Wicked river : the Mississippi when it last ran wild
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- ISBN: 0307378519
- ISBN: 9780307378514
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Physical Description
print
xxviii, 270 pages : illustrations, maps - Edition 1st ed.
- Publisher New York : Pantheon Books, [2010]
- Copyright ©2010
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-255) and index. |
Immediate Source of Acquisition Note: | LSC 31.00 |
Additional Information
Wicked River : The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
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Summary
Wicked River : The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
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. Â 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. Â 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.