By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

In the era before train travel took off out west, steamboats regularly navigated the waters of Texas’ plentiful rivers. And like many a river town, Waco owes a portion of its success to a contraption called a “snag boat.”

The snag boat — a steamboat fitted with apparatus for removing obstructions in navigable bodies of water — was the brainchild of Henry Miller Shreve (1785–1851), the American inventor and steamboat captain credited with opening the Mississippi, Ohio and Red rivers to steamboat traffic. Shreveport, La., is named in his honor.

Challenged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to devise a solution to clear the great “Red River Raft,” Shreve designed and built the first “snag boat” in the late 1820s, a revolutionary steam-powered piece of equipment crafted to ram snags, jarring them loose.

The “Red River Raft” was actually a great logjam blocking the river. For hundreds of years, tree debris had been swept into the river, piling one upon another willy-nilly until a logjam stretched from bank to bank across the Red River for more than 150 miles — from Natchitoches, La., to Fulton, Ark.

Shreve’s snag boats came to be called “Uncle Sam’s tooth pullers” for their ability to snag limbs, which were then hoisted aboard and broken apart on the vessel’s deck. Thanks to the snag boats’ ability to clear a path, the number of steamboats able to ply the waters of America’s major rivers increased dramatically, historians say.

Waco, located some 430 miles from the mouth of the Brazos River, was a contender for commercial river travel more than a century ago.

The federal Rivers and Harbors Act of 1905 authorized examination of the Brazos River from Washington-on-the-Brazos to Waco, conducted by the corps’ Galveston district.

Justification for the government project was that there was no suitable water route along which the substantial cotton crop yield of the fertile river valley could be transported to Galveston — still the state’s leading port of the era.

Army Corps Capt. Edgar Jadwin proposed a plan of eight locks and dams, plus 103 miles of open channel. Army engineers got two locks finished by 1915 and another two by 1918, but World War I interrupted the work. No river trade was expected till the entire project was finished, but by 1922, Congress had abandoned the scheme of navigable locks on the Brazos River altogether.

Sources: AmericanHeritage.com, Handbook of Texas On-Line, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers history; TexasHistory.UNT.edu.