Shreveport, Louisiana: Named for the Captain Who Fought a Logjam

Shreveport, Louisiana, is named for Henry Miller Shreve, a steamboat captain sent to break up a logjam that choked the Red River for nearly 180 miles. The town grew out of the camp where he and his crews were based.

The Great Raft

Before the 1830s, boats on the Red River didn’t get far. Alcée Fortier’s 1914 Louisiana encyclopedia describes the “great raft,” a mass of logs and debris that had piled up and locked together over the years until it was “nearly a solid mass,” reaching for almost 180 miles up the river. If you’d tried to take a boat up the Red before 1835, Fortier says, Natchitoches was as far as you’d get.

The War Department found it very expensive to haul supplies past that mess, and in 1831 Congress put up money to clear it. Shreve was hired to run the job at $5,000 a year, and the government gave him two snagboats, two transports, four barges and 200 enlisted men. The crews started in the fall of 1831, and within three years they had cleared the channel up to the spot that would become Shreveport. Fortier calls it the headquarters of the raft removers.

A captain with a reputation

Shreve was no unknown. He already had a big name on the rivers. Fortier’s section on the first steamboats says Shreve brought the Enterprise into New Orleans on December 14, 1814, in time for Andrew Jackson to use it moving troops and supplies. In 1817 he took it upriver to Shippingport in 25 days, the first steamboat to reach that port from New Orleans, and he was “acknowledged the father of steam navigation on the Mississippi.” He also commanded the Washington, which made two round trips between Louisville and New Orleans in 1816 and 1817.

From camp to town

Caroline Pfaff’s 1927 biography of Shreve, in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly, explains how the name started. The town sits on Coates Bluff, which “was originally the camp of Shreve and his workmen during the removal of the Red River Raft. It was then referred to as Shreve’s Town.” When the town was incorporated in 1839, she writes, “it was named Shreveport in honor of Henry Miller Shreve.”

Shreve didn’t just lend his name. J. Fair Hardin, a Shreveport lawyer, wrote in the same journal that year that in 1836 Shreve joined in buying a “section” of land that the Caddo chiefs had set aside for Larkin Edwards in their treaty giving up the area, and “became one of the seven organizers of the Shreve Town Company.” Fortier tells it a bit differently: the settlers called themselves the “Shreve Town Company” in honor of the captain. Either way, the honoree and the name are the same.

The captain who didn’t stay

Here’s the odd part. Pfaff notes that Shreve’s descendants ended up scattered from Boston to Silver City, New Mexico, and they “seem never to have lived in either Shreveport or in New Orleans.” Shreve himself retired to a farm near St. Louis, according to Hardin. So the city carries the name of a man whose family, as far as Pfaff could tell, never lived there.

Sources & further reading

• Alcée Fortier, ed., Louisiana, vol. 2 (1914). The Red River raft, the 1831 appropriation, Shreve’s $5,000 salary, the crews and the headquarters at Shreveport (pp. 359–360); the Shreve Town Company and the town’s start (pp. 449–450, where the captain’s middle initial is misprinted “H.”); Shreve’s Enterprise and Washington (pp. 505–506).
• J. Fair Hardin, “The First Great Western River Captain,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly (January 1927). Shreve’s 1836 share in the Larkin Edwards land and the seven organizers of the Shreve Town Company; his farm near St. Louis (p. 65).
• Caroline S. Pfaff, “Henry Miller Shreve: A Biography,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly (April 1927). Shreve’s camp on Coates Bluff, “Shreve’s Town,” the 1839 incorporation as Shreveport and the descendants who never lived there (p. 208). She also quotes De Bow’s description of Coates’ Bluff, “now the flourishing town of Shreveport, so called in compliment to that officer” (p. 232).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). “Named for Henry M. Shreve” (p. 282).
• GNIS feature 1630015 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Shreveport, used here for the parish and coordinates.