In 1829, at a bend in the Mississippi River called Plum Point, a strange vessel came churning upstream at full steam. It looked like two boats joined together, and it was heading straight for a tree. The tree was submerged, nothing more than a dark stump breaking the surface where the brown current twisted around something solid. Below that stump, a trunk perhaps sixty feet long or more lay buried in the mud, its roots anchored deep in the riverbed, its head angled with the current at the level of a steamboat’s hull.
Plum Point was thick with such trees. Rivermen called it the most dangerous water in the lower Mississippi, and the wreckage in the area proved it. Between the bows of the approaching vessel, just below the waterline, ran a massive iron-clad beam. It struck the tree with the full weight of the steamboat behind it.
A crack sounded beneath the surface. The boat rose and passed over the spot where the tree had been. Then chains were lowered into the river, and on deck, two enormous wheels, each eighteen feet in diameter, began to turn. Slowly, between the twin hulls, the Mississippi gave up something it had been hiding for years.
The tree came out of the water covered in mud, roots and all. Some of the trees pulled out this way weighed up to seventy tons. There were no hydraulic cylinders on that boat. No pumps, no pressurized oil, no fluid-driven pistons.
Everything that lifted those trees was steam, wheels, chains, and leverage. The boat was called the Heliopolis, and the man who designed it had spent twenty years of his life dodging the very thing it was built to destroy. To understand why someone would build such a machine, you have to understand the nature of the western rivers in the 1820s. They were the road.
For the farms and towns spreading across the middle of the continent, there was no other way to move anything heavy over long distances. Grain, salted pork, lead, whiskey, timber, and cotton all moved down the Ohio and Mississippi by flatboat or steamboat to New Orleans. After 1815, more and more of that cargo went by steamboat, turning the rivers into a two-way highway. The problem was that this highway ran straight through a forest.
The western riverbanks were lined with huge trees, cottonwood, sycamore, and oak, and the rivers were constantly eating those banks away. Every flood cut deeper beneath the roots. Sooner or later, the tree fell in. And a big tree that falls into a big river does not simply drift away.
The root ball is heavy and full of dirt, so it sinks and buries itself in the mud. The trunk swings with the current until it points downstream, and the water pins it there, angled upward with its tip just below the surface. Rivermen called these obstructions snags. A snag that held firm was a planter.
One that swayed with the current, appearing and then dropping out of sight, was called a sawyer, because it moved up and down like a man working a saw. The sawyer was what captains feared most, because a pilot might see it, lose it, and only find it again when it punched through the hull. And the hulls were thin. Western steamboats were built light and shallow so they could run in low water.
A loaded boat running against the current that struck a hidden stump had almost nothing between its cargo and the river. A snag could open a hull the way a knife opens a tin can. Insurance rates on the western rivers climbed. Night navigation became a gamble.
The government knew all this. On May 24, 1824, Congress appropriated $75,000 for improving navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi. Chief of Engineers Alexander Macomb held a competition for the best way to remove snags. The winner, a man named John Bruce, received a $1,000 prize and a contract to clear the Ohio.
His machine was a double-hulled boat equipped with rollers, tackles, and windlasses worked by hand. It could remove some obstructions, but by the army’s own history, it was of limited use. Bruce soon abandoned it and fell back on ordinary boats and chains. The old method remained the standard: a crew with ropes and hand tools might spend hours freeing a single tree, and the rivers held thousands of them.
Henry Miller Shreve was born on October 21, 1785, in Burlington County, New Jersey. His father, Israel Shreve, had been a colonel in the Revolution and bought land in southwestern Pennsylvania from George Washington himself. Henry grew up near the headwaters of the Ohio and lost his father when he was about fourteen. By 1807 he had built his own boat and was trading furs between Pittsburgh and St.
Louis. By 1810 he was in the lead trade on the upper Mississippi, clearing more than $11,000 on a single voyage to Galena. He was not a surveyor or a theorist. He was a working riverman who knew every bend of the Ohio and Mississippi from the pilot house, which meant he knew precisely where the snags were.
He had watched them sink boats his whole life. Then came steam. In January 1815, Shreve took a small stern-wheel steamboat called the Enterprise down to New Orleans loaded with munitions for the war against Britain. That May, he brought her back upstream to Louisville, the first steamboat ever to make that run against the current.
A year later, he built the Washington at Wheeling, the first two-deck steamboat, and her voyages are generally regarded as the beginning of the commercial steamboat era on the western rivers. When the Fulton and Livingston interests tried to enforce a monopoly on steam navigation in the lower Mississippi, Shreve fought them in court. On April 21, 1817, the suits against him were dismissed, and the western rivers were open to anyone who could build a boat. By then, Shreve had been thinking about snags for years.
