Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck This is the tale of a journalist who fulfilled a lifelong dream by taking a flatboat from Elizabeth, PA, to New Orleans. While most of the journey was on the Mississippi River, Buck and his crew also navigated the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers to get to the Mighty Mississippi. The river was central to the development of the United States, with thousands of forty-foot flatboats carrying millions of tons of cargo down the river to various ports in the early nineteenth century. Today, big flatboats and other vessels carry billions of dollars’ worth of goods to ports along the river. Besides boosting commerce, river travel helped define Americans as a migratory people who looked forward to exploring and settling new places. The Mississippi also was the conduit for Andrew Jackson’s removal of Indians from the Southeast to Oklahoma and for transporting slaves throughout the South.
The river provided many entrepreneurs with their chance to succeed in business. Clever fellows figured out that they could make money buying meat and other farm produce from the Upper Mississippi and moving it southwards to ports where people would pay dearly for the products. Boats were easy and inexpensive to build and so the trade market was open to many people. Usually the boatman would sell his flatboat at his last stop and go home and build another one for the next venture. This was the ultimate in 19th century recycling.
River commerce fueled the development of the young nation which saw the population increase from 4 million to 32 million people in the eighty years between the founding of the country and the Civil War. There were more navigable rivers than roads in the young country so water transport was a key to westward migration and commerce.
Rinker Buck was planning his voyage when he got a call from his sister asking him to come to Damariscotta, Maine, to watch over his elderly mother. She was recovering from a minor stroke. He saw this as an opportunity to do his research. Buck spent his time reading books and going to local libraries to boost his flatboat IQ. He found a lot of doctoral dissertations on the subject as well as many helpful books.
A friend recommended a Tennessee boat builder that Rinker hired to help build the flatboat. Builder John Cooper was a retired NASA engineer who liked vessels that went into space and floated on water. Buck assembled a crew of friends and referrals. The first mate was old friend Danny Corjulo, a loose cannon who was good at doing a lot of different things ranging from computers to carpentry.
The author ended up spending more time in Maine than he had planned, so John Cooper started building the boat. Buck wanted it to be an authentic replica. Engineer Cooper assured his client that if the boat were to have any chance of going down the Mississippi, it would need a lot of modern equipment, although the basic design was unchanged since the early 1800s.
Buck went to Cooper’s boatyard in Gallatin, Tennessee, to “supervise” construction. Of course, being a journalist for your entire life does not prepare one for boat building. Cooper went along with some of Buck’s ideas but most were just silly. The job was finally done and the 16,000-pound boat - christened Patience - was shipped to Elizabeth, PA, on the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh. The trip was a fiasco. John Cooper’s rig was too small for the Patience. It was way too heavy. There were eight tire blowouts along the way, but they got there.
Several other crew members were hired, including a mix of Yankee liberals and Southern conservatives. Builder Cooper would be on the boat for the first two weeks to make sure everything was working. He brought along a friend, Scott Mandrell, who had some experience with floating down the river, and wanted to be on the adventure. The crew members were all over the ideological spectrum but they were all high-powered self-starters. Some dressed in period or pirate costumes and really got into their roles. Buck’s research had taught him that nineteenth century crew members were “a foul-mouthed, rough set of bullies and braggarts” which seemed to describe his mates. Historians maintain that the river attracted men, including ex-convicts, who needed to have some of their sharper edges smoothed, something the river was very good at doing.
In the 1800s, there were few locks to equalize water level so travel was much slower. Today, there are locks that make it possible to navigate through different water levels so trips are faster.Another change is that rivers are much more polluted and fouled with debris than they were back when Huck Finn did his thing. Over the past few decades, rivers have been cleaned up, but they’re still a mess.
The boat did well in its shakedown cruise but there was no compass. Most people just use GPS to navigate, but Rinker Buck wanted to be authentic so he wanted to use a compass. The problem was that no one made compasses for small boats. (Boaters used iPads to get from here to there.) He found a used compass at a boat salvage company and installed it on the Patience.
The crew began the voyage near Pittsburgh by casting off from the dock which went remarkably well. They had experience doing this and it showed. The steering didn’t feel right to Buck and others so they returned to the dock and found out that the propeller wasn’t adjusted correctly so it was hitting the bottom of the channel. They fixed it, and got moving again.
