Books: Of Shreve & the River

MASTER OF THE MISSISSIPPI—Florence L Dorsey—Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Few individual Americans have so directly or so powerfully influenced the history and development of so vast a region—and few have been so completely forgotten—as Henry Shreve, Mississippi keelboatman, who, by the time he was 35: 1) broke Pittsburgh’s monopoly of the fur trade; 2) broke Canada’s monopoly of the Western lead trade; 3) broke the Livingston-Fulton monopoly of steamboating on the Mississippi with his shallow-draught, double-deck river steamboat; 4) made navigation safe by inventing a snag-pulling boat with which he cleared some 1,500 miles of river; 5) opened up the Red River to civilization.

Of this remarkable character Florence L. Dorsey, a kinswoman, has written a remarkable biography. Author Dorsey has an almost biologic feeling for the violence of growth—the uptilting of mountains, the plunge of rivers, the tidal surge of young and healthy nations. And she is equally at home in the Pleistocene age and the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.

The Man. One autumn day in 1807 Henry Shreve finished building a keelboat and, after hiring a crew of ten Frenchmen and half-breeds, shoved off into the muddy Monongahela, bound for St. Louis. He was 22, had long been fascinated by the gay river traffic. “It seems,” wrote his Quaker father, “as if people are crazy to get afloat on the Ohio. . . .”

Henry Shreve’s keelboat floated past “bleak and dingy” Pittsburgh; past Charlestown with its two-story pillory and stocks (“there were not many towns that could punish two culprits at once”); past Wheeling, “a notoriously gay port”; past Marietta, where everybody asked:

“What is the latest about Aaron Burr?”; past Louisville, a 120-house metropolis. In December he sighted St. Louis.

It was a village teeming with overland adventurers (coureurs des bois), boatmen (voyageurs), townsmen (habitants). “There were spruce military men from the American garrison which had been placed over the village when it passed from French rule four years ago. … To a Quaker it was strange for a town to boast a dozen billiard rooms and only one small church. . . . Most astonishing to Shreve were the warehouses where he had to select his furs. . . . Pelts were stacked high on every side . . . and heaped in hills about the floor, hung from rafters and bulging from the adjoining sheds.

. . .” Fur and tobacco were St. Louis’ money.

It took 40 days from Pittsburgh to St. Louis; it took longer being towed back. The Pittsburgh middlemen squinted at Shreve’s furs, offered him small change. Ignoring the tradition that Pittsburgh middlemen monopolized the fur trade with the East, Shreve loaded his furs on wagons, carted them over the snowy Alleghenies to Philadelphia, where he sold them at a fat profit.

To Henry Shreve, his first trip meant something more than furs and profits. When the short sailing days had ended in long nights and his crew gambled, drank, fought, Shreve spent hours studying by candlelight the penciled notes he had made. The rivers of the Mississippi system were navigable for half their lengths, “but their currents sorely hampered upstream going, and their piled and planted driftwood menaced craft on every side. It puzzled Shreve that these handicaps were accepted with such inertia.” He decided to do something about it. But first he needed capital.

Wealth. To get capital Shreve made a memorable voyage to the Sac and Fox Indians who smelted lead on the Upper Mississippi. At the Des Moines rapids the crew went overboard, pulled the boat over eleven miles of “successive ledges of stone” through “boiling troughs,” then through the 18 miles of the upper rapids. The fuel with which Quaker Shreve stoked his human engines: whiskey. The Sacs and Fox mined and smelted 60 tons of lead for Shreve. With two boats in tow, he started a 1,500-mile trip down the Mississippi.

“As the lead boats floated southward, the late July days were stifling. . . . Bear and panther could break a path in the cane, and Indians crept in and out these trails. . . . Heaped against the shore or rearing in the channel were dead drift-trees, overgrown with weeds and vines. Dully the alligators rose beside the driftwood, to view the boats and sink.”

The slow-moving towboats passed Natchez with its women “as carefree as moths”; passed the great cane plantations; passed the seductions of New Orleans and the perils of the lower Delta. The piratical Brothers Lafitte did not molest Shreve’s drab convoy, “never dreaming what a wealth of potential bullets lay in its hold.” Shreve headed into the Gulf. By autumn he landed at Philadelphia, sold his lead for $11,000 profit. He had his capital—in cash, information, ideas. He stopped wearing Quaker clothes, bought himself a “worldly” suit, got married.

The Steamboat. In 1811, “the year of the comet,” two strange things worried the Valley: 1) “A horde of squirrels, moved by some common impulse, pressed forward from Indiana over a wide front, poured into the river, swimming, clutching at driftwood . . . thousands of lifeless little bodies floated downstream”; 2) the first steamboat, Fulton’s deep-draught New Orleans, started downstream from Pittsburgh. Henry Shreve laughed at the superstitions of his boatmen, who believed the squirrels, the comet and the steamboat were portents of disaster. But in December a terrible earthquake tore the middle valley to pieces, sank dozens of flatboats and keelboats, smashed others on the banks. “Shock followed shock, the ground rose and sank in sickening waves, the earth opened fissures a half-mile long, sulfurous gases poured out. . . .”