In 1824 he wrote to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, describing a steam-powered boat designed to catch them. In the winter of 1826–27, the government appointed him superintendent of western river improvements. His first attempt at a snag boat, modeled on Bruce’s, failed.
So he started over. The Heliopolis was completed in August 1829, and she looked like nothing else on the river. Shreve used two hulls, each about 125 feet long, set side by side with a gap between them, tied together by a series of heavy cross beams. It was a catamaran built on the scale of a steamboat.
The logic was balance. A tree weighing tens of tons, pulled against one side of a narrow single hull, would capsize it. Two hulls spread apart and fastened together made a wide, rigid platform strong enough to take the strain from the center, where the load could be suspended evenly. Across the bow, between the hulls and below the waterline, Shreve mounted his weapon: a massive frame of iron-clad beams.
The captain aimed the boat at the snag, the engineers opened the engines, and the Heliopolis drove straight at the tree at full power. The iron beam took the shock with the entire weight of the moving boat behind it. Sometimes the trunk snapped clean off below the waterline. Sometimes the blow tore the roots clean out of the mud.
Either way, the boat kept going, passing over the snag until the loosened tree settled into the gap between the hulls. The lift came next. On deck, on both sides, stood the two giant wheels, each eighteen feet in diameter, with an axle between them acting as a winch. Each wheel was driven by a cable connected to one of the boat’s engines.
The same steam that pushed the Heliopolis through the water could be directed to hauling. Chains went down and wrapped around the tree, the wheels turned, the axle wound up, and the snag was pulled out of the river into the space between the hulls. There, the crew set to work with saws. Sound timber was cut up and burned in the boilers as fuel or floated off to a wharf.
The stumps and the rest of the debris were sunk in deep pools where the current could not bring them back, or hauled ashore. A crew using ropes and hand tools might spend hours freeing one large snag. The Heliopolis could pull one in under forty-five minutes. Shreve reported his boat could break and lift trees sixty feet long and three and a half feet thick, buried twenty feet in the river bottom, with ease.
Army engineer Captain Richard Delafield recorded that the Heliopolis raised a 160-foot tree in her first year. One snag she pulled was estimated at 1,600 cubic feet of wood, and the report said it could not have weighed less than sixty tons. Accounts of the work describe snag boats hauling trees of up to seventy tons out of the western rivers. The first real test came at Plum Point, the most dangerous stretch of the lower Mississippi, so clogged that captains dreaded it.
The Heliopolis entered, and within a few hours the worst snags were gone. Within two days, by one account, the entire stretch was clear. Word spread along the Mississippi and Ohio. By one account, the boat made about three hundred miles of river as safe as a still pond.
In 1830, according to the river’s history, only one flatboat was lost to snags. Other snag boats followed. A second, the Archimedes, was built in 1831 with the same pair of towering eighteen-foot lifting wheels. People who saw these strange double boats gave them a name.
They called them Uncle Sam’s tooth pullers, because that was exactly what they looked like: a machine applied to a rotten tooth buried in the riverbed, extracting it roots and all. That was the whole machine. Two hulls, an iron beam, two wheels, and a chain, and a river finally giving its trees back. In April 1833, the government sent the same kind of machine, with 159 men, to a different river, against something an official expedition had declared impossible to remove.
The river was the Red River, and the thing blocking it was the Great Raft. The Red River runs through what is now Louisiana before joining the Mississippi. For centuries, part of it had not been a river at all. Floods brought driftwood, especially cedar and cypress.
It piled up and packed together until the channel was closed for miles. Silt settled over the wood. Soil formed on top. Willows and cottonwoods rooted on the surface, in places a foot and a half thick.
Vines stretched across the trunks and bound them together. A man looking at the raft from the bank might take it for a long island. Its length depended on who measured it and when. An 1815 report put it at at least 150 miles.
An army officer in 1837 estimated 214 miles. For the Caddo people who lived on its banks, the raft was sacred, and their lives were built around the water and soil it trapped. For the government, it was a wall across a river that could carry commerce inland. In 1806, a U.
S. expedition under surveyor Thomas Freeman worked its way up the Red River until it reached the raft and turned back. Freeman wrote that there could be no hope of ever removing the Great Raft. In 1832, Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered Shreve to remove it.
On April 3, 1833, a small fleet left Natchez: the boats Java, Souvenir, and Pearl, along with the snag boat Archimedes with her two eighteen-foot wheels. At ten in the morning on April 11, the attack on the Great Raft began. By the end of that first day, by one account, the raft was five miles shorter. What followed was not a single battle.
