Old Times on the Upper Mississippi

Old Times on the Upper Mississippi is George Byron Merrick’s memoir of the great days of steamboating on the river above St. Louis. As a boy in the 1850s he worked his way up from cabin boy to pilot, and here he recalls the crews, the boats, and the shifting channels of a waterway that carried the traffic of a growing nation. Merrick describes the skill it took to read the current, the races between rival packets, the gamblers and settlers on board, and the way the railroads finally ended the steamboat era. Written years later with obvious love, it preserves a vanished world. This free PDF and EPUB gives the complete recollections of a Mississippi River pilot.