Description
Bagur has analyzed old Corps reports, historic maps, early trip accounts, and period newspapers to reveal the story of the area from 1800 to the present. Farmers and ranchers from so far as Dallas loaded goods onto Jefferson steamboats bound for Shreveport and New Orleans. Regardless of an expansion in commerce after the war, the steamboat’s heyday on Cypress Bayou was once over by 1880, seemingly as a result of the 1873 removal of the Great Raft by E. A. Woodruff and the Corps of Engineers. Bagur’s research, alternatively, confirms that the ports and landings fell victim to the same source that helped extinguish many early settlements: the railroad. Today, a dam prevents boats from traveling between Shreveport and Jefferson, yet this remarkable waterbody still offers much to latest watercraft.