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Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure Paperback – May 16, 2023

by Rinker Buck (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,113 ratings
Editors' pick Best History
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Audacious…Life on the Mississippi sparkles.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch * “Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America’s westward expansion.” —The Christian Science Monitor

The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand “flatboat era” of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of America’s first western frontier.

Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era.

The role of the flatboat in our country’s evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats headed beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Settler families repurposed the wood from their boats to build their first cabins in the wilderness; cargo boats were broken apart and sold to build the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called “gun boats”; “smithy boats” for blacksmiths; even “whiskey boats” for alcohol. In the present day, America’s inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan barges—carrying $80 billion of cargo annually—all descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience.

As a historian, Buck resurrects the era’s adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers’ push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term “sold down the river.” Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived.

With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a mus­cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.
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  1. Print length
    416 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    May 16, 2023
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1501106384
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1501106385
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Audacious . . . Compelling . . . An antidote to the cynicism of the times . . . Life on the Mississippi sparkles. . . . His prose, like the river itself, has turns that quicken the pulse.”
—Wall Street Journal

“An invigorating blend of history and journalism informs this journey down Old Man River. . . . Besides being a willing and intrepid traveler, Buck is also an able interpreter of history, and it’s clear that he’s devoured a library of Mississippiana. It all makes for an entertaining journey in the manner of William Least Heat-Moon, John McPhee, and other traveler-explainers. For armchair-travel aficionados and frontier-history buffs, it doesn’t get much better.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review), “Best Nonfiction Books of 2022”

“Engaging . . . [Buck is] a travel writer who delights in incongruity and in history’s rhymes.”
—New York Times

“A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection . . . I see Buck at the helm of the Patience when I read Twain’s description of a riverboat captain: ‘A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on the earth.’”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Rinker Buck seems like a guy you could sit down and have a beer and a good chat with. . . . The simplest conversation quickly turns into a master class of storytelling in short form. . . . Life on the Mississippi [is] an epic tale told with wit, wisdom and heart-touching honesty. . . . What the book will certainly do is give readers an up-close look at the waters so few of us see.”
—Gulf Coast Media

“Captivating . . . Rough-edged, well informed, and honest about his own blind spots, Buck is a winning tour guide. American history buffs and armchair adventurers will relish the trip.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[A] riveting, revealing, and often side-splitting saga that Oregon Trail fans would expect it to be. . . . Rollicking good reading.”
—New York Journal of Books

“Buck’s ability to deftly balance the intimate and the epic, along with his pervading charm and literary panache, make Life on the Mississippi an entertaining and engrossing read. . . . The book’s most poignant aspect is achieved thanks to the author’s ability to sketch brief, affecting portraits of the people with whom his voyage brings him into contact.”
—Shelf Awareness,“Best Nonfiction Books of 2022”

“Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America’s westward expansion after the Revolutionary War . . . It’s a mark of Buck’s ability to write engagingly of his journey that many readers will conclude that a trip down the Mississippi would be a romantic adventure and a wonderful chance to learn about America’s history.”
—Christian Science Monitor,“Best Nonfiction Books of 2022”

“Life on the Mississippi is a fascinating mix of history and travelogue. . . . Buck shines a light on an important yet forgotten part of American history and shows its relevance to today’s America.”
—American Essence

About the Author

Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his work has won the PEN New England Award, the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail, Flight of Passage, and First Job. He lives in Tennessee.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (May 16, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501106384
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501106385
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.9 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 1,113 ratings

