Review: Adventurer re-creates era of flatboat travel on Mississippi | Book reviews

T.S. Eliot called it a “strong brown god.” More prosaically, the Post-Dispatch’s Marquis Childs, in a 1982 “biography” of the river, described it as a “free highway.”

For writer/historian/adventurer Rinker Buck, the river, and its biggest tributary, the Ohio River, are those things. But in his new book, “Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure,” one senses a personal mission — to just get away, to do something exciting. Buck quotes admiringly from an early 19th-century account of how river travelers “experienced that expansion of mind that cannot fail to be produced by traversing long distances of country, and viewing different forms of nature and society.”

Many Mississippi River journeys have made it to print. “Mississippi Solo” (1988) by Eddy Harris, formerly of Kirkwood, is at the high end of that genre. But Buck’s, a rich mix of history, reporting and personal introspection, may be the first about a flatboat trip. Flatboats, Rinker writes, dominated river commerce from the early 19th century before steam travel took over in the 1830s and 1840s.

Buck’s last book, “The Oregon Trail” (2015), had him and his brother following the trail of what is popularly considered this country’s preeminent western movement. But Buck says the inland rivers — not the wagon ruts crossing from Missouri to Oregon — were America’s first western frontier.

This country’s citizen-farmers, Buck writes, “built America with logs.”

“First the logs were flatboats descending the Ohio, then they were converted into crude shacks on the frontier. If there was flatboat lumber after that, it was used to build furniture and simple barns.”

Buck, now 71, had his flatboat constructed several years ago on a Tennessee farm, dubbed it Patience, and dropped it in the Monongahela River above Pittsburgh. He floated for 2,000 miles to New Orleans over four months. Although original flatboats had oars, Patience was mostly powered by a motor.

Patience had a crew of three or four, or none, as people left for a while and rejoined later on. One crew member, who Buck felt took his status as a re-enactor too seriously, was evicted and sent home to St. Louis.

One senses that the Ohio segment of the trip was the most enjoyable and interesting. A series of dams slows down the river, and there is little riprap on the shores to block the view from the river. While negotiating the locks is challenging, the accessibility to small towns and marinas is something the Mississippi lacked.

“The Ohio,” Buck writes, “was a float through competing American spaces. The deep quiet and scenic contentment of endless conservation forests, with nothing in sight beyond the occasional osprey diving for fish … would suddenly be ended by the wail of motorboat engines, island drinking melees. … The Ohio River is a vast conservation space periodically interrupted by party venues.”

Joining the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, feels like the entry ramp to an interstate highway. While Buck found that the warnings that he’d heard about the Mississippi — that he would be crushed by barges, sucked into a whirlpool or run permanently aground — were unfounded, it did require constant vigilance. The neighborliness of tugboat captains helped too. (If Buck could have added a chapter, I would have enjoyed his conversation with someone who worked the river daily.)

Buck skips over nearly 500 miles of the Lower Mississippi — from near Caruthersville, Missouri, to Natchez, Mississippi. There he breaks the narrative to examine that city’s role in American history. Boasting one of the country’s finest mansion districts, built by cotton barons, it was also a center for slave trading, second only to New Orleans. Flatboats were used to transport thousands of enslaved people from Virginia and Maryland to work at the cotton and sugar plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana.

When Buck rode his electric bike out to the site of the slave market, there was nothing there.

He writes, “Only words can describe what the place once meant.”

While Buck borrows his title from Mark Twain’s 1883 classic, there is only passing mention of him in “Life.” Buck relies more on earlier flatboaters like Harlan Hubbard and Timothy Flint to drive his imagination. (Buck’s acknowledgements section is indeed a pleasure.)

I do, however, see Buck at the helm of the Patience when I read Twain’s description of a riverboat captain: “A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on the earth.”

Tim Bross is a retired Post-Dispatch editor. He lives in Kirkwood.