Print edition: 
Lee Sandlin’s hugely engaging story of the Mississippi River culture (geography, anthropology, sociology and even geology) begins in the early 1800s and ends on that fateful day when more than 2,000 Union war veterans, most of them returning prisoners of war, died in the explosion and wreck of the steamboat Sultana in April 1865, just along the Arkansas shore nine miles south of Memphis.
The author, an essayist and historian from Chicago, paints a vivid, almost mesmerizing picture of life on the river, a river which, before being channelized by the government and business, was truly wicked.
The Mississippi River Valley in the early years of the 19th century was a wild place, with no roads and few trails. “In hydrological terms,” Sandlin explains, “the Mississippi was something of a freak.” In the north it was a country of boundless prairies. The river was full of drowned, floating or hidden trees (sawyers, floaters, snags). Its currents and shallows were tricky. Along its path were cutoffs, meanders, oxbows, swamps and sloughs, all inhabited by thousands of species of wildlife. South, the forest was impenetrable and dangerous, trackless in every sense.
Despite its remoteness and danger, every season (June to December), thousands of voyagers took to the river (“He’s gone to the river,” they’d say), some in keel boats, barges or barques, others in pirogues, canoes or even homemade rafts. After 1820, steamboats came to the fore and by 1850 some 4,000 plied their trade. Every year steamboat accidents killed thousands — boilers exploded while overloaded boats capsized.
River traders hauled everything: whiskey and wine, nails, corn, sugar, coarse cloth for sale to villagers, newspapers and gazettes, patent medicines, knife sharpeners, and hats. Floating greenhouses offered exotic plants and photographers offered formal daguerreotypes. Brothels went down the river as did gambling boats, circuses and burlesque shows. Quacks of all sorts, homeopaths, vitopaths, mesmerists and milk-sick doctors, all floated by at one time or another.
The river, though, didn’t care. It killed them in droves, drowned them, stranded them on shifting sand bars, buried them in quicksand, got them into drunken arguments and managed to kill them with yellow fever, cholera, measles and malaria. It snagged them on sunken trees, whirled them into pools from which they never emerged. In 1811 a huge earthquake knocked down the riverbanks for hundreds of miles and later that decade a huge tornado flattened the forest along a hundred-mile swath of territory in Illinois.
Fires raged through the shanty towns along the river and in 1845 St. Louis almost burned to the ground, thus prompting the forming of the first fire department in that part of the world. One year a comet appeared and scared everybody to death. The river valley was famous for its “camp meetings,” religious gatherings of thousands which often turned into drunken orgies.
“Wicked River” is a vastly entertaining social drama. Within its pages are vigilance committees, the history of the duel, Mike Fink stories, lynchings, and of course, drinking. Never in American history had so many people drunk so much alcohol. They drank all day, starting in the morning. According to traveler’s accounts they drank mint juleps, spiked eggnog, rum punch with milk and nutmeg, sherry cobbler made with lemon, strawberries and sugar, gin sling with rum, brandy cocktail with bitters and lemon, and a drink made of brandy and ice called a brandy mash. Some voyagers had only Monongahela rye, distilled in Pennsylvania and brought down the Ohio to be distributed throughout the Mississippi Valley.
With drinking came violence — fights, battles, riots and domestic battery on a scale unequaled before or after. Elections were the clarion call to street battles galore. Sandlin’s wonderful book describes New Orleans and Vicksburg with their aristocratic upper towns on bluffs above the river, and their low-down river communities full of gamblers, thieves and prostitutes. It tells of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the St. Louis harbor crushed by a huge ice floe during the horrid winter of 1856; and, of course, the long siege of Vicksburg in 1863. This rollicking tale also has its characters — Mark Twain of course, but diarist Timothy Flint, slave-inciter John Murrell, and, lastly, James B. Eads, who had some of the first ideas about “taming” the river.
“Wicked River” is pre-capitalist, pre-money America, dressed up in homespun. It is a delightfully well-written and unpretentious popular history.
