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 mus-cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a
writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.
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