The Lower Mississippi River Water Trail
Rivergator Appendix XIII:
Literary Analysis
by John Ruskey
The Rivergator: Literary Analysis
The many available publications regarding the Lower Mississippi eddy into two categories, 1) personal travelogues and 2) scientific/historic/commercial works, neither of which satisfy the navigation & guiding needs of the modern American adventurer. Hence the need for the writing of the Rivergator.
The Naming of the Rivergator
The title Rivergator is derived from the national best-sellerThe Navigator, first published in 1801 by Zadok Cramer, with 12 subsequent printings. The Navigator described the Mississippi Valley for pioneer settlers streaming out of the Eastern United States in the first great wave of continental migrations that eventually led to the settling of the Wild West. Thomas Jefferson and other leaders were fearful that the French or the English would get there first. With the Lewis & Clark explorations and the introduction of the steamboat to the Mississippi River in 1812, Americans followed the big rivers up and down through the heart of the country, and The Navigator was their guide. In this spirit I have adopted the name Rivergator with the hope that Americans will rediscover their “wilderness within,” the paddler’s paradise created by the Lower Mississippi River. And that the Rivergator will be adopted by successive generations of canoeists and kayakers, and re-written as the river changes. Zadok Cramer also invented the numbering system for Lower Mississippi River Islands, a system still in use today.
Guidebooks
Ernest Herndon’s Canoeing Louisiana and Canoeing Mississippi are the best sources for paddlers using tributaries rivers like the Yazoo, Big Black, Red, Ouachita and Atchafalaya Rivers. In fact he raised the bar so high with these guidebooks that no one will probably ever cross it. However the Mississippi is only lightly touched upon. Because of the extreme nature of the big river, its unique challenges and its hazardous obstacles, Ernest purposely focused on all rivers but the Mississippi, and avoided describing the big river in any detailed fashion. Canoeing Louisiana and Canoeing Mississippi provide a simple outline to the Lower Mississippi River, but were not written as comprehensive guidebooks for paddler’s use on the big river.
Besides the Rivergator, there are no internet guides for paddling the Lower Mississippi, but many adventurers have kept personal blogs which are sometimes helpful in gleaning information. Several of these blogs were useful in writing the Rivergator, such as those kept by Linnea Godderstad and Dave Blomquist in 2013, and Lucas and Nathalie (and their intrepid puppy-dog Tischer) from the “Paddle in Hand” Expedition.
Personal Travelogues:
While readable and sometimes blandly helpful for those who might follow their paddle strokes, the explorations of contemporary writers Eddy Harris (1988, Mississippi Solo: A River Quest), Jonathan Raban (1981, Old Glory: An American Voyage), B.C. Hall & C.T. Wood (1993, Big Muddy: Down the Mississippi through America’s Heartland), Edward Wright (1995, The Great River Caper), Ben Lucien Burman (1973, Look Down the Winding River)and Weldon Parker (1985, Magical Mississippi) are maddeningly empty of any useful information about the islands, the harbors, the landings – furthermore, they are completely devoid of instructions regarding reading the river. This is frustrating because taken together these authors amass a great potential for sharing river knowledge and experiences. Even power-boaters Jonathan Raban and Weldon Parker must have paid close attention to navigating the channels and exploring the islands (which offer the best campsites). And yet, instead of making useful observations and reporting on them they seem satisfied on entertaining the reader with yet another series of personal experiences and vignettes from the people and places along the river. Pleasurable –yes, but not in the least helpful the modern paddler on the Lower Mississippi.
The photo books Around the Bend: a Mississippi River Adventure by C.C. Lockwood (1998), and Mississippi River: A Photographic Journey (1987, Jerry Stebbins & Barbara Cameron ) are written in the same travelogue format, fun to read and full of beautiful photography, but missing any useful tips for reading the river or navigation details that are of extreme importance to paddlers.
Mark Twain:
On the other hand, much useful information can still be gleaned from the 1883 publication Life on the Mississippi, and to a lesser extent, 1885 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain, the great dean of Mississippi literature, raised the bar so high, no other writer since has been able to hurdle it. While the context of Huckleberry Finn is the model for many a young man’s river dreams (including mine! It brought me originally to the Mississippi Valley from the Rocky Mountains via Choate Rosemary Hall High School, Connecticut in 1983), some of which have been published (Down the Mississippi by Clyde Robert Bulla, 1954, is an example) no writer has been able to follow the quality of his lead in the wonderful and unparalleled Life on the Mississippi.
The first twenty chapters of Life on the Mississippi relate the adventures of the young Samuel Clemmons in his education as a cub pilot, in which he describes with brilliant detail the changing nature of the river’s face and the significance all of its various motions, the swirls, the boils, the rippling waves, and so on and forth (with his usual charming mixture of stories and anecdotes, and river scenery). At once Twain’s narration is told through the eyes of a painter, and engineer, and a poet. Life on the Mississippi remains to this day the best single introduction to “reading the river,” and it was published over a century ago! It is a prerequisite for any potential guides with my Quapaw Canoe Company. The only thing better than better than Life on the Mississippi is river experience.
With this thought in mind, the Rivergator will impart over twenty years of “reading the river,” and “reading the islands,” for modern day paddlers, eco-travelers and armchair adventurers.
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