In this newsletter:

• Our Next Adventure
• GoodReads Giveway
• Mississippi River history connections
• FREE eBook Giveaway

Hello! We are so excited to be heading to Alaska tomorrow for two extended cruises of the Inside Passage. It is one of our favorite places on earth and we always look forward to the natural wonders, amazing wildlife, and stunning wilderness that we get to travel through. Because of this next great adventure, we are giving away one of our books this weekend that shares the incredible stories of The Great Land. But, first...

GOODREADS FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY

Last chance to enter my Goodreads feature for a FREE copy of my "Declaration of Independence" book. CLICK HERE.

MISSISSIPPI RIVER

This week we move into a new arc of our History Highlights exploration. By the early nineteenth century, the young United States was looking increasingly westward. The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the nation’s size, and Lewis and Clark had carried the American flag across the continent to the Pacific. But for most Americans, the path west was shaped less by distant mountains than by rivers.

The Mississippi and its tributaries offered settlers something enormously important: a way to turn western land into opportunity. Farmers could raise crops far from eastern markets, load their harvests aboard flatboats, and let the current carry them hundreds of miles downstream to New Orleans and the wider world. The great river system was becoming more than a boundary or a feature on a map. It was becoming the commercial highway that drew Americans into the interior.

One of the things I love about traveling the Mississippi is that you can look at something without really understanding what you’re seeing. Let me give you an example.

You’re standing on the deck of a riverboat, and around the bend comes a towboat pushing fifteen barges. Whenever I see one, I think: There’s the Mississippi River story still happening. People have used this river to move things for thousands of years.

Native peoples traveled and traded along the Mississippi and its tributaries long before Europeans arrived. Later came explorers and fur traders. Then flatboats loaded with produce floated downstream toward New Orleans.

And here’s what I’ve always found fascinating about flatboats: getting downstream was easy. Getting back wasn’t. You could float your cargo to New Orleans, sell it, and sometimes sell the boat itself for lumber because taking it upstream wasn’t practical. Then you had to find another way home.

Imagine running a transportation business where you throw away the truck after every delivery.

Then came steam power. Suddenly boats could fight the current, and that changed almost everything. Steamboats carried passengers, mail, cotton, livestock, manufactured goods, and news in both directions. Towns grew around river landings. New Orleans became one of America’s great ports, and St. Louis a gateway to the West.

The Mississippi became something like America’s first interstate highway. Then railroads arrived. Then highways. You might expect the river to have become obsolete. It didn’t.

That’s why I love watching those towboats. The vessels changed, but the basic idea didn’t. We’re still using this enormous natural transportation system running through the middle of the country.

And you can do the same thing with almost anything along the river. Look at a levee. At first, it’s just a grassy embankment. But behind it is a story about floods, engineering, communities protecting themselves, and generations discovering that controlling the Mississippi is much easier to propose than to accomplish.

Look at Vicksburg. During the Civil War, control of the Mississippi was so important that Union armies and naval forces spent months trying to capture that strategic point above the river.

Look at Hannibal, Missouri, and suddenly we’re talking about a young steamboat pilot named Samuel Clemens who became Mark Twain.

Look at New Orleans, and we’re back to Thomas Jefferson worrying about which foreign power controlled America’s access to the Gulf of Mexico—and eventually making the Louisiana Purchase.

That’s what I wanted to do with my book Mississippi River: Then and Now. I didn’t want to write only about what the river used to be. I wanted to connect that history with what we can still see, because I think that’s when history becomes especially interesting.

I’ve spent years traveling America’s rivers, and I still discover connections I hadn’t thought about before. That’s the wonderful thing about the Mississippi. You can study steamboats, Mark Twain, the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, floods, engineering, music, commerce, or westward expansion—and sooner or later, all those stories find their way back to the river.

My Mississippi River book is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook editions. To learn more or order your copy, CLICK HERE.

FREE eBook GIVEAWAY

This weekend's free eBook giveaway is for Alaska History Highlights. CLICK HERE.​

Have a great week!

Laura and Bill