num_pages: 304
description: From award-winning journalist Lee Sandlin comes a riveting look at one of the most colorful dangerous and peculiar places in Americas 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 thievesa 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 Americanaat once history culture and geographyWicked River is a grand epic that portrays a forgotten society on the edge of revolutionary change.
language: English
title: Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
publisher: Pantheon