It was a six-year siege. The work went on section by section. The snag boat rammed the face of the raft, the chains went down, the wheels turned, and the packed timber was wrenched loose and pulled out piece by piece. Shreve had a problem with all that wood.
If he simply let it go with the current, the slow Red River would carry it a few miles and form a new dam somewhere downstream. So the crews pushed the logs into side channels. The driftwood was stored out of the way, forcing the water back into the main channel. When a large stretch of the raft finally broke loose, the men said the sound it made was like human cries of pain.
The conditions were brutal. The crews worked in heat and humidity that never broke, among mosquitoes, fleas, and snakes, with alligators in the water around them. Much of the work was done standing in waist-deep water, where heavy boots were not for comfort but necessity. By June of that first summer, the men could barely stand the heat and threatened to quit.
Shreve had to promise that the work would not continue through the summer months. But by then the results were already astonishing. On May 8, the crews had cut about forty miles into the raft. On June 23, they reached a place called Coates Bluff.
Seventy miles of the Great Raft had been pulled out in a single season. The fleet returned in the fall of 1834 with 300 men. That winter and spring were slower. By mid-April they had cut only a few more miles.
Then in November 1835, the Archimedes herself broke down. Her hull had rotted, and she gave out on the Ohio. A new snag boat, the Eradicator, was built the next summer to replace her. Sickness was the worst of it.
In the summer of 1836, yellow fever swept through the crews. One report that month counted 9,006 working days lost to illness. Yet the same report showed 21 more miles of raft removed, leaving only nine miles on that stretch. That spring, near the anchorage below Coates Bluff, Shreve laid out the streets of a small settlement.
It was named Shreve Town. Shortly after, it was called Shreveport. By the summer of 1837, only about a quarter mile of the original raft remained. Then the country entered a financial panic, Congress grew reluctant to spend, and the work stopped.
While it was stopped, the river kept doing what it had always done. By the time the crews returned in the fall of 1838, that last quarter mile had grown to nearly two miles. They tore it out again. On February 15, 1839, the last of the original Great Raft was pulled.
Seven hundred fifty miles of the Red River, up to Fort Towson, lay open to boats. The snag boats were busy everywhere. On the Arkansas River in the winter of 1834, Shreve’s crews worked upstream from Pine Bluff and reached Little Rock by February 22. On the Arkansas, the men removed 4,907 snags, an average of one for every eighty-eight yards of river.
Across the western rivers by the 1840s, between six and ten government snag boats, each crewed by thirty to forty men, had pulled more than 160,000 snags out of the water. The river that had always destroyed boats became a road a captain could navigate with a reasonable hope of arriving alive. But clearing a river is not a one-time job. The trees keep falling in.
And the money that funded the snag boats was never secure. In 1841 a new administration took power in Washington, and Henry Shreve was removed from his post. He retired to St. Louis.
Appropriations for the work kept shrinking, and by 1844 four of the government’s snag boats were sold off. On the night of January 3, 1844, a steamer called the Shepherdess was working her way up the Mississippi toward St. Louis. She had come from Cincinnati and was almost to her destination.
It was a dark, stormy winter night. There was ice in the river, and she carried close to sixty or seventy people. She was at the Cahokia bend, just above the mouth of Cahokia Creek, about three miles from downtown St. Louis.
It was eleven o’clock at night. The Shepherdess struck a submerged snag. The tree tore open her hull. Water came in so fast it reached the lower deck in under two minutes.
In about three minutes, the cabin floor was flooded. In the dark, the passengers found themselves in freezing water. The current carried the boat backward down the river and into a second snag. The Shepherdess rolled hard, throwing her boilers, part of her engine, and both smokestacks over the side.
Her captain was Abram P. Howell of Covington, Kentucky, a father of eleven. When the boat hit, Captain Howell went to the alarm bell and began ringing it. He was still ringing it when the river swept him overboard.
He never came back. One of his children, traveling with him, also died in the river. A passenger named Robert Bullock from Maysville, Kentucky, did what he could, helping people up to the hurricane deck, the highest part of the boat and the only part still above water. When the wreck broke apart, Bullock made it to shore, where, amid the ice and cold, he kept two women alive.
The steamer Henry Bry and a ferry called the Islander came out to pull survivors from the water. Not everyone had a Bullock. A man named Levi Cradic lost three children that night. A man named Green lost his wife and three children.
A man named Wright lost two children. No one could determine the exact number of dead, because no accurate list of who was aboard existed. Early reports suggested about forty deaths. One account put it at no fewer than seventy.
The Shepherdess sank three miles from St. Louis, the city where Henry Shreve, the inventor of the machine that pulled trees out of the river, lived in retirement. The Shepherdess was not exceptional. That is the hardest part of this story to accept.
