Rinker Buck Journeys Down the Mississippi River

Rinker Buck

Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era.

The role of the flatboat in our country’s evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats headed beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Like the Nile, the Thames, or the Seine before them, the western rivers in America became a floating supply chain that fueled national growth. Settler families repurposed the wood from their boats to build their first cabins in the wilderness; cargo boats were broken apart and sold to build the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called “gun boats”; “smithy boats” for blacksmiths; even “whiskey boats” with taverns mounted on jaunty rafts. In the present day, America’s inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan barges—carrying $80 billion of cargo annually—all descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience, which must avoid being crushed alongside their metal hulls.

As a historian, Buck resurrects the era’s adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers’ push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term “sold down the river.” Weaving together a tapestry of first-person histories, Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived.

With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a mus­cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.

Here is a video of his journey on The Oregon Trail

Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his stories have won the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He is the author of The Oregon Trail as well as the acclaimed memoirs Flight of Passage and First Job. He lives in northwest Connecticut.



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The Great Manuscripts On A Typewriter!

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief for Southern Writers Magazine 

If you write your stories using your computer then you will appreciate not having to use a typewriter. As a young girl, my grandfather had a manual typewriter in his office and I can remember him putting the paper in, turning a knob until the edge of the paper would show just enough that a bar would come over the paper and hold it down. Then he would hit each key to make words. When he let me, I would try to hit the keys but being a little girl, it took a lot of effort to hit the key hard enough to make a letter.

Though through the years the manual typewriter gave way to the invention of a motorized typewriter, and it became easier to hit the keys. I for one am glad they finally invented the computer key board we use for our writing today.

Did you know one of the early users of the typewriter was Mark Twain? I believe it said he started writing on a machine in 1876. I can’t imagine what that must have been like when comparing it to the manual my grandfather had in the late 40’s. You can go to http://mentalfloss.com/article/80104/19-authors-and-their-typewriterspub and read the letter he wrote to his publisher. He claimed he wrote his manuscript for Tom Sawyer on a typewriter.

Some historians think that his book Life on the Mississippi, published in 1882, was the first manuscript submitted to a publisher in typed form. Let’s face it, he is the only one who really knows.

There were other writers who came along who wrote their stories on a typewriter such as: L. Frank Baum,  author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; Ernest Hemingway, author of A Farewell To Arms; Orson Welles, author of Citizen Kane to name a few. If you recall, these books contain many pages–can you imagine the length of the manuscripts?

For writers today, we have our computers to use. These keys are so much smoother and easier than the old typewriters these authors used. I thought it only fitting to bring this up to remind us all that we are very fortunate in having an apparatus to use for our writing that is so easy compared to the machines these authors had to use. Can you imagine the manuscripts they might have written if they had had the computer plus google?

I think sometimes we forget how good we have it. So, the next time you sit down at your computer to write, give it a little pat, say a thank goodness, and begin your manuscript.