While everyone was excited, the view wasn’t great. There was a lot of congested boat traffic and there were many abandoned, rusting hulks along the shore. Buck soon learned that the Army Corps of Engineers charts he brought along were essential. They provide great detail about the depth of the water and about what problems may lurk under the surface.
The Patience soon entered the Ohio River on its way to the Mississippi. Over 40% of the country’s river watershed is in the Mississippi's catchment area which includes 250 tributaries. The river truly is America's River and is essential to a large percentage of our population.
In the early 1800s when rivers spurred the nation’s growth, there were no federal resources to maintain rivers so that they could carry all of the traffic. After the Civil War, Congress, recognizing the commercial value of waterways, authorized federal work to ensure that rivers were navigable. By the turn of the 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) was given responsibility for maintaining rivers. Today, ACE presides over 250 locks and a fleet of dredging boats to keep things moving. The locks do help when nature either floods or goes into a drought, but most were built decades ago so many have trouble handling bigger ships.
The Patience entered its first lock and saw the water level drop initially. The crew also saw cars, boats, construction debris, and countless tires that fouled the bottom. A few hours later they docked in Glenfield, PA, where they were greeted by dozens of people on the shore. The crew came ashore and partied with the locals, a situation that was repeated throughout their journey.
Floating down a big river isn’t easy. Your vessel is competing with many others for space in the water. Weather can go south on you at any moment. There are a lot of big trees in the water that keep hitting your boat. Islands in the stream make navigation tricky and sandbars keep cropping up based on weather conditions. One must be alert and quick to respond to whatever comes up. Rinker Buck and his crew looked forward to figuring out whatever was impeding their progress. It kept them sharp and made the trip more interesting. They got really good at moving logs out of the way before they could do any harm.
After a few weeks on the river, tensions increased among crew members. There were sharp political differences on board but that wasn't a problem. People joked about that, however some personalities were into controlling things which got old fast. Scott Mandrell, who came on Board with boat builder John Cooper, thought he knew everything and he rubbed most of the crew the wrong way. Scott also did four or five costume changes a day and spent most of his time preening on the deck and not doing any work. Perhaps Scott was a frustrated actor. Buck had to figure out how to get rid of him.
The river was polluted but it was cleaner than it had been twenty years earlier. For over a century, manufacturing plants – textile, paper, and steel mills as well as coal-burning power plants -– dumped all of their bad stuff in the river. We are finally starting to clean things up but there’s a long way to go. Coal mining had been a major industry along parts of the river, providing high-paying jobs. When the Patience pulled into various ports, they often heard reference to how the politicians in Washington destroyed the industry. There weren’t a lot of Green New Deal people along the way, although things were moving to develop more environmentally-friendly energy sources. Even many coal supporters realized that it was time to move on.
Several of the crew members were experienced flatboaters who captained the boat at first, teaching others how to move ahead without sinking. A week into the trip, Buck took over and soon mastered the basics. He even got good at getting by the really big boats -– making friends with the captain via radio was always a good thing to do. Captain Buck learned how to use the lock system. He was literally having the time of his life piloting the Patience.
Crew member Danny, Buck’s good friend, was a terrible pilot. He had intense attention deficit disorder which, like many in his age group, had never been treated. Danny could not stay focused on whatever was the task at hand. On the other hand, he was a great cook.
One night Scott, who was still irritating everyone, tried to overrule the captain about how to anchor the boat. He was rebuffed and went off in a huff. The next day, Scott announced that something had come up at home and he had to get back. People were happy.
The boat was approaching Cincinnati, the first big city on the trip. They stopped at a marina that was full of pleasure boats jammed together. They left the next morning and quickly moved through Ohio and into Indiana and Kentucky that shared a border of the Ohio River. The water got rough near Evansville, IN, but they got through it.
Buck was working in the galley when he tripped and hit his chest on the staircase railing. He knew he had broken a couple of ribs. There’s not much treatment for that, so he just bandaged his chest and tried to take it easy when he was moving around. He also drank a bit of brandy to get through it.
There are fascinating people all along the Mississippi. One of the most memorable men that the crew met was Ron Richardson, a “river rat” who lived in Brandenburg, KY, on the Ohio River. He was a design draftsman by trade, but in his spare time and on vacation had worked just about every job you could do on the waterway. Ron fondly recalled that as a kid his family took in just about every performance on the showboats that were full of tourists. The entertainment ranged from Shakespeare plays to Broadway shows and semi-famous singers.
