The Great Raft and the River That Built a City
Near Shreveport, Louisiana
Stand near the Red River today and it is hard to picture what Captain Henry Miller Shreve found when he steered his fleet upstream in April of eighteen thirty-three. The river was not a river so much as a wall. From somewhere to the south, hundreds of miles of interlocked dead trees had been accumulating since roughly the twelfth century, forming what travelers called the Great Raft.
At its widest the logjam stretched more than one hundred sixty miles along the channel, turning the Red River into a sealed corridor of ancient timber. Navigation was simply impossible. Settlers in east Texas and northwest Louisiana were effectively cut off from the markets of the Mississippi.
Shreve arrived with four snag boats and a force of one hundred fifty-nine men. His invention was a twin-hulled steam-powered vessel with a windlass mounted at the bow, designed to drive into a snag and wrench it free. He had been developing the concept since eighteen twenty-one and had tested an early version, the Heliopolis, in eighteen twenty-nine.
The Army Corps of Engineers had assigned him to the project at the order of Secretary of War Lewis Cass, who understood that the western territories would remain commercially stunted until the river moved freely. Shreve cleared enough of the raft by eighteen thirty-eight to make navigation practical in the upper reaches. In eighteen thirty-six, speculators organized the Shreve Town Company and platted sixty-four city blocks on the newly accessible bank, naming the settlement in his honor.
The town was incorporated as Shreveport on March twentieth, eighteen thirty-nine. The Great Raft had created things as well as destroyed them. By backing up water for centuries, it had produced Caddo Lake and several surrounding waterways.
When Shreve removed the obstruction, the lake level dropped more than ten feet, ruining the steamboat port of Jefferson, Texas almost overnight. Clearing one river made another impossible. History rarely travels in a straight line.
