Lost Shreveport: Vanishing Scenes from the Red River Valley

By Gary D. Joiner and Ernie Roberson

Over the course of many decades, the city of Shreveport witnessed dramatic growth and ever-changing landscapes.

Mule-drawn railways gave way to electric streetcars, and what was once the Confederate capital of the state became today's vibrant commercial hub of northwest Louisiana. Drawing from their extensive image collection, authors Joiner and Roberson depict the forgotten scenes and lost stories that form the complex layers of Shreveport history. From the famous performances of Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show to the infamous red-light district, from the decline of vigilante justice to the victims who perished from yellow fever, Joiner and Roberson recover and remember lost Shreveport.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781614231615

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BEGINNINGS

The westward expansion of the United States created the need for towns along waterways at intersections with existing trails, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s. From these frontier outposts, settlers and merchants expanded their holdings, and more people moved in. Some settlements flourished into towns and cities, but many others withered and died. Shreveport, Louisiana, was one of the success stories. Its history is that of a raw frontier town that fought against the river that bore it, tropical diseases that almost killed it and the sometimes mean-spirited frontier spirit that defined it.

Shreveport is located on the Red River in northwestern Louisiana, positioned on the first sustainable high ground in the river valley north of the old French settlement at Natchitoches. When the town was incorporated in 1839, it was, for a short period, the westernmost municipality in the United States. Four years prior to this, the settlement began as Shreve Town. Hugging a one-square-mile diamond-shaped bluff and plateau, Shreveport seemed an ideal place for a town. The northern edge of the plateau rested against Cross Bayou. The combined water frontage of the bayou and the Red River afforded the town ample room for commercial growth. However, a major obstacle stood in its way.

Captain Henry Miller Shreve, the man for whom Shreveport is named, received a contract from the U.S. Army to remove a giant logjam known as the Great Raft. Shreve was widely acclaimed as the most knowledgeable expert on raft removal. When the French arrived and began exploration of the upper part of what is today the state of Louisiana, the raft extended south to Natchitoches, about 70 straight-line miles from the site of Shreveport. The upstream portion of the raft at times extended into Oklahoma. Since the Red River had many meandering curves, a straight-line mile might have as many as 3 river miles within it. At its largest, the raft clogged over 400 miles of river. By the time Shreve examined it, in about 1830, the raft extended about 110 miles.

Shreve brought in large vessels that he modified for the job. Some of these ripped the jam apart with grappling hooks. Others rammed the raft to loosen individual trees. Some of these vessels were built by taking two steamboats and joining them side by side into a catamaran. The captain built a small sawmill on the common deck. The most famous of these hybrid snagboats, as they were called, were the Archimedes and the Heliopolis. His crews consisted of slave labor and Irish immigrants. The work was very difficult and extremely dangerous.¹

Clearing the raft often meant pushing logs and trees into the mouths of existing bayous. The men also piled the debris onto riverbanks or burned the wood if it was dry. In plugging some streams and opening others, Shreve changed the landscape for hundreds of square miles. Prior to his efforts, lakes had existed through the entire length of the Red River Valley, from Arkansas to the river’s mouth near Simmesport. The removal of the raft and the damming of streams starved most of these lakes, and within a decade, many became farmland. Only when spillways were built in the twentieth century did some of them return. Examples of these are Cross Lake, Lake Bistineau, Bodcau Lake and Wallace Lake.

Henry Shreve surveyed the original town site for Shreveport. It contained sixty-four blocks, and this is still the core for downtown Shreveport. Because the massacre of Texas loyalists at the Alamo was a recent event, and because most people in the area either had relatives in Texas or owned land there, many of the downtown streets reflected the new community’s political leanings. Texas Street, Crockett Street, Travis Street, Fannin Street and Milam Street are indicative of the interest and connection to Texas, which was located only twenty miles to the west. By 1841, Shreve had had falling-outs with his business partners and the U.S. Army, and he left the region to become harbor master in St. Louis. He died there in 1851, never having lived in Shreveport, the town that bore his name.

Shreve’s efforts did not end the problem with the raft. Periodic work was needed to clear the river as the raft formed again. The Civil War interrupted this work, but by 1870, Congress had realized that the river must be opened. Appropriations were again made, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent an engineering unit to deal with the issue. The team arrived in late 1871 under the command of First Lieutenant Eugene Augustus Woodruff. Woodruff, his brother, George, and their men set to work. They recorded their actions with maps and photographs. R.B. Talfor was the photographer assigned the duty of recording the work, and this may have been the first instance of an imbedded photographer assigned to a specific unit. Talfor and the Woodruff brothers took over one hundred images of the raft clearing. Today, their records remain the standard chronicle for a project of this type.²

The unit’s primary snagboat was the U.S. Aid, a modern version of Henry Shreve’s Archimedes. This elegant stern-wheel vessel was the most advanced of its type in the late nineteenth century. Another technology used as a test bed for river clearing was the newly created explosive nitroglycerin. Because nitroglycerin was extremely dangerous to use and volatile to make, the nitroglycerin lab occasionally blew up—thankfully, with almost no casualties.

The Woodruffs found areas of clear water, appearing as a string of lakes, and when they broke up the logs around them, the loosened trees and logs would sometimes form snags downstream. This created severe hazards for steamboats plying the newly cleared waters. One of the unfortunate steamboats was the R.T. Bryarly, photographed by Talfor in 1873. Talfor took his photograph from a recently cleared section of the river. Piles of debris could clearly be seen on both banks as the steamer picked its way up the river. The Bryarly plied the river until September 19, 1876, when it hit a snag and was lost.³ The use of explosives and the improved snagboats finally conquered the river.

During the Civil War, Shreveport was the Confederate capital of the state from March 1863 until its surrender in early June 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The city had grown from about four thousand people in 1860 to over twelve thousand in 1865, not including troops stationed there. Refugees had poured into Shreveport from southern Louisiana and as far away as Missouri. After the war, many of those people remained in the city, among them an enterprising former Confederate captain from Missouri named Peter Youree. He would be instrumental in the creation of the modern city that Shreveport became. By 1870, the city’s population was estimated at twenty thousand.

A lingering problem in the South, one that no one understood fully until the end of the Spanish-American War, was that of the dreaded yellow fever. Epidemics were so frequent that the populace could count on one every other year. The general consensus was that the fever was caused by bad air, or a miasma. In mid-August 1873, an epidemic broke out in Shreveport. Everyone who could leave town did, and the population dwindled to about four thousand people before other towns sealed off the roads, railroads and streams to protect their residents. A quarter of the population who remained died within the first two weeks, and another 50 percent contracted yellow fever within the next six weeks. Most of the doctors