by Rinker Buck
First published 2022
Rinker Buck constructs a wooden flatboat called Patience and embarks on a journey down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. His eccentric crew navigates narrow channels crowded with massive cargo barges, rescues a mate who falls overboard, and sails through blinding fog. Buck breaks his ribs twice during the voyage and camps nightly on sandbars and remote islands. While chronicling his adventure, Buck explores the forgotten flatboat era of the early 1800s when millions of farmers, merchants, and young adventurers traveled beyond the Appalachians to settle Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The river carried not just settlers but floating brothels, blacksmith shops, and whiskey boats. Buck confronts the darker truths of westward expansion, including the forced removal of 125,000 Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribal members and the transport of nearly a million enslaved African Americans to Southern plantations. His modern voyage illuminates how America's first western frontier shaped the nation.
Genres: history, 20th-century, american, adventure, biography-memoir, 21st-century, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, journey
Setting: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Orleans
Period: Early 1800s
416 pages · Hardcover · Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: colonialism, racism, slavery