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On Growing Up in the Mississippi River Bottoms
The Mississippi Valley Traveler caught up with me recently for an interview about my riverbank childhood in the Monkey Run bottoms south of Hannibal. We covered a range of subjects as I reflected on the role of the river as a shaping cultural influence on my writings, music, and life. I hope you might have…
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Meet the Mississippi Valley Traveler and His New Podcast
I met Dean in the summer of 2013 when he came upriver to Hannibal to catch a show by Dr. G & the Mudcats in the sweltering heat at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum’s Music Under the Stars. It was the beginning of a friendship born of our mutual love for the Mississippi…
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Shantyboat Standoff Against Anheuser-Busch
“This is my home and I intend to defend it. All that it contains is the toil of years. If anyone attempts to pull my houseboat off without due process of law, I’ll kill the one who attempts it.”
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Abortion on Four Mile Island
“If your wife will listen to Ida you folks won’t have any more children.”
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Rose Etta Allan’s Fight for Her Children
“He and his wife said they loved the children as if they were their own, but I wanted them, they were mine, all I have in this world.”
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A Kentucky Shantyboat Baby
“From the shack he and mother moved to the shanty boat, so that he could make a living fishing. . . He was a Cherokee Indian and my mother was half-Seminole and half-black.”
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Ukraine on the Rural Mississippi
Until the building was torn down in 1938, river travelers and motorists who gazed up at the “Onion Bulb” dome on the bluffs were left to wonder about the origins of such a unique church in a small Mississippi River town in rural Missouri.
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Black River Roustabouts Lost and Found
“The mate walked up and looked over the guard and said, ‘Well, pick up your iron and get out of the way; the man’s drowned now; needn’t be standing around.'”
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The St. Louis Levee and W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”
“I slept on the cobblestones of the levee of the Mississippi. My companions were perhaps a thousand men of both races.”
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Shantyboat Rose
Rose Mosenthein was a pioneer in women’s competitive rowing and aquatic sports at a time when rowing clubs denied membership to women.
Lost River Stories
Invisibles of the Mississippi Valley.
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Lost River Stories 