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18 April 2024 — Taking on Snags, Planters, Sawyers, and the Great Raft

When we last looked in on Henry Miller Shreve, he had adapted the characteristics of his competitors’ steamboats to better suit them to the Mississippi River system, giving them shallower drafts and more powerful engines. But he was the kind of person who couldn’t stop thinking about how to improve things, and he remained focused on the river system as a vitally important resource for the local communities as well as entrepreneurs such as himself. 

A significant challenge to steamboat traffic on the Mississippi and her tributaries was the prevalence of debris in the water, typically trees that fell into the river during floods. Trees that were dislodged, roots and all, and fell into the river could lodge firmly in the river bottom; these hidden or semi-hidden snags were a threat to boats in the waterway. Rivermen coined special terms for the different types of snag, such as planter (a tree stuck in an upright position), and sawyer (a tree stuck at an angle to the water’s surface). Over the course of time, trees newly fallen into the water would get hung up on trees already stuck in the mud, accumulating to form dense logjams, called rafts. A large raft, thick with wood and silt, could force water traffic off the river and onto side channels, or even block a waterway entirely.

The most famous such logjam was the Great Raft, on the Red River. The Red River—A Historical Perspective described it in this way:

Caused partly by caving banks in the upper river which threw trees into the stream, the huge jam stretched from Campti, Louisiana, at its lower end, north to about the Arkansas line, a distance of approximately 160 miles. After each flood, the river banks gave up more ground to the insatiable waters. Trees, logs and other debris caught on sand bars. The resultant series of jams became water-soaked with time; logs sank to the bottom, and other logs floating down the river became piled up on top of them. …[It was] a log jam twenty-five feet deep, cemented with centuries of packed silt and vegetation roots—solid as rock.

The Great Raft was an important fixture in the way of life of the Caddo Indians, who were established in the area. The Caddo farmers took advantage of the seasonal flooding around the logjam, after the floodwaters had removed trees and deposited nutrient-rich soil along the river. They also felt protected from outside aggressors, because the Raft made it so difficult to travel along the river. 

Heliopolis was the first Shreve-designed snag boat. Trees could be dislodged and hauled up on the work platform to be trimmed of root and branches and tossed back into the water. Image courtesy Murphy Library Special Collections/ARC, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

To the Americans who continued to expand settlements in the territories, however, the annual flooding disrupted their farming practices, and the barrier in the river impeded both the flow of commerce and access to military outposts that settlers viewed as protection. The US Army Corps of Engineers was ordered to do something about the general problem of snags in the river system. and in 1825 it contracted one John Bruce to tackle the job. After what seemed to be a successful start, stakeholder complaints grew in number and his contract was ended; his successor, Samuel McKee, didn’t seem to be doing any better and then died early into the project.

A detail drawing from Shreve's snag boat patent. PD

Wanting to hand off the task to someone who would produce results, the Army then turned to our friend Henry Miller Shreve. As stated earlier, he seemed to be always thinking about how to make things better. And sure enough, he had already put some thought into designing a vessel that could handle the task of uprooting massive trees from a riverbed reluctant to give them up. Shreve was named Superintendent of Western River Improvements in December of 1826. He ordered the construction of a purpose-built snag boat after his design, the Heliopolis, which was launched in New Albany, Indiana, in 1829. The crew was able to show admirable progress in removing many of the most dangerous snags from the Western Rivers. On 11 April, 1833, he and his team began to tackle the Great Raft, with three snag boats, three “helper” steamboats, and a crew of 159 men: officers, mechanics, laborers and cooks. He had since improved on his snag boat design; apparently one eye-witness wasn’t impressed with its beauty but approved of its effectiveness for the task at hand: 

When the Archimedes steamed into sight at Campti one early morning in 1833, a more awkward and ungainly sight could not be imagined. Looking like two steamboats joined near the waterline with heavy timbers, there was a broad alleyway left between the hulls. Above this alleyway between the twin hulls was a steam windlass, the shaft of which weighed more than seven thousand pounds. This windlass provided the power for the Archimedes to deal with even the largest, most stubborn logs.

The snag boats would use the center beam between the two hulls to dislodge or snap trees stuck in the river, haul them onto the boat and then trim away entangling roots and branches, to release the remaining pieces to float downriver.   

The work was hard, and the men were plagued by flies, wasps, hornets, snakes, and cholera. But they worked methodically through the enormous logjam. Shreve’s crew reached the head of the raft between Cowhide Bayou and Cedar Bluffs on March 7 1838.  

By 1873 the Army Corps of Engineers had to launch a new project to clear passage on the Red River. Image: PD

The Caddo people of the Red River region, no longer able to farm in locations cleared by the river’s historic flood patterns, were edged off of their lands by the encroaching settlers. Today, the Caddo nation headquarters is near Binger, Oklahoma. 

Of course, the cyclical flooding of the river system led to more snags and the creation of subsequent rafts; government funding dried up and snag removal was anything but regular. The Army Corps of Engineers did send a team to clear away a newly formed Great Raft in the Red River in 1873, with the addition of nitroglycerine to its snag-removal arsenal. Subsequent patrolling of the waterways prevented the Great Raft from re-forming; today we must rely on the histories and our imaginations to envision the logjam that extended for miles.

Extra Credit

“Snagboats of the Mississippi” in Sea History

Sea History Today is written by Shelley Reid, NMHS senior staff writer. Past issues can be read online by clicking here.