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
1,113 global ratings
Book Wanders Like a River – Not Always for the Best
3 Stars
Book Wanders Like a River – Not Always for the Best
Journalist Rinker Buck decided to take his love for the flat boats of the 1800’s and make that his next trip into America’s past. He has one built for himself and sets out to sail it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Along the way, he studies up on this part of American history. How will his journey go?The idea of a trip like this appealed to me, so I sat down to read this with high hopes. Sadly, it wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped it would be, mostly thanks for things the author put in he didn’t need to. There was more history than I was expecting; I was expecting more of a travelogue. That’s on me, although I did find much of this interesting if a little too long. However, I didn’t need all the biographical sketches about Rinker. I feel like some of that was his grieving process over having recently lost his mother. It would make for good reading, but in a different book. He also seemed to want to inject politics into the book where it didn’t need to be, and his attitude was very smug when this came up, even condescending at times. However, when he was actually describing the river and talking about what it took to navigate it, I was enthralled. I never thought about what it would take. The stories about some of the people he met along the way were good as well. The end result was a mixed bag.
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Top reviews from the United States

Bill Lawrence
5.0 out of 5 stars Very enjoyable read. One of my favorites recently.
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2024
Verified Purchase
This book was a surprisingly pleasant read. Informative and entertaining. Recommend for anyone who enjoys the out of doors and history.
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Linda Lou
4.0 out of 5 stars My favorite author. Rinker buck
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2023
Verified Purchase
You’re never disappointing if you’re reading her book book, this one details, how the rivers made as much difference or more in the western movement we always thought it was the covered wagons coming across the plains when in fact, it was people on those river boats. Great River history, easy read Jack, sure and read all of his books. There’s only a handful.
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Amy
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book.
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2024
Verified Purchase
I enjoyed reading this book about traveling down the Mississippi River. It certainly wasn’t a dull read.
I do think he has a tendency to gloss over areas he doesn’t quite know how to describe. He should know better than most that history is not simply black & white.
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Placeholder
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy read
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2024
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Great story
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Frode Jensen
3.0 out of 5 stars history, travelogue, introspection
Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2022
Verified Purchase
While I generally liked the book, it is not a book I would read again. It is part travelogue, part history, and part personal reflection. Rinker is obviously an interesting fellow and a good writer. He has done his homework. Some of the details are somewhat meaningless to the casual reader. It means little to me where buoy such and such and mile post #321 are geographically since I have no real acquaintance with the Ohio or Mississippi Rivers. Obviously the author needed to know since they were his guideposts, so he included them. However, the incident near Rabbit Hatch and Petersburg on the Ohio did ring a bell because part of our family spent a week in that general area a few years ago. That was the only place in the whole journey that I could relate to. Of course, that’s not Rinker’s fault; it’s mine.

The idea of myths being popular truths that are repeated so often they are accepted as reality makes sense. It resonates with what Joseph Goebbels said about telling a lie long enough and loud enough and people with begin to believe it. I chuckled at the dire predictions he heard along the route, none of which came true. But there is another area where truth and reality are also blurred, primarily because of omission. Rinker’s pieces on the forced removal of native Indians and the great slave transfer to the south from the Tidelands were interesting and informative. He calls out the historians who pander to the myths and elites instead of giving a real life picture of what went on with the people. Well, what’s new? The winners write the history books, and they lionize those who will benefit them and get their books into print. The personal stories of regular folks rarely make the bestseller lists.

His last chapter on acknowledgments referred to many interesting sources. Too bad life is so short; too many books, so little time. His paragraph on Constance Skinner and her view of the 65 book series on American rivers she promoted reminded me of The Real America in Romance series edited by Edwin Markham the poet. As someone said, “Literature is the handmaiden of history.”

