Old Times on the Upper Mississippi

About the book

George Byron Merrick looks back on river life from 1854 to 1863, beginning with youthful fascination and moving into the working world of steamboats. Engineers, clerks, mates, captains, and pilots each have their own duties, status, and expertise. Learning to read the river and steer a vessel requires practical judgment that cannot be reduced to a simple map. Accounts of meals, music, gambling, racing, and commercial speculation place that skilled labor within a lively social setting. Later chapters consider war, changes to navigation, and the forces that diminished the old steamboat world. Appendices preserve vessel lists and other reference material. The memoir's affectionate tone makes technical knowledge and nostalgia inseparable, recording both how the work was done and why its memory mattered.

• Skilled labor
• River communities
• Technology and memory

Why read it

Merrick explains the different jobs aboard a steamboat with the affection and specificity of an apprentice remembering his teachers.

English text of the 1909 Arthur H. Clark edition, with appendices