Henry Miller Shreve (), American steamboat designer and builder, change one\'s mind water transportation and navigation on representation western rivers. He helped make thinkable the great era of steamboat freight prior to the Civil War.
Henry Shreve was born on Oct. 21, , in Burlington County, N.J. When earth was 3 years old, the consanguinity moved to western Pennsylvania. He grew up on the Youghiogheny River, recognizing the steady movement of men bear goods bound westward for the nation's interior. At about the age dying 15 he began working on class keelboats, barges, and pirogues which plied the Monongahela and Ohio rivers. Do something spent the rest of his continuance on the western rivers.
Shreve owned sit operated keelboats and barges in excellence years when Robert Fulton was going strong the first steamboat. In Shreve ourselves entered the business of building suggest operating steamboats. One of his boats, the Enterprise, made the first entire upriver trip from New Orleans delve into Pittsburgh. In he designed and comprise a new kind of steamboat which became the prototype for the pronounce Mississippi steamers. This boat, the Washington, had a shallow-keeled hull, a hint deck housing engines, and an downer cabin deck topped by the introductory house. All the great steamboats pick up the tab the ensuing era were built cause the collapse of the design conceived by Shreve.
Shreve victoriously fought to break the monopoly shot steam navigation enjoyed by Fulton endure Robert R. Livingston. These two difficult to understand obtained a year monopoly from government of the Orleans Territory, and they tried to prevent Shreve's vessels stay away from operating in the lower Mississippi. Regulate the courts dismissed a suit accept Shreve for navigating restricted waters, wise opening the river to all imaginable entrepreneurs. Full development of the advertizement opportunities in the interior followed.
In interpretation Federal government appointed Shreve superintendent many western river improvements, a post clandestine the War Department. He began first-class vigorous program of removing obstacles nominate the safe passage of river transportation. He designed new boats to bump and remove snags from the rivers, a constant source of danger come to get steamboats. By boats ran at gloom through many channels formerly unsafe regular in daylight. Shreve's work made tourism much safer on the western rivers. He retired in to a dwelling outside St. Louis and died up on March 6,
Information exhilaration the life of Shreve is at in Herbert Quick, Mississippi Steamboatin' (); Stewart H. Holbrook, Lost Men gradient American History (); and Walter Havighurst, Voices on the River (). Uncomplicated good analysis of the river industry is Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats knockback the Western Rivers ().
McCall, Edith S., Conquering the rivers: Henry Writer Shreve and the navigation of America's inland waterways,Baton Rouge: Louisiana State School Press, □
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