Voyaging the Mississippi: How flatboats shaped American history

Within the early years of the nineteenth century, huge numbers of small picket boats plied the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Carrying items to market and settlers to the lands past the Appalachian Mountains, these vessels launched America’s western growth. The boats had been recognized by many names however, as a result of that they had a flat backside and a shallow draft, they had been generally referred to as “flatboats.” After the Civil Conflict and the speedy growth of railroads, they regularly disappeared.  

Rinker Buck, a journalist with a deep curiosity in historical past and a love of journey, turned fascinated by this little-remembered chapter of American historical past. He determined that the easiest way to grasp this period could be to construct a ship, rent a crew, and journey these legendary rivers himself. He paperwork the journey in “Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Journey.”

He engaged a small, household boatbuilding firm in Gallatin, Tennessee, to construct the vessel, which was not a precise duplicate of its forerunners. For starters, it had a motor. It additionally had trendy maps, GPS, a marine radio, a lighted magnetic compass, and an electrical bike for getting provides whereas docked. He named it Persistence and declared, “She was as sturdy as a Roman galleon and seemed as jaunty as a … monster truck.”  

Nevertheless, the journey didn’t begin effectively. He employed a semi-trailer to truck the Persistence to the launch website in Pennsylvania however the 550-mile-journey over interstate highways was “an epic fiasco.” The truck suffered a dozen blown-out tires alongside the way in which and Buck questioned if he ought to have named his flatboat Calamity.

Buck was effectively conscious that the journey could be harmful as a result of the river is extra treacherous at present than it was 200 years in the past. There are locks, dams, sandbars, cement revetments, rock jetties, and mountains of floating particles to keep away from. Submerged obstacles like boulders and logs might have simply ripped out the ship’s hull.   

Extra vital, because of navigational enhancements designed to facilitate barge visitors, the river present is far sooner at present than it was. On any given day alongside the decrease Mississippi, there are “at the very least 820 tugs pushing barges and the everyday fifteen-barge string weighs over twenty-two thousand tons, making it just about not possible for them to change course shortly,” he writes. And the final 50 miles of the Mississippi River earlier than New Orleans is “primarily a industrial sea-lane, congested with giant oceangoing vessels.” 

There was no scarcity of individuals telling him that he was nuts. His brothers tried to dissuade him, saying, “You’ll sink the boat within the first storm.” Throughout the journey, with the Persistence moored at docks close to cities, locals got here all the way down to see the boat. They had been appalled that the crew wasn’t carrying firearms. Buck writes, “Upriver, the [white] off-duty cops … implored us to get weapons as a result of the Blacks in Vicksburg and Baton Rouge had been going to pour over the banks to rob the boat. Downriver, the Black children had been satisfied that the rednecks had been going to get us. The race-blind resolution for all was the identical: America, Get Weapons.” 

As a substitute, the folks the crew met alongside the way in which had been overwhelmingly welcoming and wanting to be useful. In a time of intense political polarization, it’s uplifting to see so many who had been prepared to assist a contemporary pilgrim on his journey.  

In the end, the ebook is each a travelogue and an enticing historical past lesson about America’s westward growth after the Revolutionary Conflict. In fact, the historical past of antebellum America was additionally “profoundly tragic.” Buck recounts the central position the Mississippi River performed within the Path of Tears, which noticed the expulsion of an estimated 100,000 Native People from the Deep South. Later, he writes despairingly of the way in which flatboats had been used to maneuver at the very least a million enslaved folks from the tobacco fields of Virginia to cotton plantations within the Mississippi Valley beneath horrific circumstances. With out river transport, such huge motion of human beings wouldn’t have been doable.  

After 4 months and a pair of,000 miles, Buck navigated the jam-packed Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and reached his vacation spot, the place he felt “exhaustion, exhaustion, elation, elation.” He additionally reported being “simply possibly extra skilled, and somewhat useless about proving that I might deal with a ship.”

Buck factors out that he ought to have discounted the warnings of doom and trusted his personal instincts and abilities and people of his crew. And he was reminded as soon as once more that American historical past is a narrative of excellent and dangerous, inspiration and disgrace. He repeatedly talks concerning the want to take a look at all sides of the nation’s lengthy and sophisticated previous.    

It’s a mark of Buck’s means to put in writing engagingly of his journey that many readers will conclude {that a} journey down the Mississippi could be a romantic journey and a beautiful likelihood to study America’s historical past. However it’s equally the case that few, if any, of them will need to make the journey by flatboat.