Books: Of Shreve & the River

• Tweet
• Digg

MASTER OF THE MISSISSIPPI—Florence L Dorsey—Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Few individual Americans have so directly or so powerfully influenced the history and development of so vast a region—and few have been so completely forgotten—as Henry Shreve, Mississippi keelboatman, who, by the time he was 35: 1) broke Pittsburgh's monopoly of the fur trade; 2) broke Canada's monopoly of the Western lead trade; 3) broke the Livingston-Fulton monopoly of steamboating on the Mississippi with his shallow-draught, double-deck river steamboat; 4) made navigation safe by inventing a snag-pulling boat with which he cleared some 1,500 miles of river; 5) opened up the Red River to civilization.

Of this remarkable character Florence L. Dorsey, a kinswoman, has written a remarkable biography. Author Dorsey has an almost biologic feeling for the violence of growth—the uptilting of mountains, the plunge of rivers, the tidal surge of young and healthy nations. And she is equally at home in the Pleistocene age and the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.

The Man. One autumn day in 1807 Henry Shreve finished building a keelboat and, after hiring a crew of ten Frenchmen and half-breeds, shoved off into the muddy Monongahela, bound for St. Louis. He was 22, had long been fascinated by the gay river traffic. "It seems," wrote his Quaker father, "as if people are crazy to get afloat on the Ohio. . . ."

Henry Shreve's keelboat floated past "bleak and dingy" Pittsburgh; past Charlestown with its two-story pillory and stocks ("there were not many towns that could punish two culprits at once"); past Wheeling, "a notoriously gay port"; past Marietta, where everybody asked:

"What is the latest about Aaron Burr?"; past Louisville, a 120-house metropolis. In December he sighted St. Louis.

It was a village teeming with overland adventurers (coureurs des bois), boatmen (voyageurs), townsmen (habitants). "There were spruce military men from the American garrison which had been placed over the village when it passed from French rule four years ago. ... To a Quaker it was strange for a town to boast a dozen billiard rooms and only one small church. . . . Most astonishing to Shreve were the warehouses where he had to select his furs. . . . Pelts were stacked high on every side . . . and heaped in hills about the floor, hung from rafters and bulging from the adjoining sheds.

. . ." Fur and tobacco were St. Louis' money.

It took 40 days from Pittsburgh to St. Louis; it took longer being towed back. The Pittsburgh middlemen squinted at Shreve's furs, offered him small change. Ignoring the tradition that Pittsburgh middlemen monopolized the fur trade with the East, Shreve loaded his furs on wagons, carted them over the snowy Alleghenies to Philadelphia, where he sold them at a fat profit.