A fascinating account of how the Mississippi River shaped America In Old Man River , Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history―the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 16th century to the Civil War. George Washington fought his first battle near the river, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their spectacular victories on the lower Mississippi. In the 19th century, home-grown folk heroes such as Daniel Boone and the half-alligator, half-horse, Mike Fink, were creatures of the river. Mark Twain and Herman Melville led their characters down its stream in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Confidence-Man . A conduit of real-life American prowess, the Mississippi is also a river of stories and myth. Schneider traces the history of the Mississippi from its origins in the deep geologic past to the present. Though the busiest waterway on the planet today, the Mississippi remains a paradox―a devastated product of American ingenuity, and a magnificent natural wonder. Nonfiction lovers with eclectic tastes and readers bored by a single-discipline approach will love Schneider’s multiple-angle portrait of the Mississippi watershed. The territory Schneider studies is what some dismiss as flyover country, but what fascinating stories flyover country has to tell! The journey begins with geology and anthropology, exploring how the rivers that drain this huge watershed developed and what we know of the area’s earliest civilizations. Schneider narrates the first European ventures into the watershed, and the roles of the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans—as well as Native Americans, particularly the Iroquois, with whom colonizers sometimes partnered and sometimes battled—in this new land. Key Civil War operations to control the Mississippi are vividly portrayed; the book’s final section examines technology: steamboats, bridges, railroads, and, ultimately, efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers to tame the ­river, which killed so many in its 1920s floods. Throughout, there are bits of memoir, as Schneider sets out on one of the watershed’s rivers by kayak or motorboat. Appropriate for most libraries. --Mary Carroll “[A] vivid history.” ― The New Yorker “In fabulous yarn-spinning sentences, [Schneider] whirs through the geologic eras in which the river was formed…A fabulous romp…Schneider is a marvelously personable tour guide…Schneider has a real knack for capturing life on the river.” ― Barnes and Noble Review “Schneider's book stands out… It's another reminder of how we took the river's heritage for granted for far too long, and why it's worth scrambling today to reclaim and maintain as much of it as we can.” ― Minneapolis Star Tribune “Paul Schneider recounts history as a novelist might. Once you start one of his books, you find yourself unable to put it down. As I read his story of the Mississippi, I feel like I am revisiting early America on board a raft with Huck and Tom and runaway Jim. I think Mark Twain would be one of the first to congratulate Mr. Schneider on his splendid new book.” ― James Lee Burke “I have heard and sung the painful ballad ‘Old Man River,' since my childhood in the 40's, but it was only when I read Paul Schneider's Old Man River , I took a deeper look at the Mississippi River and truly understood with greater clarity how, as the author puts it, ‘the river's history is our history.' Travelling with Paul Schneider's words and heart is an eye-opening adventure well worth taking.” ― Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “A terrific, wonderfully written account of the river, the peoples past and present who lived there, what they loved and what they loathed (often foreigners), how they lived and died and explored and ought in the Old Man's shadow. His tale unfolds from the beginning of north American time and it's the best detective story you'll read this year.” ― Ward Just, author of An Unfinished Season and Exiles in the Garden “A fascinating and passionate profile of the river that shaped American history and culture.” ― Rosemary Mahoney, author of Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff “Vividly peopled and comprehensively marshaled, this account makes a fine and flowing read, summarizing the ineffable.” ― Edward Hoagland, author of Notes from the Century Before and Sex and the River Styx “Paul Schneider takes us on a hugely entertaining journey along one of the world's greatest waterways. It is a pageant of astounding color and variety, sweeping from mammoths, mastodons and paleo-Indians to the British Petroleum disaster, and from Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian city in America, to f