Passage

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Feeling that my memories of houseboating on the Ohio River in my youth weren’t quite enough to support my tale, I turned with great reading pleasure to additional sources. I quickly found that while material on steamboating ran the length of the Mississippi, the earlier era of keelboats, flatboats, and muscle power was much less widely documented.

Especially worth sharing with the reader curious for more are: The Keelboat Age on Western Waters (1941) by L.D. Baldwin; Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The recollections of a steamboat pilot from 1854 to 1863 (1909) by George Byron Merrick; A-Rafting on the Mississip’ (1928) by Charles Edward Russell; A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, by Himself (1834) (Bison Books facsimile reprint 1987); and, rather a prize because it was only printed in a limited edition of 750 copies, The Adventures of T.C. Collins—Boatman: Twenty-four Years on the Western Waters, 1849–1873, (1985) compiled and edited by Herbert L. Roush, Sr.

The Merrick, the Russell, the Crockett, and the Collins were all authentic firsthand accounts, immensely valuable for the kind of detail that cannot be found in general histories. I owe Russell for Whit’s memorable phrase when falling in love at first sight with a great river because I could not sum up those feelings any more perfectly and Crockett, not only for the flatboat-sinking incident, for inspiration for the charming character of Ford Chicory—himself. I heartily recommend this autobiography, which seems to have been penned as an early political memoir; its politics have been pared away by time, but its personal aspects remain riveting to this day.