Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
written by Lee Sandlin
read by Jeff McCarthy
2010
This is a wild ride. It’s a non-fiction black-comedy history book. It’s a collection of crazy stories about unpleasant people living awful lives and they are hilarious. Except that sometimes it gets grim enough that it overloads my sense of humor and just gets super depressing even in its ridiculousness. But it really is fascinating and an excellent look at American history and social movements. It’s kind of amazing how many patterns of events and types of people I recognize as being present in today’s world.
This is by the same author who wrote Storm Kings , which I enjoyed so much that I immediately checked out their other audiobook. Storm Kings is the better book, with a more cohesive storyline, while Wicked River is more a scattershot of stories and events, but it’s still very good and very impactful. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of life along the Mississippi, mostly pre-Civil War, skipping around in time and location, with a lot of stories about the lives of specific individuals and events. It gets into the nitty gritty of life and death and trade, the horrors of recurring epidemics, the cognitive dissonance of slave-holding societies, the lawlessness of the various settler justice systems, intermittent excesses of debauchery, celebrations of casual violence, ubiquitous drunkenness, and a vast cast of characters from all walks of life.
The book concludes with the Mississippi River Commission being established immediately post-Civil War and essentially taming the river, at the same time that railroads were replacing boats for transport. In the end, there’s a sense of nostalgia for the wildness that has been lost, because the river cultures were amazing and easily romanticized, even though, or perhaps especially because, they sound truly awful to have lived through.
Biblio-therapy 