Buck was getting nervous because the flatboat was entering more crowded waters with lots of big boats that could be a problem for the relatively small Patience. Ron had done a lot of piloting on the river and he gave Buck an intense course in how to get through small spaces. The main instruction was to study what the tugboat captains were doing and follow them. It was good advice.
Most of the members of the boat’s crew had real jobs which they had to get back to after a few weeks on the rivers. Buck had to wait a few days for his new crew to assemble. While he was moving down the river with a minimal crew, he got stuck on a sandbar. He was alone and the ribs hadn't completely healed but he had to get moving. He figured out how to go back and forth, just like the driver would do with a car that was stuck in snow. The Patience was soon on its way again.
The book gives the reader a lot of information about how waterways shaped the country. In the first half of the nineteenth century, populations expanded along tributaries and eventually along major rivers. There just weren’t many good roads but there were tens of thousands of miles of navigable water. Flatboats, which had been invented in New England in the 1650s, were the vessel of choice for travel and commerce. Textile factories in the Northeast would ship finished products all over the country using various types of flatboats. Farmers in the Midwest would transport pork and other farm products on flatboats that stopped at river ports.
In the nineteenth century, salt was essential to preserving meat for transport and sale. The Kanawha salt works on the Ohio River in West Virginia produced most of the salt for the interior of the country. Thousands of slaves produced thousands of tons of salt, with many workers dying in the process. This was one of the many troubling tradeoffs that fueled the growth of the nation. Ironically, as river travel increased after the Civil War, many freed slaves found decent jobs working on the boats that plied the rivers.
Indian tribes were pushed off their land to advance some growth agenda. Many Indians were transported away from their homes via the rivers. President Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act passed in 1830 so that he could open up native lands to American settlers. In 1837, a 135-ton steamboat, the Monmouth, was transporting 700 Creek Indians up from Baton Rouge, LA, to ports where they would travel westward to their new reservations. There was a collision with another ship in a big storm and all 700 died.
The author lambastes the National Park Service for sanitizing the role of rivers in encouraging slavery and Indian removal. All of the historic presentations are fawning about how great everything was for everyone in the flatboat era.
One interesting anecdote in the book details George Washington’s crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776. The next day, the Americans routed the Hessians in the Battle of Trenton, a key early victory for the rebels. The classic painting of this iconic event has George standing in a rowboat, looking stately. Unfortunately, a rowboat could not have navigated the shallow Delaware River. The Americans used flatboats to get to New Jersey. Emanuel Leutz, the artist who did the famous painting, took some artistic license in creating this work.
The most skillful crew member was Mike Binkley who had extensive experience on major rivers. As the summer went on, weather became more dangerous, with vicious thunderstorms a constant threat. One afternoon, a nasty storm hit, with high winds, while the boat was out on the river. Buck was piloting and he was terrified. Mike calmed him down and told him how to turn the boat into the wind to avoid getting swamped. It worked and after about ten minutes of terror, the winds died down and all was well.
The boat stopped at Newburgh, IN, 200 miles away from the Mississippi, for repairs. Some things had broken and had to be fixed. Buck also realized that they needed a bigger outboard engine to move the boat. They found a used one at a boat repair shop and had a few days to explore the area.
During the height of the flatboat era (early-to-mid 1800s) Newburgh was the biggest port between Cincinnati and New Orleans. It was humming as the commercial center of the area. Boats would offload their goods onto wagons which would transport meat, farm produce, and other things all over the Midwest. The discovery of coal in the area in 1850 further boosted the town’s regional importance. By the 1870s, Evansville, IN, eclipsed Newburgh as a major river center.
They spent a week in Newburgh where Buck reassembled his team and added new crew members. Two women who had spent the first few weeks on the boat but had to leave for business reasons, came back. Debra Satterfield and Cynthia Lee had spent lots of time on the rivers and were valuable additions to the crew. Debra was an experienced pilot who took over steering the boat many times along the way. Buck’s friend, Danny, returned to the adventure after having left for a few weeks to take care of business issues at his home.
The boat finally hit the Mississippi at Cairo, IL, in early August. The Ohio River water is green while the Mississippi is muddy. The confluence of the two rivers creates strong currents, but the Patience, piloted by Buck, did fine. The crew was almost in awe of finally sailing on the mightiest river on the continent, on which floated half of the nation’s farm products and one-third of its basic industrial output. The Mississippi is the major league of water transport. Hundreds of big barges and boats are on it each day. It is congested and a small barge like the Patience can literally get swamped.
