Wicked River the Mississippi, Lee Sandlin

This is a wonderful account of the river before 1882 when engineers began to reshape the wild river into a shipping canal.  It is about steamboats, river pirates, keelboats, canoes and the wrecks, boiler explosions, and pageantry of the river. 

This begins before the St Anthony Falls were changed in to a steel apron and lock s and dams and recalls floods, fires, and collisions on the water that are dramatic and colorful.  The term wicked river came from the Voyageurs and continued in use throughout the wild days.

Of course wicked became associated with the river side “bad parts of town”  that served the constant flotillas of settlers and commercial boats as well as the growing brothels from New Orleans to floating hostels.

Famous names like Mark Twain, Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and Abraham Lincoln have their place in the river lore and Vicksburg is a key southern city that fell to a prolonged siege that helped finish the civil war.  You can learn about river pirates, notorious gangs of thieves and murderers and the wild tent city revivals that literally drew 10,000 people in to the woods along with brothel tents to help relieve the tension for the converting zealots.

Sandlin does good research and is a good writer – I liked this line in the introduction, “On the maps in my schoolbooks it seemed to cut through the who of the Midwest like the dark central vein in a leaf…”

I learned many new things like New Orleans desire to declare itself a neutral city to maintain its commerce during the civil war – that didn’t work.  How poor Admiral Farragut was (like so many of the original northern generals) and how he could have hastened the end of the war if he had done what his successor did. 

Learn about legends and fill out your river lore.  It was weak on the northern river and the Indian history, but otherwise it was an excellent book.  For an excerpt:  http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307378514&view=excerpt