Voices on the River, Walter Havighurst

Voices on the River, Walter Havighurst

This is a compendium of river history and stories that encompasses the Ohio, Missouri, and other tributaries as well as the Mississippi.  It includes the normal colorful characters like Samuel Clemens, Horace Bixby and Grant Marsh while showing us the tragedies and conflagrations of the steamboats and flatboats that traveled the wild river before dams, locks, lights, and dredging simplified the river travel.

“In a time long past an ocean gulf reached northward, between the Ozark Mountains and the highlands of Tennessee, narrowing to the river mouth near present day Cape Girardeau.  Here, in a grandeur that no eyes ever saw, the primordial Mississippi plunged 285 feet from its rock ledge to sea level.  And here began the ancient delta, by which the silt-laden river extended its course through land of its own making.”

To which the author adds – “Rivers are more alive than any other of earth’s features, except for the briefly violent volcano.  A river is always carving its channel and always depositing sediment along the way.”

The river is a who’s who of American history and this book does more than list the names and dates.  The author gives us the embodiment of the stories that surround the dates and names.  You can learn, for example, about the role of riverboats in General Grant’s battles and how they helped him with his first great victories, or the conflict at Vicksburg that had riverboats involved in both strategies with great losses to both armies.

The cities, forests, floods, earthquake, and civil unrest that is found throughout the nation’s history is found here in depth and we learn that the river is a microcosm of the expansion to the west.