The Great River Raft

Louisiana’s unique geography presented a challenge to early settlers because its wet environment and thick forests hampered transportation. Rivers and bayous served as highways, but log jams frequently clogged up the vital streams.

The largest of these was the Great River Raft on Red River. No one is sure when or how the log jam was created. It may have begun around 1100–1200 A.D. when floods caused the banks to collapse and dumped trees into the river, which then became snagged on sandbars. Or it might have been created by a massive Mississippi River flood that caused Red River to reverse course and become blocked by debris.

Whatever its origin, the raft grew nearly a mile every spring as annual floods deposited more trees into the river.

While the Great River Raft posed immense problems for early settlers, we would not have some of our most beautiful lakes without it. Whenever the log jam backed up past the mouth of a bayou, it acted as a dam and prevented the stream from draining into the river. As a result, the bayous backed up and created lakes in low spots.

These so-called raft lakes are unique to Louisiana's Red River and include Lake Bistineau, Black Lake, Saline Lake, Iatt, and Nantachie.

Early explorer Thomas Freeman described the raft around Campti in 1805. "The first raft is not more than 40 yards through. It consists of the trunks of large trees, lying in all directions, and damming up the river for its whole width, from the bottom, to about three feet higher than the surface of the water. The wood lies so compact that, that [sic] large bushes, weeds and grass cover the surface of the raft." In some places the raft was so thick that the men could walk on it.

To open the Red River to commercial traffic, the War Department ordered Capt. Henry Miller Shreve to begin clearing the log jams in February 1833. Shreve was the Superintendent of the Army Corps of Engineers' Western Waters Department and one of America's most famous steamboat designers and pilots.

On April 1, Shreve arrived at the foot of the raft with eight steamboats and snag boats, and a work force of three hundred men. The Heliopolis was one boat that Shreve had designed a few years earlier (Shreve registered twenty-two patents as a result of his work on the Great River Raft). A steam-powered windlass on the bow was used to pluck logs from the water and then run them through a saw mill set up on the deck.

A congressional report later declared, "One snag raised by the Heliopolis . . . contained 1,600 cubic feet of timber, and could not have weighed less than sixty tons."

After six years of work Shreve finished the job, but the clearing of the raft had unforeseen consequences. In addition to draining the raft lakes, the project also left Natchitoches high and dry.

The town sat on a river channel known as Cane River, but the clearing of the log jam caused most of the Red to flow down the Riviére de Petit Bon Dieu, a small branch of the Red River in the St. Maurice area. Cane River virtually dried up in the summer time, and Natchitoches ceased being a major river port.

One town's loss, however, was another one's fortune. After clearing the Great River Raft, Shreve and his business partners established their own port farther upstream. In 1836, that port was incorporated as Shreveport.

Frustratingly, the Great River Raft quickly reformed unless snag boats worked constantly to keep the debris plucked out. The Civil War put a halt to these efforts, but work began anew in 1872 when dynamite was used to clear the raft all the way to Fulton, Ark.

The following year a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Shreveport that killed 759 people—10 percent of the city's population. At that time, it was not understood that mosquitoes carried the deadly fever, and many people blamed the epidemic on noxious gases that were stirred up from the river's bottom during the raft-clearing work.

During the 20th century, government officials began addressing problems created by the clearing of the Great River Raft. Because Cane River virtually dried up after the Red River began running down the Riviére de Petit Bon Dieu, two earthen dams were built across Cane River in 1915 to create today’s Cane River Lake.

Steps were also taken to recreate the Raft Lakes that drained when the log jam was removed. In the 1920s and 1930s, dams were constructed to hold water permanently in Lake Bistineau, Black Lake, Saline Lake and others.

Dr. Terry L. Jones is professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe who has received numerous awards for his books and outdoor articles.