Having survived an arduous journey and documented it in The Oregon Trail, Rinker Buck built a wooden flatboat to sail with a crew down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, and breaks his ribs twice. As he charts his progress, Buck also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era in which such excursions were surprisingly common.