Summary of Life on the Mississippi

DISCLAIMER: This is not a replacement of the book 'Life on the Mississippi' by Rinker Buck, nor is it endorsed by the author. It is rather a brief, yet contextual summary of the contents of the book in details by independent publisher Jordan C. Moore. ABOUT THE ORIGINAL BOOK Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about...
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DISCLAIMER:


This is not a replacement of the book 'Life on the Mississippi' by Rinker Buck, nor is it endorsed by the author. It is rather a brief, yet contextual summary of the contents of the book in details by independent publisher Jordan C. Moore.



ABOUT THE ORIGINAL BOOK



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 record his newest extraordinary adventure: constructing a wooden flatboat from the bygone period of the early 1800s and sailing down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.


A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck takes out down the river in the flatboat Patience followed by an oddball band of brave shipmates. Over the course of his expedition, Buck maneuvers his frail wooden ship through tight canals occupied by enormous freight barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, fractures his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, lonely islands, and high levees. As he traces his personal path, he also creates a deeply gratifying work of history that brings to life a forgotten age.


The importance of the flatboat in our country's growth is significantly more crucial than most Americans understand. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, businessmen, and adolescent explorers sailed from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats going beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Settler families recycled the wood from their boats to construct their first cottages in the wilderness; freight vessels were broken up and sold to create the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river trade were floating brothels, termed "gun boats"; "smithy boats" for blacksmiths; even "whiskey boats" for booze. In the current day, America's interior waterways are a superhighway ruled by leviathan barges--carrying $80 billion of freight annually--all derived from flatboats like the rickety Patience.


As a historian, Buck resurrects the era's daring spirit, but he also questions popular clichés about American expansion, addressing the deadly realities behind settlers' desire for land and money. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 ordered more than 125,000 people of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and numerous other tribes to sail the Mississippi on a terrible voyage en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, approximately a million enslaved African Americans were hauled in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles through the Appalachians to the cotton and cane plantations of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, spawning the expression "sold down the river." Buck recounts this watershed moment of American growth as it was truly lived.


With an unique narrative strength that mixes exciting adventure with captivating unwritten history, Life on the Mississippi is a muscular and magnificent achievement of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.