The various people who were on the boat with him and some of the folks he met when he ported were generally interesting. But they came and went pretty fast. I recognize he was almost always on the move, so that’s part of the explanation. He spent four months on the Patience guiding it down the rivers. It’s a lot to try and cram into 360 pages. In the main, it is a book with a loose thread; the theme that holds it together is the travel down the river. It is not a novel. The ending was a bit anticlimactic. He gets to the end, and, well, that’s all folks.
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G. C. Carter
4.0 out of 5 stars A two-thousand mile, modern-day flatboat river historical reenactment and more
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2022
Verified Purchase
I purchased and downloaded the book entitled: “Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure” by Rinker Buck while searching for a David McCullough follow up book or one similar to his 2019 book entitled: “The Pioneers” related to settling the US east of the Alleghany mountains by way of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Unfortunately, David McCullough died in 2022.
This book by Rinker Buck has several threads. One of which is the history of settlement along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers by using flatboats. One story is building and sailing an actual flatboat from Pittsburgh to New Orleans to understand some of the challenges of sailing a flatboat along this course. Another story line is the challenge of recruiting and sailing with several different crews with diverse personalities, skill sets and different political persuasions to live on a flatboat together for various segments of time. Usually, the author doesn’t divulge his political leanings but sometimes he does, perhaps in the spirit and sharing that a crew has to work together to achieve a common goal even when they disagree politically.
Illustrative of the style and substance of the author, Buck writes: “I DIDN’T SPEND A YEAR building a wooden flatboat and then sailing it two thousand miles down the Mississippi to New Orleans simply because I was suffering from a Huck Finn complex, although that certainly played a part… Mostly, though, I was entranced by history.”
Buck writes: “The inland rivers—not the wagon ruts crossing from Missouri to Oregon—were America’s first western frontier… During the first five decades of the 19th century, more than three million migrants ventured down the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys.. to the swelling southwestern frontier. In the 1840s and 1850s, a comparative trickle—fewer than 500,000 travelers—crossed the plains west of the Missouri River by overland routes, primarily the Oregon and California trails… the western rivers in America became a floating supply chain that fueled national growth… Prior to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Mississippi acted as America’s western border, preventing expansion into the colonial empires of Spain and France.”
Buck writes: “No one pursued the policy of Native American cleansing longer and more zealously than Andrew Jackson, whose presidency began with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, during which more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes were force-marched across the Mississippi into the arid barrens of eastern Oklahoma. At least four thousand Cherokees alone died during their 1,200-mile trek west, one of the darkest chapters of American history now known as the Trail of Tears. Simultaneously, in another brutal chapter still unknown to most Americans, almost a million African American slaves were marched by foot one thousand miles over the Appalachians from the depleted tobacco plantations of Maryland and Virginia to the next source of American wealth, the sweltering cotton and sugarcane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.”
Buck writes: “The modern Ohio and Mississippi rivers are jointly managed by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers… Now I was proposing to myself that my first trip as a boat captain would be to negotiate two thousand miles of some of America’s most notoriously dangerous waters. Two of my brothers, Coast Guard veterans, laughed hysterically when I told them about my plans…. “Rinker, you don’t know knots, and you won’t be able to tie up in time,” Nick said. “You’re going to die.” That quickly became the dirge, the theme song written in advance, for my trip. I was going to die.”
Buck writes: “Swelled by immigration, especially after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe in 1815 and the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, the U.S. population would boom eightfold, from 4 million after the Revolution to 32 million by 1861…. the French and Indian War in the 1760s had introduced Americans to the rich possibilities of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. A quarter century later, the success of the Revolution liberated Americans from the patronizing and politically inept British crown, and by 1790 the compass had shifted in a perpendicular direction… even as late as 1815, “heavy wagons drawn along common roads or turnpikes by four-and-six-horse teams provided the only means of moving bulk goods over appreciable distances by land. It is hard to realize how prohibitively expensive was such transportation.””
