Life on the Mississippi Audiobook Libro.fm

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AudaciousLife on the Mississippi sparkles The Wall Street Journal A rich mix of history reporting and personal introspection St Louis PostDispatch Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about Americas 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 Americas 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 modernday 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 countrys 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 Americas inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan bargescarrying 80 billion of cargo annuallyall descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience

As a historian Buck resurrects the eras 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 125000 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 1000 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 muscular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain