Word: shreve
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Shreveport's Shreve...
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...
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...
...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...