Buck writes: “After 1788, when the federal government issued the first land warrants in the West for Revolutionary War veterans, more than five thousand veterans from Virginia alone, including Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, headed over the mountains with their families on these floating farms, plying the Indiana and Kentucky banks of the Ohio and its tributaries in search of likely homesites to clear… The Kentucky arks helped promote the idea of salvageability. Taking the boat apart after the river trip and selling the wooden decks and framing timbers as construction lumber became a welcome means of recovering the largest cost that Indiana or Kentucky settlers incurred on the trip—the price of their boat.”
Buck writes: “Gloria … seemed to suffer from a syndrome that causes uninformed people to confidently sound off on subjects they know nothing about.
for example, that Taylor Swift “couldn’t sing,” and [views on political figures]… I would have to ignore a lot to get to New Orleans with the menagerie of personalities aboard the Patience… Their personality clash went way beyond the parking lot near miss. Their DNA derived from distant planets… Incompatible doesn’t begin to describe their feverish animus for each other—they were Sophia Loren on a blind date with Billy Graham. When they first clashed, I thought to myself: Oh, what a fun trip we are going to have here. Rinker, as a human resources manager, you are first class… The many and evident eccentricities of my crew prompted me to return to a subject I had reflected upon almost from the day I decided to build a flatboat and sail to New Orleans. How would… I lead, especially captaining a boat? I had always defaulted toward a laissez-faire approach to leadership, favoring a style that mostly stressed enabling people to make decisions on their own according to their strengths, and not issuing a lot of explicit commands.”
Buck writes: “Historians have generally depicted the great migration west as a process of removing the excess energy of the heavily populated East. The unemployed, the dreamers, the swindlers, and gunslingers whose personalities were unsuitable for the settled society of the East found a culture more suitable in the violent, unpredictable West… The mash of characters that I’d gathered would turn the Patience into my own private microcosm of America floating… downriver.”
Buck writes: “Barge traffic was my biggest worry… Tugboat captains, like airline pilots, are notoriously unwilling to bother with radio communications with smaller, private craft in their way, and the rule of the river is to avoid needless radio chatter. They can call me; I don’t hail them… The Coast Guard is legally entitled to pull these boats off the river as a “hazard to navigation,” based on just a single captain’s report… The civilian staff that runs the Army Corps of Engineers dams can release enormous amounts of water at night, to improve the depth of the channel underneath the sail line. These nighttime water releases could dramatically affect current and change the position of my boat.”
Buck writes: “A succession of presidents in the early republic—from Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to James Polk in 1849—objected to the use of federal funds for what they considered river projects that benefited only individual states… In antebellum America, the big flywheel driving the economy was cotton, and “Cotton was King.” But the same might have been said for coal. By 1880, America was extracting 80 million tons of coal a year, and most of it reached distant markets along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers… Today, the Army Corps, with thirty-seven thousand employees and a $ 5 billion budget, presides over an inland empire of hydroelectric plants, more than 250 river locks, Superfund mitigation sites, and a fleet of dredging boats that keep the river channels clear by relocating 250 million cubic yards of silt a year… Today, the Army Corps, with thirty-seven thousand employees and a $ 5 billion budget, presides over an inland empire of hydroelectric plants, more than 250 river locks, Superfund mitigation sites, and a fleet of dredging boats that keep the river channels clear by relocating 250 million cubic yards of silt a year.”
Buck writes: “The colonial New France territory, roughly following the Mississippi drainage, was vast, stretching from Hudson’s Bay in Canada south to New Orleans, and the impact of French still resonates… Thirty percent of today’s spoken English, about seven thousand words, derives from French vocabulary,.. Their impact on common nouns and place names in American English was enhanced by their willingness to intermarry with indigenous tribes and learn their languages, and then import native words into French that, over time, were assimilated into English.”
Buck writes: “He personified a favorite quote of mine, from Ulysses S. Grant. “The most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter.”
Because the latest government charts were often ten or more years old, I couldn’t rely on them for the location and size of shoals and sandbars ahead of us. When my cell phone reception was good, I could call up Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey website to check their data, which was usually only two or so months old.”
Buck writes: “I realized that I had completely missed the clear signs of the death rattle of coal… The decline of coal was probably the most dramatic historic shift that we saw on the trip. Hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling for natural gas over the past decade, mostly just over the mountains in Pennsylvania, had unleashed a massive