All along the journey, people kept warning the crew that the Mississippi was deadly, with strong currents and storms likely to scuttle a boat and kill its crew. This turned out to be a bit of local hyperbole. The big river was more challenging than the Ohio but not too much more dangerous. Buck had to navigate through a whirlpool the first day on the Mississippi, so he did.
According to the crew, the Mississippi was a happy river. It was wider and had a lot of boat traffic but people were friendly. Captains doffed their caps to other captains. There was some genuine old-world charm on the water. Buck made sure to make friends with as many captains as he could. He knew that he might be in a tense situation with a boat at some point on the river. Things would be better if he knew the captain.
The river was faster and the crowd of boats meant that Buck and crew had to be more alert. Often, the captain of a monster boat would sort of adopt the Patience and help it get through a challenging situation, sometimes literally running interference to block other boats from messing up the Patience’s course. One big-boat captain warned Buck that at a certain point down the river, the depth buoys that kept you from running aground had been relocated by a recent storm and were useless.
They stopped in New Madrid, MO, which in the early to mid 1800s was the commerce capital of the river. The town was kind of a “pre-industrial service center” where you could sell goods, get your boat fixed, and have a good meal or a good time. In 1927, a huge flood wiped it out, but today it still was an important port.
Buck needed a better anchor and he found it in a shop in New Madrid – a homemade spider anchor. It was exactly what he needed although he had never seen anything quite like it. It was unique to the region. The boat needed some other repairs so the crew hung around for a few days. They were invited to a Pentecostal church picnic where political beliefs were different from those of most of the crew, but politics never came up and a good time was had by all. The local VFW also threw a party for the Patience. This was a friendly place.
Just as they were loading gas and supplies, Deb Satterfield, an accomplished pilot, fell and broke her arm. After her arm was set at the local hospital, the boat took off. Losing Deb hurt the crew as much as the arm hurt Deb. As they moved down the river, everything got harder to do and losing the full services of a crew was something else Buck had to figure out.
The author can really write: “Every hour on the Mississippi was an intense suffusion of light, waterscape, and sand. The grand spectacle of the continent was racing by. The American harvest was underway and the trainloads of corn and beans off-loading onto the barges at the Caruthersville and Helena wharves were spewing giant clouds of dust that kited northeast across the bends.”
After a few days, they tied up in Tiptonville, TN, for supplies and rest. Each docking was an adventure since each dock was different. This time, Buck decided to jump into the water a few feet from the dock and tie the boat up. A swift current came up and almost carried him away. He had forgotten to put on a life preserver, a very stupid move. All was well and he learned his lesson.
Buck’s friend, Danny, and another crew member, Curtis, decided to experience a river tradition - crossing it in a small inflatable dinghy. Since there was a lot of traffic on the Mississippi, this was a challenge. They bought a dinghy and took off on their adventure. Halfway across, the boat suddenly deflated. Danny and Curtis were wearing life preservers so only the dinghy was lost. So much for that tradition.
Rinker Buck loves the great outdoors. He’s written several books extolling the natural beauty of this country. The trip gave him a close-up view of how badly we have let our rivers deteriorate. He blames the Army Corps of Engineers for letting things get out of hand, although he does acknowledge that there was never enough funding to clean things up. “The Ohio and Mississippi are nothing but Superfund sites with water running through them.” The crew saw mountains of oil barrels and lots of abandoned vehicles piled up next to the river. There are many junk yards along the river and a lot of hydraulic fluid and other yucky stuff seeped into the water over the decades.
Around mile 819, 70 miles north of Memphis, the boat had to navigate a sharp bend in the river. The water was crowded with all sorts of vessels which took up a lot of space. Buck misjudged his ability to beat a couple of big barges around the bend and ended up on a sandbar. By now Buck had made friends with a lot of the captains of big boats that were going down the river at about the same speed as the Patience. He called up a captain he knew and explained that he was grounded and needed some help. The help here was to have the big boat float close to the stranded Patience and create a wash of water to lift the little boat off the sandbar. It worked and everyone was soon underway again. There was a real community on the river, which helped everybody. Buck was delighted. He had been repeatedly warned that sand bars would do him in but he only hit one and was able to free the boat quickly.
