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Loading... Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild (2010)by Lee Sandlin
Lively! Brings out personalities and character of the river people. Loved Sandlin's use of the painted panorama as a central motif, and his focus on the American dialect of the day. (  ) Katong | Apr 14, 2013 |  This book was amazing! I really enjoyed it. (  ) mel_m | Apr 2, 2013 | A semi-chronological narrative of life along the Mississippi River, primarily before the Civil War, when the river valley was still part of the frontier. It was a dangerous place, both from nature (storms, earthquakes, the river itself) and from other humans (lots of drunkenness and piracy). Includes the origin of the term "lynching", which didn't always mean hanging. Found myself unreasonably amused by the fact that the voyageurs (boatmen, somewhat expendable) were known for their red shirts. Tidbits that I want to use for future D&D games: the Crow's Nest, an island of pirates in the middle of the river, which was destroyed by the New Madrid quakes; Natchez-Under-the-Hill, the sketchy/wild town down by the river, partially built into the bluffs, with the "respectable" town up above. Ends with Mark Twain's last visit to the river, when few boats traveled it, the traffic all having gone to rail, and when the course of the river itself was being tamed; in the epilogue, he revisits the "panorama" paintings that were all the rage in the early 19th century, and how the last one disappeared. (Fittingly, part of it may still be hidden under a wall somewhere in South Dakota.) Very engaging; probably wouldn't have read it if it hadn't been one of the few non-fiction books available in Overdrive, but glad I did anyway. ( ) epersonae | Mar 30, 2013 | A wild swirling ride of a book with back-eddies and quiet pools of history and thought bursting out again into the mayhems and disasters of this river, its peoples, histories and its traffic. Sandlin starts his wild river ride not at the true source, away up north in a quiet backwoods, but in his Illinois home-town standing over a storm drain that has become yet another tributary feeding ”Old Glory”. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) returned to his river, of his youth, Huck Finn and his glory days of being a Mississippi Pilot to find it … gone. Embanked, straightened, lit with beacons and lighthouses, flood-controlled and, the biggest shock, empty of boats, traffic and trade. From the first steamboat in 1811 to just 1830 the traffic doubled, tripled and doubled again – to over four thousands boats plying the writhing stream. Sandlin writes of the madness of the riverfolk, of a sort of continuous rage, induced by daily and regular intake of rye but stimulated too by poverty and unremitting hard work. Literally having to drag their boats back upstream against the roar of the flow, waist deep in chilling water and mud, full of rye and fever, they were mad. The confluence of the relatively clean Missouri with the “Old River” causes a spectacle as each river rejects the other for several miles, the two streams visibly separate, a phenomena written of by Melville, Lewis and Clarke to, more recently, Jonathan Raban (in Old Glory). And, of course, Sandlin who also adds the pirates, the gamblers, the slaves or that “piebald parliament an anacharsis cloots congress of that multiform pilgrim species man” as Melville put it! An exciting book then with aspects of history to interest, travel narratives to engage and wit to entertain. John_Vaughan | Aug 14, 2012 | Stories abound about the Mississippi River, and I've read several. This is by far one of my favorites. Lee Sandlin gives us a history of the River from the early 1800's up to the siege of Vicksburg in 1863. He focuses on some of the bigger events happening around the river, as well as focusing on the river itself before the attempts to "tame" it by the Army Corps of Engineers. It's amazing to realize how independently it flowed before then. (  )1  tloeffler | Jul 20, 2011 |
Mr. Sandlin begins, ingeniously, with a storm sewer in his own Illinois neighborhood, a tiny, filthy pre-tributary of that "industrial drainage system the length of a continent." We first see the expanse of the river valley through the author's childhood memories of speeding toward it in the family car, during a storm. But the book soon drifts into Mr. Sandlin's fascination: the great Mississippi River culture, as it grew from "somewhere in the 1810s until the Civil War," when "a new society had rapidly sprouted and come to a fantastic height" in the American interior. This was not the Mississippi that Twain knew best,
References to this work on external resources.
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