The master of Pond Spring - planter, lawyer, and businessman - was serving his third term as representative of north Alabama's 8th District in the US Congress. After a winter of convincing the Secretary of War, William C. Endicott, had sent the engineer home with the Congressman in early August after the recess of the 1st session of the 49th Congress. Three weeks later after countless hours on horseback up and down the stretch of Tennessee River from Whitesburg up river just south of Huntsville to down river, or upriver again, west of the shoals at Tuscumbia, the two had taken measurements, made observation notes and drawn sketches of the ornery heartland water way.
Every generation since white habitation of the Tennessee Valley, dreamers have shaken their heads and said, "This big stream has got to be improved for navigation. Look at New Orleans, Memphis and St. Louis on the Mississippi and Louisville, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh on the Ohio. Even Nashville on the unambitious Cumberland has prospered because of a useable river." Joseph Wheeler was the latest to lament such sentiment about the wide, unruly river that split his property. The wild river brought annual spring floods and frustration along its banks. The whirling, churning low shoals blocked the easy navigation of the fickle river that stretched from the creeks of the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia southeast to make a wide arch to Tuscumbia then back northwest to Paducah, Kentucky and the Ohio River. The Tennessee was one of Mother Nature's truly uncontrolled children. The number who had dreamed of civilizing her was legion. The cavalryman turned politician and planter had the fever.
With Grover Cleveland in the White House, the first Democrat in the White House since befuddled James Buchanan (1857 - 61) and five Republican chief executives, the southern Democrats had someone to listen to them, seriously, at the head of the executive branch of government. Presidential influence, patronage, even with the recent Civil Service reform still was important.
Cleveland had two former Rebels in his cabinet - Mississippi's Lucius Q. C. Lamar in Interior and Attorney General August H. Garland of Arkansas. Lamar had born arms while Garland had served in both houses of the Confederate Congress. A Democratic President and House of Representatives was new and significant for the "Solid (Democratic) South". A southern leader, more interested in the horizon than the road traveled, carried weight, not literally, in Washington. Congressman Wheeler was on a political vidette.
"Captain, I've waded, swam and ridden dozens of different mounts across this big creek and sure don't mind getting my boots wet," Wheeler informed with a smile as the negotiated their way through a tangled thicket away from the boat.