oversupply of natural gas that was a far-cheaper and less environmentally destructive fuel for making electricity. Energy producers from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the Ohio Power Company had led a retreat from coal that had reduced mining in the Appalachians by 45 percent over the previous decade… By 2017, five of the largest coal companies in America had declared bankruptcy, and several coal company executives were facing federal criminal charges for bank fraud and conspiracy to violate employee-safety rules. Washington hadn’t destroyed the coal industry. Management myopia and greed had destroyed the coal industry… As a result, there isn’t a single coal-fired plant planned by an electrical utility in the United States today, and employment in the mines has dropped nationally from just under 200,000 jobs in the late 1980s to barely 50,000 today. At its peak, “King Coal” had employed nearly a million people in the 1920s, making the Ohio River valley an energy powerhouse, vital to the American economy. But today the barges mounded high with tons of sooty black lumps that I saw passing by were remnants, symbols of a dying industry. Blaming Washington and the Clean Power Plan for the death of coal was a refrain we would hear all the way down the Ohio, and it didn’t have to be true to be widely believed… Cheaper and cleaner gas had already made it a more desirable alternative to coal, and after 2008 the boom in renewable forms of energy—hydropower, solar, and wind—was dramatically changing electricity generation. On the Ohio alone, three major lock and dam systems were being rebuilt to accommodate hydropower turbines. By 2019, renewables were already generating 11 percent of American power, compared to coal’s 13 percent. Natural gas was producing 34 percent. The future was already obvious.”
Buck writes: “The large family of William Chapman, a Shakespearean troupe from England, spent the 1830s drifting downriver every summer, stopping at river towns, or the floating villages of flatboats bunched together along the banks, performing Othello and The Taming of the Shrew in an amphitheater with a capacity of 120 seats, built on top of a hundred-foot barge.”
Buck writes: ““When discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha and the Holston [in Tennessee], and Kentucky,” Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his famous frontier thesis, “the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was part of the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.”… The Kanawha salt mines are controversial today because, under brutally inhumane conditions, slave labor was used to work the pits—one of the few instances where the southern plantation system was adapted to an industrial or mining setting. Life was cruel for the roughly three thousand slaves who worked the Kanawha Salines. The saltworks were run twenty-four hours a day most of the year, to avoid the inefficiency of shutting down and restarting coal furnaces every day, and a “task system” established strict quotas for how many bushels of coal, or baskets of salt, each slave had to produce… Well before the Civil War, the Kanawha River and its flatboats became a microcosm of America’s conflict over slavery.”
Buck writes: “In 1851, the German-American artist and portraitist Emanuel Leutze immortalized the surprise Revolutionary War attack on Trenton with his inspiring oil painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The Leutze painting is considered a masterpiece of historical art,… In 2011, Mort Künstler, who is known as America’s foremost historical painter, was commissioned to paint a more accurate image of the crossing for an unveiling at the New-York Historical Society… Künstler’s canvas, which won raves from historians and art critics alike, depicts a less heroic but still determined Washington standing on the square bow of a flatboat,… How we remember history is as important as history itself, and the story of the two paintings, created 160 years apart, shows how the hoarfrost of mythmaking and edited detail can obscure our real past.
While an estimated 6,200 Americans were killed on the battlefield, more than 17,000 Continental soldiers died of malnutrition and disease.”
Buck writes: “The clamor to occupy the rich new soils of the inland river country began even before the American Revolution was over. Squatters, Continental army veterans anticipating land grants for their military service, fur trappers, and even organized-church groups had been trickling through the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio in flatboats as early as the 1770s. This trickle became a flood by the 1790s. Skirmishes between the scruffy bands of white pioneers and the indigenous tribes over land use boiled over into massacres, and then revenge massacres committed by both sides. The chaotic situation in the West, and the federal government’s realization that it couldn’t… restrain its own citizens as they streamed over the Appalachians, ignited the Northwest Indian War, a bloody conflict against a confederation of Shawnees, Delawares, and Creeks that would drag on for ten years after the Revolution… As soon as the disruptive waves of white settlers got into trouble, the central government intervened on their behalf, sending troops, building forts, and militarily subjugating the tribes… The inland river tribes had long been accustomed to the presence of non-native Europeans. But these were mostly French trappers, who traveled in small, nonthreatening groups of canoes, and who were more than willing to intermarry with the tribes, live together, and share both the work and the bounties of building fur-trading villages together. For a