Books: Of Shreve & the River

MASTER OF THE MISSISSIPPI—Florence L Dorsey—Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Few individual Americans have so directly or so powerfully influenced the history and development of so vast a region—and few have been so completely forgotten—as Henry Shreve, Mississippi keelboatman, who, by the time he was 35: 1) broke Pittsburgh's monopoly of the fur trade; 2) broke Canada's monopoly of the Western lead trade; 3) broke the Livingston-Fulton monopoly of steamboating on the Mississippi with his shallow-draught, double-deck river steamboat; 4) made navigation safe by inventing a snag-pulling boat with which he cleared some 1,500 miles...