Book Recommender: 'Life on the Mississippi,' an Epic Travelogue of History, Adventure, and IntrospectionRinker Buck is a newspaperman. His hobby is visiting the past. But since he lacks a time machine, he tries to relive past eras in the present.
"Life on the Mississippi" documents his latest adventure. This time, he travels by flatboat down the Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. Along the way, he learns about America in the late 18th, early 19th, and early 21st centuries.
Rivermen rafted the route from the 1780s through the beginning of the Civil War. Although the steamboat began supplanting flatboats in the 1830s, flatboats remained important through the 1850s. Buck shows that settlers traveling trans-Appalachian America east of the Mississippi did not rely solely on Conestoga wagons. Settlers used flatboats to move west and built homes along the rivers and creeks of the Mississippi River basin....
Source: Book Recommender: 'Life on the Mississippi,' an Epic Travelogue of History, Adventure, and Introspection (https://www.theepochtimes.com/book-recommender-life-on-the-mississippi-an-epic-travelogue-of-history-adventure-and-introspection_4925994.html)