Rinker Buck's flatboat Patience chugs down the Mississippi.
Best-selling author writes about flatboat journey on Mississippi River
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Scott LaMar
Rinker Buck's flatboat Patience chugs down the Mississippi.
Airdate: October 11th, 2023
In the 1800s, in what was then the western United States, many Americans traveled long distances on the rivers. The goods and products that were made or grown or dug from the ground were often shipped down by flatboat to the Mississippi River and on to New Orleans to be shipped elsewhere.
Today, the Mississippi is still full of tugboats and barges filled with what the nation and the world consumes.
Best-selling author Rinker Buck wanted to go back in time and travel down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a wooden flatboat like our ancestors did. Buck had a flatboat built, assembled a crew and left from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania on the Monongahela River, made his way to Ohio River and then onto the Mississippi.
He wrote about it in his latest book, Life on the Mississippi An Epic American Adventure.
On The Spark Wednesday, Buck said he got the idea for traveling by boat down the Mississippi when he wrote a previous book about the Oregon Trail and how Conestoga wagons crossed rivers on flatboats.
Buck found a man in Tennessee to build a flatboat,”It was actually a replica of a flatboat. Most of the flatboats came along before the era of the daguerreotype and tintype and photographs and stuff. So we have to rely on paintings and sketches and stuff. But I was able to find a lot of those…it was a real flat boat, except the drift to floating of the old days was replaced by a 125 horsepower mercury motor.” The motor was needed so the flatboat, named Patience, could get out of the way of the large shipping vessels on the rivers.
Buck and his crew didn’t have modern navigational equipment so how did they find their way down the rivers without it,”Just really what they call straight pilotage. Pilotage means looking at what’s on the river that you can see and then confirming it with your maps. On the Mississippi have mile markers and day markers. But the Coast Guard doesn’t maintain the system very well, so they get washed away. But there was always a visual and I’m very used to navigation...I’d done a lot of navigation without radio support. My rule was, while I was running the boat, somebody else was full time navigation or I let somebody else run the boat and I was full time navigation. And the reason is if a tugboat push in 15 barges comes along and he can’t get out of your way, you got to steer his way.”
Buck was asked about the places he liked best along the rivers,”My favorite towns were places like Brandenburg, Kentucky, of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Newburgh, Indiana. And, of course, Natchez, Mississippi, which anybody listening. If you haven’t seen Natchez, Mississippi, you’ve got to get down there. It’s like a mini Savannah. It’s one of the most well-preserved antebellum towns in America. But that was one of the big surprises of the trip, which is that these gorgeous river towns along the Ohio, which you don’t think of, the Ohio as beautiful country, you think of it as sort of industrialized space and stuff. But in fact, it is. And it’s very, very rural. There’s very long stretches of just national forest and so forth. But those old river towns continue to have a relationship with the river, even after the railroads came in and sort of took away a lot of the barge traffic.”