The next stop was Natchez, MS, which during the nineteenth century, had been a wealthy city, that had been the favored address of millionaires who got rich from exploiting slaves in their fields or poor immigrants in their factories. There were lots of old mansions in the area which still glittered from its vibrant history. After the flatboat was tied up on the dock, a police officer came over and announced that the Patience was too close to a cruise ship and would have to move. This was a bogus order from a rogue cop. Buck and the crew knew that but decided to move and not end up getting arrested in the Deep South. A man on the shore saw their plight and offered his dock to them. That fixed the problem.
In the 1800s Natchez was a major way station on the river with legitimate commercial enterprises as well as prostitution and gambling which took place in a separate border community known as Under-the-Hill. In the day, the area shined; at night, not so much. Natchez pretty much ignored the Civil War. There were no battles near it and a lot of the population had Union sympathies. Natchez ended up being one if the few southern cities to have escaped serious damage and shelling.
The boat docked in Baton Rouge, 80 miles north of New Orleans. Many members of the crew who earlier had to leave for business reasons came back for the final leg of the trip to their destination. At this point, everyone on board had become very good at their jobs. The Patience had a first-rate crew now. A bunch of local Black kids came on board and were amazed that a bunch of regular people had voyaged over 1,000 miles just for an adventure.
The next day the boat stopped 40 miles away from New Orleans. They left the boat, built a fire, had a great dinner, and reminisced about the journey. The good news was that they were almost there. The bad news was that the port of New Orleans is one of the most crowded waterways in the world. Little boats can get scuttled by big barges and huge oceangoing vessels.
Getting through the traffic was tough. Radio communication was almost useless with everyone talking at the same time. Many pilots spoke Cajun English which the Patience’s crew did not understand. Naturally, Buck was at the helm as they headed towards the Big Easy. He took it very slowly, counting each mile, just like I did at the late stages of a marathon when I was gassed.
In order to get to Lake Pontchartrain where Buck had reserved a dock months earlier, the boat had to go through a final series of locks. Unfortunately, they weren't working. In Baton Rouge, Buck had done some digging and reserved alternative space at another dock.
Things got wild as they moved downriver. At one point, the captain of a huge boat offered to run interference for the Patience as it navigated through the crowded water. It worked, and Buck got through the roughest part of the journey. The big boat captain signed off with, “Nice knowing you, wooden boat.” Buck did not know the name of that captain or of the many captains who helped the Patience continue its journey. They just were there to help and then they moved on. Buck’s crew truly benefited from the kindness of strangers.
The crew stayed at a local hotel and relaxed. Many members felt strange after having finished such an intense experience. Buck was wiped out. Along the way, he had learned how stubborn he was – you had to be to keep going when things got messed up. He reflected that the journey was a lot like life which often presented problems that you just had to solve to move forward.
Buck summarized the journey nicely, “Living on the river produced an overwhelming sense of relief about leaving the modern living and convenience of cities behind. Simplicity, and living by my wits, were working for me and I loved being a nomad on the river.”
Bob's Take
Rinker Buck is an accomplished journalist who worked for the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, MA, and the Hartford Courant for many years. He also wrote several bestselling books. When he was a teenager, he and his older brother flew a small plane across the country. He later wrote a popular book on that journey. He also enjoyed boating, so his Mississippi River adventure, which took place in the summer of 2016, made sense.
Rivers were important to developing our country and any country. Before humans had roads and wagons, they had rivers and boats. Early American population expansion patterns followed rivers and streams, so towns and cities tended to be located on waterways.
The Mississippi was a key conduit for the slave trade. Many slaves were moved from Virginia and other southern states westward to the Mississippi and then sent downriver to the sugar cane fields of the Deep South. Between 1790 and 1850, at least one million African American slaves were sent down the river to their new masters. Today, Natchez, a key part of the slave trail, is home to many displays and a large museum which focuses on that dark chapter in American history.
The book documents constant change on the river. A port could be a major commercial center for decades and then fade into history. Mt. Vernon, IN, Brandenburg KY, and New Madrid, MO all were big deals for quite a few years but eventually faded dramatically.
The crew of the Patience met many nice people who told interesting stories. Many river people told tales of relatives who were legends on the river. Most of the people they met didn’t work on the river - they had normal jobs - and they had some regret about what might have been had they followed their uncle or father in working on the Mighty Mississippi.
