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The year of 1811 was near the end of the time of the dominance of keelboats on the Mississippi River. Keelboats were strongly built wooden boats, large enough to carry a significant amount of cargo but small enough to be poled along in shallow parts of the river. Whenever possible, downstream or upstream, a sail was used. Men would run cotton and other such cargoes south to New Orleans then carry up things needed by the small settlements that were growing up along the river. The time of the steamboat was coming soon.
The River Pirates is set in this time, and is based on actual happenings. Someone like the character of Dill Munro was recruiting criminals to act as river pirates and build up a small army to conquer and loot, with the help of traitors in each town, many small settlements along the Mississippi. People such as the heroes of the book, Lee Parham and Peter Crawley, captain of a keelboat, arose to oppose and defeat these evil plans. Lee is a gunsmith but has been run out of town by a rival gunsmith, much bigger than him, who defeats Lee in a fight. Lee ends up going undercover with Dill Munro and with the help of Crawley, who teaches him how to box, defeats Dill Munro, his gang of river pirates, and his rival gunsmith. There is a sweet touch of romance between Lee and Rachel Clark, whose father founded Clark’s Landing, where the story begins, and a vision of the future of the steamboat.
The Great Steamboat Race is a partly fictionalized account of the famous race between the Natchez and Robert E. Lee steamboats on the Mississippi River. The hero is Matt Parham, the grandson of Lee Parham from The River Pirates. Matt really wants to work on the growing network of railroads, but accepts a position of assistant engineer on the Robert E. Lee steamboat just in time for the race. Similar to how The River Pirates was set in the ending of the keelboat era and the beginning of the steamboat era, The Great Steamboat Race is set in the ending of the steamboat era, replaced by the steam railroad. It is an exciting adventure, taken right from American history.
Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) was an interesting American writer. He was born in the country of Angola in Africa, the son of a medical officer. The family then moved to America, where Wellman got a college degree in journalism in 1926. He and his wife lived for the last several decades of his life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Wellman wrote for many different genres – comic books, mysteries, science fiction, and stories in which his heroes fought evil in the supernatural realm. Today, he is best remembered for his delightful stories and novels about Silver John, a wandering minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar who travels through the Appalachian regions and fights supernatural evil known only from whispered folk tales. During the time of his career, he also had a tremendous interest in American history, particularly of the North Carolina area, and so wrote many wonderful juvenile historical novels, like the Bear Paw Gap trilogy (see my review), his four-part American Revolution in the South series (see my review), and his three-part Civil War series (see my review).