Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider (review)

The title of this book recalls a bygone era in more ways than one. Beginning nearly two centuries ago, a strongly held belief that the Mississippi River Valley was vitally important to American history and culture led scholars to write about it. Beginning with Timothy Flint’s Condensed Geography and History . . . of the Mississippi Valley (1828), authors described the Mississippi Valley as an exceptional cultural region. Their works include John W. Monette’s History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi (1848); Henry Lewis’s The Valley of the Mississippi (1854; originally published in German); J. W. Foster’s The Mississippi Valley: Its Physical Geography . . . (1869); and C. B. Walker’s vital The Mississippi Valley, and Prehistoric Events . . . (1880). Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1881) was followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (1889–96), a paean to the Great Valley, and James K. Hosmer’s concise chronological overview, A Short History of the Mississippi Valley (1901). Next, Frederick Jackson Turner outlined “The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History” in a 1908 keynote speech before the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, an organization whose very name and existence reflects the degree to which Americans saw the Great Valley as the heart of America.

Throughout the twentieth century, Roosevelt’s and Turner’s sweeping portraits begat a number of more focused books about selected aspects of the Mississippi River Valley. Beginning in the 1970s, after the name-change of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association to the Organization of American Historians, new social historians produced scores of works focused on race, class, gender, and environment in the Valley of the Mississippi. Surveying all of this literature, one is struck by the fact that, of the hundreds of books written about the Mississippi Valley, all but a dozen avoid synthesis. And of those dozen books which take a sweeping view, nearly all were written in the middle and late nineteenth century.

Paul Schneider brings an impressive resume to Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. A native of Amherst, Massachusetts, and graduate of Brown University, he has published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Times. He is author of the well-received The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness (1997), followed by a popular history of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard and several other books. He is currently editor of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

“It’s impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi,” Paul Schneider states. “The river’s history is our history” (1). He begins his history of the Mississippi during the ice age and tells the story of prehistoric animals and men in the Great Valley. He devotes a major section to Mississippian Moundbuilders and their American Indian descendants, and then launches a discussion about the major European explorers—De Soto, La Salle, and Marquette—and the eighteenth century arrival of the British and their American subjects. This takes him into the history of the early American republic, Lewis and Clark, and the keelboat, flatboat, and steamboat ages on western rivers. The role of the Mississippi in General U.S. Grant’s Civil War campaigns marks the book’s crescendo, while a concluding section focuses on the author’s own Mississippi travels and his concerns for the river’s natural environment in an industrial age. Old Man River’s ample bibliography is composed of a mix of old and new scholarly secondary sources, firsthand accounts, and newspaper and magazine articles. As in his other publications, Schneider is adept at working with dozens of sources and expeditiously serving up documented, engaging, book-length narrative prose.

This is not so much a book about the Mississippi Valley as one about events on or near the river itself. Schneider seems unaware of all but a few of the authors mentioned in the first paragraph of this review, or of his place in carrying on...