Meanwhile Williams was hard at work on the canal. In addition to such details as could be furnished by the troops without wholly neglecting the absolutely necessary portions of their military duties, Williams had employed a force of about 1,200 negroes, rather poorly provided with tools. The work was not confined to excavation, but involved the cutting down of the large cottonwoods and the clearing away of the dense masses of willows that covered the low ground and matted the heavy soil with their tangled roots. By the 4th of July the excavation had reached a depth in the hard clay of nearly seven feet. The length of the canal was about one and a half miles. By the 11th of July the cut, originally intended to be four feet deep and five feet wide, with a profile of twenty square feet, had been excavated through this stiff clay to a depth of thirteen feet and a width of eighteen feet, presenting a profile of 234 feet. The river, which, up to this time, had been falling more rapidly than the utmost exertions had been able to sink the bottom of the canal, had now begun to fall more slowly, so that at last the grade was about eighteen inches below the river level. In a few hours the water was to have been let in. Suddenly the banks began to cave, and before any thing could be done to remedy this, the river, still falling, was once more below the bottom of the cut. Although with this scanty and overworked force he had already performed nearly twelve times the amount of labor originally contemplated, Williams does not seem to have been discouraged at this; his orders were to make the cut, and his purpose clearly was to make it, even if it should take, as he thought it would, the whole of the next three months. He set to work with vigor to collect laborers, wheelbarrows, shovels, axes, carts, and scrapers, and "to make a real canal," to use his own words, "to the depth of the greatest fall of the river at this point, say some thirty-five to forty feet." But this was not to be.