Henry Shreve hurried down to the docks to question returning rivermen. What had happened to Fulton’s steamboat? Nothing, they told him; she rode out the earthquake.

But Shreve did not believe the deep-draught New Orleans would long ride over the Mississippi snags. And could she travel upstream against the current? Even Fulton had his doubts. He wrote: “I do not see by what means a boat containing 100 tons of merchandise can be driven six miles an hour in still water. . . .” He offered $100,000 for the patent on a boat that could.

Henry Shreve did not claim the $100,000, but he started building the boat. Amid sensational rumors and the hoots of river loafers, he laid the keel at Wheeling. “Talk of this hull never died. . . . The vessel defied every principle of shipbuilding.” It “was exceedingly shallow of draft, but reared aloft with two decks, one above the other.”

One day Shreve installed the “incredible engines” in the “unbelievable hull,” and the President steamed out of Wheel ing. At Marietta, the steamboat blew up. Patiently Shreve buried the eight casualties, repaired his boiler, continued down stream.

Despite the accident, passengers crowded aboard. Shreve had brought not only practical steamboating to the Mississippi. He had brought luxury. The President was “finished with the finest woodwork and mirrors . . . meals equaled those of the best hotels and were served with much formality.” In “the commodious bar,” most of the conversation was about what the steamboat monopoly would do to Captain Shreve when he got to New Orleans.

The Monopoly. The steamboat company of Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston (brother of Louisiana’s Governor Edward Livingston) had an 18-year monopoly over the rivers in Louisiana, “enough to bottle up the Valley.” Shreve determined to break it.

When the President reached New Or leans, Edward Livingston hurried down to look it over. “It was an odd vessel, he realized, only because no one had ever built a steamboat for the Mississippi. He could foresee that it would be the Valley steamboat of the future.” “You deserve well of your country, young man,” he told Shreve, “but we shall be compelled to beat you if we can.”

First step in the beating was to seize the President, hold it in $10,000 bail. Shreve countered by demanding a $10,000 bond for any damages to his ship while Livingston held it. Frightened for the first time, Livingston released the boat. Triumphantly Shreve steamed back to Louisville.

Next spring he set out on a round trip to New Orleans—”the voyage from which all Western historians date the commence ment of steam navigation in the Mississippi Valley.” The trip took nine days. Again Livingston seized the boat, again Shreve demanded bond.

Livingston offered Shreve a half interest in the monopoly, equal credit with Fulton in inventing the steamboat. When Shreve refused, Livingston had him arrested. Nevertheless, only two days behind schedule Shreve steamed out of New Orleans. “The monopoly’s helplessness was farcical.” In 1819 the Fulton-Livingston company withdrew all claim to a monopoly. “News of this surged up every stream. The Mississippi was free! Henry Shreve had battered the barrier down.” In the next two years 60 steamboats were built on the River.

Snag Boat. Next Henry Shreve went after other barriers: the snags that imperiled navigation for 1,500 miles. “For years boat owners and settlers who had lost their craft or goods had pleaded with Congress to do something about the driftwood menace. The bewildered statesmen could offer no help. It was considered impossible to dislodge the enormous timbers: trees whose roots had dug deep into the stream bottom . . . were packed down with tons of silt. …” Shreve disagreed. He had invented a “heavy-timbered, twin-hulled snag boat” to do the job. He wrote the War Department, offering to submit a model. The War Department “did not trouble to reply.”

When John Calhoun became Secretary of War, Shreve got his chance. While jeering onlookers hooted, the snag boat “drove head on at a massive ‘planter’ (half submerged tree). There was a booming impact and crash. It seemed to the onlookers that the boat must be shattered to pieces. But there it was, still intact, and the huge tree toppling into the water. A spontaneous cheer went up. . . .” “By the end of 1830, the age-old drowned forests had vanished from the Mississippi.”

The War Department had already informed Congress: “The clearing of the Red River was all but impossible.” For 160 miles, it was blocked by a mass of ancient driftwood called the Great Raft— “so solid in places that a man could ride across it on horseback. Except for the Raft, the Red River would be navigable for a thousand miles.” But Henry Shreve and his snag boat, amid bitter wrangling, red tape, lack of money, deaths from boiler explosions and cholera, cleared the Great Raft and opened the Red River.

Downriver. Later Shreve settled on a plantation near St. Louis. When railroads came, he dabbled in railroads. He had married again and his tribe multiplied around him. He enjoyed enormous respect. He said little, wrote less: he had always been deeply taciturn. His life began to flow away like the River, and he was taken almost as much for granted. In the bustling civilization which he had done so much to bring to the Valley, he was almost like one of those Peoria Indians he used to see standing on the river front at Ste. Genevieve, wrapped in their blankets, waiting. “No one, not even the Indians themselves, knew what they were waiting for … perhaps for this unreality of white men and white ways to pass, for felled forest to stand again, for the buffalo to return.” One windy evening in 1851 (the year the Pacific Railroad was begun and the future river pilot, Mark Twain, was 16) Henry Shreve taciturnly died. In a few decades the citizens of Shreveport, La. no longer remembered for whom their town had been named.