The gray mists of predawn shrouded the waters and banks of the Natchez riverfront on the morning of April 3, 1833, as the steamboat Java cautiously moved past the ghostly forms of rafts, keelboats, and two other steamboats. On board the small, unadorned working boat, Capt. Henry M. Shreve took note of them all and then nosed the Java to a docking close to her sister steamboats, Souvenir and Pearl. Ahead of the flotilla loomed the shadowy bulk of the snag boat Archimedes, her two huge eighteen-foot windlass wheels rising above the mists.

Captain Shreve wasted no time that day as he made a final check on the equipment and the crew members awaiting embarkation. This was the last port of call before their voyage into almost uninhabited northwestern Louisiana. There they would begin a job most people believed doomed to failure: the removal of the centuries-old Great Raft of the Red River. In midafternoon Shreve was ready to write a report to mail to his superior, Brig. Gen. Charles Gratiot, chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Shreve had been serving the corps since January 1827 as superintendent of Western river improvements, assigned responsibility for making the Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers safe for steam navigation by clearing them of treacherous snags.

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