Download or read book The Oregon Trail written by Rinker Buck and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the bestselling tradition of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail is a major work of participatory history: an epic account of traveling the 2,000-mile length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way, in a covered wagon with a team of mules—which hasn't been done in a century—that also tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country. Spanning 2,000 miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used it to emigrate West—historians still regard this as the largest land migration of all time—the trail united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. The trail years also solidified the American character: our plucky determination in the face of adversity, our impetuous cycle of financial bubbles and busts, the fractious clash of ethnic populations competing for the same jobs and space. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten. Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. The New Yorker described his first travel narrative,Flight of Passage, as “a funny, cocky gem of a book,” and with The Oregon Trailhe seeks to bring the most important road in American history back to life. At once a majestic American journey, a significant work of history, and a personal saga reminiscent of bestsellers by Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed, the book tells the story of Buck's 2,000-mile expedition across the plains with tremendous humor and heart. He was accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an “incurably filthy” Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, Buck dodges thunderstorms in Nebraska, chases his runaway mules across miles of Wyoming plains, scouts more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, crosses the Rockies, makes desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water, and repairs so many broken wheels and axels that he nearly reinvents the art of wagon travel itself. Apart from charting his own geographical and emotional adventure, Buck introduces readers to the evangelists, shysters, natives, trailblazers, and everyday dreamers who were among the first of the pioneers to make the journey west. With a rare narrative power, a refreshing candor about his own weakness and mistakes, and an extremely attractive obsession for history and travel,The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime.
Download or read book Mississippi Solo written by Eddy Harris and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a young black man's quest: to canoe the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.
Download or read book Old Times on the Mississippi written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Life on the Mississippi written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.? --William Faulkner A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain?s rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it. Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today?s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author?s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings, volume number 5 in the Library of America series. It is joined in the series by six companion volumes, gathering the collected works of Mark Twain.
Download or read book Plantation Life on the Mississippi written by W. E. Clement and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 2000-04-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One day in 1852, The Princess, one of the finest steamboats afloat on the Mississippi River one hundred years ago was rounding the bend a Duncan�s Point about ten miles below Baton Rouge, when the boilers exploded with a frightful loss of life. The disaster occurred in front of the Conrad cottage where a descendant, the late G. Mather Conrad, of New Orleans, was born and lived as a youth. Lyle Saxon in his Old Louisiana tells of having known an old gentleman who remembered the awful holocaust. Then a little boy, this old gentleman was awaiting the return of his mother and father from New Orleans. He saw the Princess come around the bend and then turn in toward the bank. As he watched he heard a terrific explosion and saw the steamboat burst into flames. Mr. F. D. Conrad, plantation owner of that generation, so Saxon tells us, sent his slaves out in skiffs to rescue the men and women who crew struggling in the water. Many of them were frightfully scalded by steam from the broken boilers. Sheets were spread on the ground under the oak trees on the lawn and barrels of flour were broken open and the contents poured on the sheets. As the scalded people were pulled from the river, they were stripped and rolled in the flour, where they writhed and shrieked in agony. The little boy went from one sufferer to another seeking his father and mother. They were not there. They returned from New Orleans on a later boat, but he never forgot the anguish of his search.
Download or read book The Last Resort written by Norma Watkins and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raised under the racial segregation that kept her family's southern country hotel afloat, Norma Watkins grows up listening at doors, trying to penetrate the secrets and silences of the black help and of her parents' marriage. Groomed to be an ornament to white patriarchy, she sees herself failing at the ideal of becoming a southern lady. The Last Resort, her compelling memoir, begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow as a counselor to fiery, segregationist Governor Ross Barnett. His daughter flounders, looking for escape. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change, daily made manifest by the men in her home. A sexually bleak marriage only emphasizes a growing emotional emptiness. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind? With humor and heartbreak, The Last Resort conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.
Download or read book Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi written by George H. Devol and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George H. Devol was the greatest riverboat gambler in the history of the Mississippi. Born in Ohio in 1829, he ran away from home and worked as a cabin boy at age ten. At fourteen he could stack a deck of cards. Over the years, he bilked soldiers, paymasters, cotton buyers, thieves, and businessmen alike. He fought more fights than anyone, and was never beaten. This is his story. Nobody was ever bored by it.
Download or read book Life on the Mississippi written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.
Download or read book Minn of the Mississippi written by and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1951 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows the adventures of Minn, a three-legged snapping turtle, as she slowly makes her way from her birthplace at the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the mouth of river on the Gulf of Mexico.
Download or read book Life on the Mississippi Annotated written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life on the Mississippi (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. It is also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans many years after the war. The book begins with a brief history of the river as reported by Europeans and Americans, beginning with the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1542. It continues with anecdotes of Twain's training as a steamboat pilot, as the 'cub' (apprentice) of an experienced pilot, Horace E. Bixby. He describes, with great affection, the science of navigating the ever-changing Mississippi River in a section that was first published in 1876, entitled "Old Times on the Mississippi". Although Twain was actually 21 when he began his training, he uses artistic license to make himself seem somewhat younger, referring to himself as a "fledgling" and a "boy" who "ran away from home" to seek his fortune on the river, and playing up his own callowness and naïveté.
Download or read book Lansing to LeClaire Travel Guide written by Dean Klinkenberg and published by Dean Klinkenberg. This book was released on 2009 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time written by Robert McCrum and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --
Download or read book Black Life on the Mississippi written by Thomas C. Buchanan and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exploration of the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, the author documents the variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked along the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation written by Stephen E. Ambrose and published by National Geographic Society. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the Mississippi River, tracing its length from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and discussing its important role in the history of the United States. Includes photographs, period illustrations, artwork, documents, and maps.
Download or read book Amidst the Fray written by William D. Mounger and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the Fray: My Life in Politics, Culture, and Mississippi by William D. Billy Mounger with Joseph L. Maxwell, is a firsthand account of state and national political scandals such as the internal conflict of Republicans at the 1976 GOP national convention, the cloud of controversy surrounding former Mississippi Governor Bill Allain and Congressman Jon Hinson, and an inside look at the Watergate cover-up by the Nixon White House staff. Mounger documents his role in President Ronald Reagan's rise to power and how the Mississippi GOP regained momentum against the Democratic stronghold. US Senator Trent Lott said, I consider myself one of the first generations of progeny of Billy Mounger's Republican generation.
Download or read book My Life on the Mississippi written by Richard Bissell and published by eNet Press. This book was released on with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A skillful, and frequently hilarious, comparison of Mark Twain and the author, Richard Bissell. Part commentary and part autobiography, Bissell deftly interweaves family history, anecdotes, and career paths into an unforgettable linking of two outstanding authors and river boat buffs living almost a century apart.
Download or read book Mississippi Writings written by Mark Twain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-05-31 with total page 1104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
