Robert Gudmestad

Yeah.

Interesting.

He was a riverboat captain.

And Tom Sawyer, it was a way to measure the water ahead of the steamboat.

So you're calling out navigation, if you will, and depth of the water.

And you have somebody at the front who's looking for these obstacles.

So you're exactly right.

Tom Sawyer is related to a steamboat snag.

And you're trying to avoid those snags, obviously.

Yeah.

There are so many of these in the rivers in the 1820s and 1830s that you're not traveling at night.

It's just too dangerous.

What the federal government did was there was a man named Henry Shreve who created a snag boat.

In fact, he built three snag boats, and they are government-owned vessels that...

took care of these snags, they either bashed into them and broke them off.

So there was basically like a battering ram in front of it.

It was a horizontal bar that was metal on the outside of it.

Or they had cranes and winches.

So you had guys who would get into the water, wrap chains around a snag, and then the boat would go as fast as it could going backwards and yank these snags out of the water.

So these boats became known as Uncle Sam's Tooth Pullers.