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The Lost River
| Article
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11181 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1993 |
2,921 Words |
| Author
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Jim Moore
Jim Moore is a free-lance writer and photographer living in
Alexandria, Virginia. His articles have appeared in health,
education, and military-interest magazines, and his
photographs in such newspapers and magazines as Time,
Newsweek, Paris Match, Stern, and Riyadh. |
It was early morning. The sun was at work driving up the temperature near the river, and the air had a moisture-laden thickness that smelled of wet mud and meadow grass. "There was a time when, right here, this river was about forty feet deep," my guide was explaining, waving his hand toward the middle of the narrow channel of still water into which we had slipped our canoe. "It was five times as wide as it is now, and this marina was a big port, with sailing ships from all over the world coming up river from the Potomac."
We pushed away from the shore and began the slow, educational journey downstream from Bladensburg, Maryland, to Washington, D.C. Our early morning trip would take about three hours along the six-mile length of Washington's other--often forgotten--river, the Anacostia. My guide was Robert Boone, founder and executive director of the Anacostia Watershed Society, a small but dedicated group of volunteers from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia committed to the restoration of the Anacostia as a swimmable, fishable, and recreational waterway by the year 2000.
What I knew of the Anacostia was embarrassingly little, particularly as I am a native Washingtonian. To me, the Anacostia was that brown strip of water on the eastern side of Washington you have to cross over on your way to the Chesapeake Bay. End of knowledge.
PLACE IN HISTORY
Yet the river does have a place in our national history. Depictions of the lower reaches of the Anacostia first appear on maps drawn in the early seventeenth century by Capt. John Smith, the English adventurer and Virginia colonist who, in 1608, was among the first Europeans to sail up the Potomac River. Smith noted in his diaries that, while the Indians along the banks of the Potomac were generally friendly, it was the Natchotanke Indians along the "Annakostia" who provided the most welcome reception to the new-world explorers.
Later, the river was not so fortunate; it was the site of a battle that took place at noon on August 24, 1814. On that day, near the outskirts of Bladensburg, six miles northeast of Washington, D.C., a fast-moving British raiding force of twenty-six hundred men took on and defeated a hastily and poorly organized American force twice its size. The battle lasted four hours. The only significant obstacle facing the British was the Bladensburg Bridge, over what was then called the Eastern Branch of the Potomac River. The American attempt to hold the bridge was
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