The Mobile River presents the first-ever narrative history of this
important American watercourse. Inspired by the venerable Rivers of
America series, John S. Sledge weaves chronological and thematic
elements with personal experiences and more than sixty color and
black-and-white images for a rich and rewarding read. The Mobile
River appears on the map full and wide at Nannahubba, fifty miles
from the coast, where the Alabama and the Tombigbee rivers meet,
but because it empties their waters into Mobile Bay and
subsequently the Gulf of Mexico, it usurps them and their
multitudinous tributaries. If all of the rivers, creeks, streams,
bayous, bogues, branches, swamps, sloughs, rivulets, and trickles
that ultimately pour into Mobile Bay are factored into the
equation, the Mobile assumes awesome importance and becomes the
outlet for the sixth largest river basin in the United States and
the largest emptying into the Gulf east of the Mississippi River.
Previous historians have paid copious attention to the other rivers
that make up the Mobile's basin, but the namesake stream along with
its majestic delta and beautiful bay have been strangely neglected.
In an attempt to redress the imbalance, Sledge launches this book
with a first-person river tour by "haul-ass boat." Along the way he
highlights the four diverse personalities of this short
stream-upland hardwood forest, upper swamp, lower swamp, and
harbor. In the historical saga that follows, readers learn about
colonial forts, international treaties, bloody massacres, and
thundering naval battles, as well as what the Mobile River's
inhabitants ate and how they dressed through time. A barge load of
colorful characters is introduced, including Indian warriors,
French diplomats, British cartographers, Spanish tavern keepers,
Creole women, steamboat captains, African slaves, Civil War
generals and admirals, Apache prisoners, hydraulic engineers,
stevedores, banana importers, Rosie Riveters, and even a few river
rats subsisting off the grid-all of them actors in a uniquely
American pageant of conflict, struggle, and endless opportunity
along a river that gave a city its name.
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