BiblioVault - Books about River life

Before Mark Twain: A Sampler of Old, Old Times on the Mississippi
Edited by John Francis McDermott
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998
Library of Congress F351.B44 1998 | Dewey Decimal 977

Dreaming the Mississippi
Katherine Fischer
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Library of Congress F355.F55 2006 | Dewey Decimal 977

Offering a fresh perspective on the river’s environment, industry, and recreation, Dreaming the Mississippi challenges old stereotypes through the experiences of modern Americans who work the barges, rope-swing into muddy bottoms, struggle against hurricane floodwaters, and otherwise find new meaning on this great watery corridor. In an engaging voice, earnest and energetic, Katherine Fischer describes how the river’s natural and human histories overlap and interweave as she tells of her own gradual immersion in its life—which led her to buy a house so close to its banks that each spring she must open her basement doors to accept its inevitable floods.

Fischer blends stories of people living along the river with accounts of national and global consequence. She weaves humorous accounts of river rats and towboat pilots with stories of sandbagging against a flood tide that refuses to be contained. She tells of river hangouts—“joints” that literally join segments of humanity along the river—as she revels in the colorful clientele of her favorite waterfront taverns. Some chapters connect the wildness of this mythical river to outside regions such as the Great Salt Lake and Florida, taking the lure of the mighty Mississippi as far as Japan. Another chapter, about the river’s mouth, “Gulf,” considers the gulf between engineers and naturalists—and between America’s haves and have-nots—as it offers heartfelt reflections on Katrina’s wrath.

Through compelling words and photographs, Dreaming the Mississippi invites readers to taste life on today’s Mississippi, as sweet, tangy, and wildly cantankerous as it gets. In conveying her understanding of contemporary life along the river’s length, Katherine Fischer has much to teach us not only about reverence for this glorious American waterway but also about our eternal connections to the natural world.

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Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863
George Byron Merrick
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Oneota Flow: The Upper Iowa River and Its People
David S. Faldet
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Library of Congress F612.U77F35 2009 | Dewey Decimal 977.76

Whether profiling the chief of the last hunter-gatherers on the river, an early settler witnessing her first prairie fire and a modern wildlife biologist using fire to manage prairies, the manager of the Granger Farmer’s Co-op Creamery, or a landowner whose bottomlands are continually eaten away by floods, Faldet steadily develops the central idea that people are walking tributaries of the river basin in which they make their homes.

Faldet moves through the history of life along the now-polluted Upper Iowa, always focusing on the ways people depend on the river, the environment, and the resources of the region. He blends contemporary conversations, readings from the historical record, environmental research, and personal experience to show us that the health of the river is best guaranteed by maintaining the biological communities that nurture it. In return, taking care of the Upper Iowa is the best way to take care of our future.

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The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock
Otto A. Rothert. Foreword by Robert Clark
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
Library of Congress F549.C37R8 1996 | Dewey Decimal 977.398

Exceptionally rare and valued by book collectors, Otto A. Rothert’s riveting saga of the outlaws and scoundrels of Cave-in-Rock chronicles the adventures of an audacious cast of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in and around the famous Ohio River cavern from 1795 through 1820 (adventures featured in Disney’s Davy Crockett and the film How the West Was Won). Once sporting the enticing sign "Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment," this beautiful cavern location decoyed the unsuspecting by offering a venue for food, drink, and rest.

Compellingly lively, The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock is nonetheless the work of a scholar, a historian who documents his findings and leaves a detailed bibliographical trail. Presenting many eyewitness accounts, Rothert supplies the lore and legend of the colorful villains of Cave-in-Rock. Always maintaining the difference between stories he tells with historical authority and those that are pure speculation, Rothert provides both a fascinating narrative and a valuable regional history.

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Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama
Harvey H. Jackson
University of Alabama Press, 1995
Library of Congress F332.A17J33 1995 | Dewey Decimal 976.15

The story of the people of the Alabama River system

Four streams make up the Alabama River system, the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Together they flow for more than 900 miles, through some of the most historic regions of the state. This book looks at the way these streams have shaped the lives of the people who lived along them, and how, in turn, people have used the rivers to their own ends.

This is the story of the people of the Alabama River system: the Indians, traders, steamboatmen, passengers, slaves, loggers, "deadheaders", divers, river rats, fishermen, industrial giants, factory workers, business boosters, environmentalists, and those who simply love the rivers because of something that seems to have been a part of them from the first time they saw the water flowing. This is a book for and about these people. They, and the rivers, are the main characters in the story.

