Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild »

Lee Sandlin has been a regular contributor to the Chicago Reader. His essay “Losing the War” was included in the anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction. He lives in Chicago.

From award-winning journalist Lee Sandlin comes a riveting look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America’s historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the nineteenth century.
 
Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Wicked River takes us back to a time before the Mississippi was dredged into a shipping channel, and before Mark Twain romanticized it into myth. Drawing on an array of suspenseful and bizarre firsthand accounts, Sandlin brings to life a place where river pirates brushed elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries shared passage with thieves—a world unto itself where, every night, near the levees of the big river towns, hundreds of boats gathered to form dusk-to-dawn cities dedicated to music, drinking, and gambling. Here is a minute-by-minute account of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the St. Louis harbor being crushed by a massive ice floe; hidden, nefarious celebrations of Mardi Gras; and the sinking of the Sultana, the worst naval disaster in American history. Here, too, is the Mississippi itself: gorgeous, perilous, and unpredictable, lifeblood to the communities that rose and fell along its banks.
 
An exuberant work of Americana—at once history, culture, and geography—Wicked River is a grand epic that portrays a forgotten society on the edge of revolutionary change.

Library Journal

Quiet riverside towns and boys in straw hats lazily fishing as paddle steamers sail by are historical images associated with the Mississippi River, the most important river in the United States and central to the history of the nation and the mid- to late 19th-century writings of Mark Twain. In this engaging work, Sandlin, an essayist who has written frequently for the Chicago Reader, draws on the extensive body of folklore, essays, and legends from the early part of the century, before Twain's works, to re-create life on and along the river during a wilder time. Beginning in the earliest years of the 19th century, when native Americans ruled the river and white settlements were few and far between, he takes the reader down the river, culminating with Twain's late 19th-century journey on a steamboat, when such vessels were no longer common and a boat sailing was "as safe on the river as she'd been in heaven." VERDICT This engaging narrative of lyrical tales will entertain most readers, especially those interested in American studies or wishing to learn more of the history and folklore of this important river. Regional libraries must acquire.—Theresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.