The role of the flatboat in our country's evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Buck chronicles his adventure building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He cast off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, steering a fragile wooden craft through narrow channels...

"Life on the Mississippi is a powerful narrative concerning the past, present, and future of the Mississippi River, including its towns, peoples, and ways of life. Before addressing the river and his personal relationship to it, Twain provides a brief history of the Mississippi River. He comments in the first few chapters on the river's historic standing as a wonder that surpasses many rivers around the world. Twain also provides a history of explorers...

Chafed by the "sivilized" restrictions of his foster home, and weary of his drunkard father's brutality, Huck Finn fakes his own death and sets off on a raft down the Mississippi River. He is soon joined by Jim, an escaped slave. Together, they experience a series of rollicking adventures that have amused readers, young and old, for over a century.
The fugitives become close friends as they weather storms together aboard the raft and spend idyllic

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A fascinating account of how the Mississippi River shaped America.

Tells the story of Magnolia Ravenal and of her marriage to the river gambler, Gaylord Ravenal, black sheep son of an aristocratic family. It is also the story of their daughter Kim, who became a famous Broadway actress.

In 1857, while helping to conceal a runaway slave on her father's Mississippi River steamboat, twelve-year-old Libby looks to God for support and hopes that her friend Caleb will let her join the Underground Railroad.

Life hasn't been easy for Jeanne Bettencourt, a widow approaching thirty and struggling to provide for her eight-year-old daughter. But hope arrives in the form of the Helena Rose, a steamboat she unexpectedly inherits from a distant relative. Jeanne looks forward to a renewed livelihood on the mighty Mississippi, until news comes of another heir, a tough man named Clint Hardin--and a clause in the will that says claimants of the estate must live...

"The year is 1927. Rains swell the mighty Mississippi which threatens to burst its banks and engulf everything in its path. When federal revenue agent Ted Ingersoll and his partner arrive in the town of Hobnob to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents, they find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene. Ingersoll, an orphan raised by nuns, is determined to find the child a home and his search leads to bootlegger Dixie Clay Holliver....