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Stepping Twice Into the River: Following Dakota Waters
Robert King
University Press of Colorado, 2005
Library of Congress F642.S53K56 2005 | Dewey Decimal 978.476

What happens when an English professor takes a year off to explore a tiny prairie creek? Between mishaps with the canoe, long walks to the sites of Cheyenne villages and cavalry trenches, and gallons of coffee with isolated farmers, what happens is insight. In Stepping Twice Into the River, Robert King recounts his exploration of the "almost unnoticeable" along North Dakota's Sheyenne River, from its headwaters to river's end. With each experience along the way - tracing a military campaign, canoeing the river, visiting a ghost town and even trying to sleep in an ancient Cheyenne village - King examines a different aspect of the plains: Native American culture, pioneer society, religion, war, agriculture, and nature.

Blending travel narrative and poetic reflection, Stepping Twice Into the River takes readers on a journey through time, revealing both stability and change and offering prairie wisdom. An affectionate and shrewd observer, King illuminates the ordinary from the perspectives of history, science, and literature. In the hands of this gifted thinker and writer, local facts yield universal metaphor.

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Up on the River: People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi
Madson, John
University of Iowa Press, 1985
Library of Congress QH104.5.M5M33 2011 | Dewey Decimal 508.77

Up on the River is John Madson’s loving and often hilarious tribute to the people, animal life, and places of the Upper Mississippi. Madson’s Upper Mississippi is the part “between the saints,” from St. Louis to St. Paul, and where for thirty years he explored the bright waters of the upper reaches of the mighty river itself as well as the tangled multitude of sloughs, cuts, and side channels that wander through its wooded islands and floodplain forests.

“Some of my best time on the River has been in the company of game wardens, biologists, commercial fishermen, clammers, trappers, hunters, and a smelly, mud-smeared coterie of river rats in general, and my views of the River are far more likely to reflect theirs than those of the transportation industry,” Madson writes of his thirty-year acquaintance with the Mississippi. Traveling mainly by canoe and johnboat, he tells of encounters between archetypal commercial fishermen and archetypal game wardens over hot fish chowder, fishing for crappies in the tops of submerged trees and for walleyes amid gale force winds, nesting and migrating herons and ducks and eagles, the histories of river logging and pearling and button making, and towboats and barges and the lives of the “ramstugenous” people who move freight on the river.

Learning about the Upper Mississippi via the wry tutelage of John Madson, who discovered that “whenever I am out on a river some of its freeness rubs off on me,” readers of this classic book will also come under the spell of this freeness.

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Upriver Journeys: Diaspora and Empire in Southern China, 1570–1850
Steven B. Miles
Harvard University Press
Library of Congress HB2114.X5M55 2017 | Dewey Decimal 305.906910951271

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, this book describes the circulation of people through one of the world’s great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Steven B. Miles examines the relationship between diaspora and empire in an upriver frontier, and the role of migration in sustaining families and lineages in the homeland of what would become a global diaspora. Based on archival research and multisite fieldwork, this innovative history of mobility explores a set of diasporic practices ranging from the manipulation of household registration requirements to the maintenance of split families.

Many of the institutions and practices that facilitated overseas migration were not adaptations of tradition to transnational modernity; rather, they emerged in the early modern era within the context of riverine migration. Likewise, the extension and consolidation of empire required not only unidirectional frontier settlement and sedentarization of indigenous populations. It was also responsible for the regular circulation between homeland and frontier of people who drove imperial expansion—even while turning imperial aims toward their own purposes of socioeconomic advancement.

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The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition
Kenneth Grahame
Harvard University Press, 2009
Library of Congress PR4726.W515 2009b | Dewey Decimal 821.8

Begun as a series of stories told by Kenneth Grahame to his six-year-old son, The Wind in the Willows has become one of the most beloved works of children’s literature ever written. Now, in Seth Lerer's annotated edition, readers can enjoy a larger appreciation of the novel’s charms and serene narrative magic. Anyone who has read and loved The Wind in the Willows will want to own and cherish this beautiful gift edition. Those coming to the novel for the first time, or returning to it with their own children, will not find a better, more sensitive guide than Seth Lerer.

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Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River
Bonnie Stepenoff
University of Missouri Press, 2015
Library of Congress F351 | Dewey Decimal 977

The Mississippi River occupies a sacred place in American culture and mythology. Often called The Father of Rivers, it winds through American life in equal measure as a symbol and as a topographic feature. To the people who know it best, the river is life and a livelihood. River boatmen working the wide Mississippi are never far from land. Even in the dark, they can smell plants and animals and hear people on the banks and wharves.

Bonnie Stepenoff takes readers on a cruise through history, showing how workers from St. Louis to Memphis changed the river and were in turn changed by it. Each chapter of this fast-moving narrative focuses on representative workers: captains and pilots, gamblers and musicians, cooks and craftsmen. Readers will find workers who are themselves part of the country’s mythology from Mark Twain and anti-slavery crusader William Wells Brown to musicians Fate Marable and Louis Armstrong.

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