The Lure of the Mississippi

The narrative opens on the Upper Mississippi frontier as soldiers depart a riverside fort, leaving simmering tensions with local Sioux and setting concurrent dramas: an Indian uprising in the northern valleys and hard-fought Civil War campaigns along the river. A handful of frontier figures—a veteran trapper, a Sioux scout, two young brothers and their cousin—undertake seasonal voyages, hunting, trapping, and survival through storms, wrecks and winter encampments while drifting southward. The episodic river adventures build toward a climactic siege at a strategic river city, where a former fort commander commands Confederate defenses against a determined federal assault.