generation or more, the inland river country of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky became a network of mixed-race fur-trapping hamlets generally free of conflict. But this changed dramatically during and just after the Revolution, when large expeditions of flatboats began to arrive south of the Ohio River. The new arrivals were predominantly English-speaking Virginians, intent on permanently settling the land for farming… Recurrent epidemics of smallpox and rubella sweeping through tribal lands turned initially friendly villagers into hostile warriors, and the decimation weakened tribal resistance to the white invasion… Historian William Heath has estimated that between the late 1780s and the early 1790s, more than five hundred settlers were killed along the Ohio when their flatboats were ambushed by Native American warriors.”
Buck writes: “Thanks to Jackson and his treaties, southern cotton and sugarcane growers had obtained millions of new acres to plant. Within a decade, Jackson, now the most celebrated American general since George Washington, would ride his military fame into the White House… the Georgia legislature promptly passed legislation establishing a lottery to distribute the native land to the white miners, and forbidding Cherokees from claiming legal title to land or mining for gold. The Georgia legislature had endorsed a massive land grab… Jackson wasted no time affirming Georgia’s actions. He spent his first year as president, 1829, methodically laying the groundwork for what would eventually be called the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided for native lands in the southeastern states to be exchanged for lands in a new “Indian Territory” along the arid plains of Oklahoma.”
Buck writes: “U.S. Army troops and state militia forced between 80,000 and 100,000 members of the five tribes from their homes… Cholera, dysentery, and whooping cough raged through the flatboats and camping spots along the journey. Overall, among the five southwestern tribes, almost a quarter of the marchers, an estimated 16,000 to 24,000 people, died.”
Buck writes: “THE MOUTH OF THE OHIO at its confluence with the Mississippi, at Cairo, Illinois, is almost one mile wide. The merging of the rivers spreads a massive, triangular fan of rippling water and sandbars to the banks of three states—Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri… But the hydrological wonder at the confluence is deceptive. The riverway leading to the Mississippi is actually a narrow, man-made chute. More than 50 percent of America’s agricultural exports, corn, soybeans, and vegetable oils, and 35 percent of America’s basic industrial products, finished steel, scrap iron, crude oil, sand, and cement, passes through this space to reach the great global port one thousand miles downriver at New Orleans… More than 1,500 barges, often packaged in strings of forty-two or more, move south along the Mississippi during an average week, while more than a thousand mostly empty barges pass them going upriver… I was on the lower Mississippi now. There were no locks and dams for the next one thousand miles, and thus no lockmasters raising or lowering water levels after dark. The stronger, natural flow of the river took care of depths. The water below me would remain fairly consistent overnight… The local off-duty cops, of course, were appalled when they learned that I was traveling the river unarmed, doubly appalled when I… refused their offers of free guns.”
Buck writes: “if I ran aground on the sandbars, my trip would be over.
under regulations devoted to maintaining the commercial waterways, the U.S. Coast Guard would declare my boat a “hazard to navigation,” drag it away by salvage boat, and have it destroyed… But now that I had spent two months traveling more than a thousand miles of the Ohio and the Mississippi, I considered this information suspect. In fact, the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard are inept at policing America’s waterways and have never displayed much interest in maintaining either a safe or clean environment for boat traffic.”
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Jim
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent blend of personal adventure and history
Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2024
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One of the best books I have read in a very long time.
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Michelle West
5.0 out of 5 stars I LOVE THIS BOOK!
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2022
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I LOVED First Job & Flight of Passage and have been eagerly awaiting a new read from Rinker Buck. Life on the Mississippi was WELL WORTH the wait and well deserving of my anticipation. Mr. Buck's storytelling ability is so engaging and informative in a way that incites my curiosity while filling my mind with full color images and a sense of being there. Rinker Buck is like a blend of Mark Twain & Matthew Rhys. I find his sarcasm, old-world values, self-effacing and seemingly Cleaver-esque filter through which he processes the world enchanting. I wish I could meet him and tag along on his next adventure myself!
10/10 WOULD RECOMMEND.
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peter e.
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in Germany on March 1, 2024
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Brillant geschrieben, historisch recherchiert, zeitgenössisches Abenteuer
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