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Henry Miller Shreve
Colonel Israel Shreve was born on Christmas Eve of 1739
in Mansfield Township, Burlington County, New Jersey as
the seventh of the eight children of Benjamin and
Rebecca French Shreve. He married Grace Curtis in
February of 1760 and had four children. After her death,
he married Mary Cokley Shreve on May 10, 1773, and they
had eight children, the fifth child being Henry Miller
Shreve, who was born on October 21, 1785 in Burlington
County, New Jersey. 1-2 Israel was a distinguished
Revolutionary War hero as well as a close friend of
George Washington. 3 When Henry was just a boy, his
father bought land in Pennsylvania from Washington, and
it was here on the Monongahela River that he spent his
boyhood years. 4
He was a steamboat pilot from an early age. In 1807 he
built a thirty-five ton barge and hired ten men to man
it. 5-6 The Monongahela meets with the Allegheny River
to form the Ohio River, which then flows into the
Mississippi River. 7 Shreve and his crew left
Brownsville, Pennsylvania for St. Louis, Missouri, and
arrived in late December after a forty day trek down the
Ohio River. 8-9 He bought furs for Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and for three years he continued to trade
furs. In 1810 he built another thirty-five ton barge and
left St. Louis for Fever River, later Galena River, in
present-day Illinois with supplies to trade with the
Indians. After fourteen days Shreve and his crew reached
their destination. In six weeks, Shreve had traded for
sixty tons of lead that the Indians had mined; this lead
was useful to whites as bullets, but it meant that
Shreve would have to build another ship on site to
transport it. 10
On February 28, 1811 he married Mary Blair of
Brownsville, and they had two daughters, Harriet Louise
and Rebecca Ann, and a son, Hampden Zane. 11 His son
and younger daughter died before Shreve’s own death. He
married Lydia Rogers after the death of his first wife,
and one of his daughters from this marriage died. He
had a daughter from each marriage survive him. 12 His
eldest daughter by Mary Blair survived him and married
John W. Reel of St. Louis; she died in 1924. 13
In 1811 Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston received
exclusive rights to navigate their steamboats on the
rivers of the territory from the legislature of the
Territory of New Orleans. Shreve refused to allow this
monopoly to continue and sailed his steamboat into the
area. He spent some time in jail, but he broke the
monopoly. 14 In 1824 Chief Justice John Marshall ruled
that interstate waterways were open for navigation in
the Gibbon v. Ogden case. 15-16
Shreve was placed in charge of the Enterprise
after he persuaded its builder, successful entrepreneur
David French. 17 The Enterprise was reportedly
the first boat to depend solely on steam, and in the War
of 1812 it made fifteen trips on behalf of the U. S.
Army. 18-19 In 1814 the Enterprise traversed the
river as far as Alexandria, being the first steamboat to
do so, and it reached the end of the Raft in 1815 at
Natchitoches. 20 Shreve traveled from Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania to New Orleans with supplies for General
Jackson’s army and arrived in December of 1814. With
permission, Shreve manned a twenty-four-pound gun during
the Battle of New Orleans. 21 Sneaking beneath the
noses of the British and protecting his ship with cotton
bales, he brought relief to Fort St. Philip. 22-23 He
was sent to the Gulf of Mexico to meet with the British
fleet for an exchange of prisoners. 24 After the war,
he returned the troops to their homes along the Red
River, surprising the Indians and settlers who had never
seen a steamboat in the area. 25 In May of 1815 Shreve
ascended the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers on the
Enterprise. 26
Shreve suggested new designs for French’s new steamboat
that was being built, but the suggestions were met with
much opposition and eventually Shreve cut ties with the
Enterprise and its owners. He built his own
ship, the George Washington. 27 As an inventor,
Shreve developed the cam shutoff, built the first high
pressure engine, and suggested flues for boilers. 28 He
designed draft boats with their engines above deck
rather than below. 29
In June of 1816 Shreve headed toward New Orleans from
Wheeling, Virginia in the Washington. On the
Ohio River, an explosion, caused by the failure of the
safety valves, cost the lives of eight people, and
Shreve and others were tossed overboard. He corrected
the problem, and in September of that year, he set out
for New Orleans from Pittsburgh once again. He arrived
unscathed on November 7 and returned to Louisville,
Kentucky in 1816. 30-32 He ran another voyage in March
of 1817, arriving in New Orleans twenty-five days after
leaving Louisville. 33
Shreve built the 231-ton Post Boy in 1819 for use
by the United States Post Office Department. The packet
was to deliver mail between Louisville and New Orleans
and was the first time a steamboat carried mail on the
western waters. 34
Shreve was appointed to the position of Superintendent
of the Western Rivers Improvement in 1826, and he
accepted when the government agreed to pay for the
construction of the new steam snag boat he had
invented. He built a smaller version of it when the
government failed to keep their end of the bargain; it
would be 1829 before the full-scale snag boat,
Heliopolis, was completed. He used this to clear
much of the Mississippi River in 1830. 35 Next was the
Great Raft in the Red River.
From 1833 until 1838, Shreve supervised the removal of
the Great Raft in the Red River, and he worked on the
Great Raft until he was removed from his position in
1841. With the death of the Whig presidential
candidate, President William Henry Harrison,
Vice-President John Tyler took office and instilled his
anti-Jacksonian beliefs. 36 In a letter to the War
Department dating September 11, 1841, Shreve, a
Jacksonian, handed over his job to his successor. 37
In 1836, as a member of the Shreve Town Company, he was
invited to plat the town of Shreveport. However, Shreve
never lived in Shreveport. 38 Shreve returned to St.
Louis, spending his last days at his daughter’s house,
where he died on March 6, 1851. 39-40 He was buried in
the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. 41
References
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