In the decades before the Civil War, fires were not the most destructive cause of steamboat losses, nor were the boiler explosions that made headlines. It was the trees. By one count, between 1821 and 1860, snags wrecked 593 American steamboats. Fire destroyed 582.
Collisions wrecked 199. Boiler explosions, the disasters everyone remembers, wrecked 113. Until 1849, snags and similar obstructions lay behind about three-fifths of all steamboat accidents. On the Arkansas River alone, historians have documented 190 steamboat wrecks, 96 of them caused by snags, more than double the toll from fire.
One economic historian studying a sample of western boats found that about 40 percent of steamboats built before 1849 were lost, most of them to snags. The boats in his sample lost to accidents were in service on average less than twenty-two months. That was what a new steamboat could expect from the western rivers. The deaths from all of it were never accurately counted, because on most of these boats no one kept a precise list of who was aboard.
The real number is surely far higher than the records show. The Red River did not stay open. After Shreve left, a new raft began forming in the upper river, near where the town of Belcher, Louisiana, stands today. Over the following decades, through the Civil War and after, that second raft kept growing until it reached the Arkansas state line.
In the early 1870s, the task of removing it was given to a young army engineer named Eugene Augustus Woodruff. Woodruff was from Connecticut, a West Point graduate and a lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. On December 1, 1872, his crews began work on the new raft. His principal vessel was a snag boat called the Ida, a modern descendant of Shreve’s Archimedes, working alongside two crane boats.
By the 1870s, the old methods had a new and powerful partner. Starting in May 1873, Woodruff put a carefully planned program into effect using nitroglycerin to blast the packed timber apart so the boats could haul it away. It worked. On May 16, 1873, a steamboat called the R.
T. Bryarly passed through the gap. That September, yellow fever swept through Shreveport, the city that bore Henry Shreve’s name. The epidemic was brutal.
Woodruff could have returned to his crew on the river. He chose not to, because he did not want to carry the infection to his men. Instead, he stayed in Shreveport and worked among the sick, trying to bring some order to a city in chaos. In the midst of it, he caught the fever himself.
Eugene Woodruff died on September 30, 1873. He was two months shy of his thirty-second birthday. His commanding officer wrote that Woodruff died a martyr to the blessed cause of good. He was buried in Oakland Cemetery in Shreveport, near the mass grave of more than seven hundred victims of that epidemic.
His brother, George Woodruff, carried on the work. On November 27, 1873, less than two months after Eugene’s death, the snags were gone and the Red River was open to navigation. The snag boats outlived everyone. The Army Corps of Engineers kept building them and sending them out, decade after decade.
One was the Montgomery, built in 1925 and 1926 by the Charleston Dry Dock and Machine Company in South Carolina. She was a stern-wheel steamer about 190 feet long. Starting in 1926, she worked the Alabama and Coosa rivers, then the Black Warrior and Tombigbee, then the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee and Flint, pulling trees, stumps, and submerged branches from the channels for more than half a century. She was retired on November 8, 1982.
By then she was the last working stern-wheel vessel on the rivers of the South, one of only two steam-powered snag boats left in the United States. The other, the W. T. Preston, cleaned the rivers of Puget Sound and now rests in Anacortes, Washington.
The Montgomery is a National Historic Landmark. She sits today on the bank near Pickensville, Alabama, where she can still be visited. Think of the span of that era. The Heliopolis struck her first snag in 1829.
The Montgomery, still steam-powered and stern-wheeled, was pulling trees out of American rivers in 1982. More than 150 years after Henry Shreve’s first snag boat, at least one was still doing the same work, the same way, using steam. Go back to Plum Point in 1829. A double boat 125 feet long, driving at full steam into an invisible tree.
An iron beam takes the shock. Two wheels, each eighteen feet across, begin to turn. The chain tightens, and a tree that has been lying in the Mississippi, a tree that may weigh sixty or seventy tons, comes out of the brown water into the daylight. There is no hydraulic pump on that boat.
No pressure line, no cylinder, no oil-driven piston. There is a river captain who spent twenty years dodging these trees and finally decided to stop maneuvering. There is a steam engine turned to the work of hauling, and a winch used patiently, tree after tree, until by the 1840s more than 160,000 snags had been pulled from the western rivers. When people imagine the great age of the Mississippi steamboats, they picture the paddle wheels, the tall chimneys, the long white decks.
They do not picture the short double boat working the river ahead of them. But every one of those steamboats traveled a river someone had cleared first. And on a dark night at a bend near St.
Louis, one hidden tree was enough to remind everyone that the work must never stop.
