Henry Shreve, founder of Shreveport, in 1833 eliminated 1,500 navigational snags, but boatmen still grumbled that the river's "bottom is too near its top." By the 1870s, the snags, sandbars and erratic flow were stifling traffic along the Arkansas, and when rails spanned the river at the turn of the century, even the steamboats vanished.

After a 1943 flood, Oklahoma's late Senator Robert S. Kerr turned his considerable skills as a cloakroom operator to winning approval for a scheme to tame the river. In 1955 the first major funds were appropriated. From the start, opponents quipped that it would be cheaper to pave the Arkansas than to dam it. Yet the project is now three-fourths completed. Eventually, 17 locks and dams (the biggest named for Kerr) will create a 446-mile skein of lakes running clear down to the Mississippi near Yancopin, Ark., forming a barge channel nine feet deep and at least 150 feet wide.

A 50-mile downstream stretch is already navigable, will be extended another 100 miles to Little Rock before year's end. Engineers predict yearly benefits of $69,927,400, by 1970, a strangely precise estimate arrived at by combining savings in flood control, hydroelectric energy, recreation and freight. Up and down the river, land prices have soared--in one case from $25 an acre to $2,500 with no ceiling yet in sight. Boats have become as ubiquitous as second cars. Supporters of the project claim that cheap transportation will tap the landlocked region's raw materials and enrich 8,000,000 citizens of eight states.

Inland Port. The biggest gainer could be little Catoosa, a once bedraggled Tulsa suburb (pop. 1,000), which expects after 1970 to handle 12,500,000 tons of cargo a year, more than the ports of St. Louis, Memphis, Pittsburgh or St. Paul. The new port is also expected to generate 14,000 new jobs and $500 million in investment. But all that must wait until a channel is dug from a big tract of land where cottonwoods, scrub oak and pecan trees now stand. For the present, though, it is rather jarring to see a big white water tower with the legend PORT CITY OF CATOOSA rising above acre after acre of dry, dusty land.

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