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Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875–1930 by Gregg Andrews (review)

2024; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 90; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2024.a919015

2325-6893

Scot McFarlane,

American History and Culture

Reviewed by: Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875–1930 by Gregg Andrews Scot McFarlane Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875–1930. By Gregg Andrews. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 323. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7847-8.) Gregg Andrews has written "a 'history from the river bottom up'" of the people who lived and worked on the Mississippi River (p. ix). While centered on St. Louis, his book Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875–1930 follows the shantyboat dwellers on their seasonal migration downriver and the roustabouts' work on traveling steamboats. This history takes place after the decline of steamboats even as they remained important to riverfront towns. The temporal focus of 1875–1930 overlaps with many southern histories of this era when poor people suffered great hardships and yet retained some access to a commons and to subsistence, which would eventually be taken from them. Though lacking the capital of the steamboat owners and the policing power of the state, these river people proved remarkably adept at organizing and resisting forces opposed to their interests. Andrews grew up in Ilasco, Missouri, upriver from St. Louis in the Mississippi River bottomland. He has explored the escape he found on the river amid much hardship in his 2019 memoir My Daddy's Blues: A Childhood Memoir from the Land of Huck and Jim (San Marcos, Tex., 2019). However, Andrews explains that his connection to the river inspired the writing of this new book in his "quest to put my ancestral river heritage into a broader cultural context" (p. ix). Andrews's exploration of the many terms used by and to describe the people who lived on the river highlights his efforts to undo the false stigmas attributed to them. While the planter William Alexander Percy referred to houseboat people as "river-rat[s]," they preferred the term "the river people" (pp. 17–18). By 1900, around four hundred roustabouts were based in St. Louis. Roustabouts usually lived in settlements near the river and faced many hardships. They carried heavy loads up steep, muddy banks through nonstop hours of work. Andrews, an accomplished musician, explores the role of music on the levee and how river life "fostered creativity and inspired songs that were shared across racial lines by Black roustabouts, white deckhands, and shanty-boat migrants on the waterways" (p. 117). This book covers a range of topics in its eleven chapters, ranging from an opening overview of shantyboats and roustabouts, to thematic chapters on topics such as medicine boats and missionary boats, and a chapter that tells the story of a talented female rower named Rose Mosenthein. At times these [End Page 185] stories read as a flood of information, but the core chapters could be assigned for teaching students about life on the Mississippi River. Vivid images tell their own compelling story alongside the text. Andrews also includes a comprehensive bibliography that would be useful for anyone interested in the history of rivers in the South. One of the main topics that Andrews returns to is evictions. Since the river freezes in St. Louis, or at least used to consistently freeze, most houseboat dwellers migrated south during the winter time. Thus, city officials and railway owners planned evictions to coincide with these migrations, though they sometimes made the mistake of evicting people who had just planted their summer gardens. Alongside an unforgiving river, these evictions took their toll, and the shantyboat population declined by the 1920s even as a smaller group reached a détente, often paying rent to their would-be evictors. Later portrayals of river life in music and literature sometimes softened the hardships that the river people endured, and in this sense, Andrews's book serves as a useful antidote for anyone interested in understanding the history of life and death on the Mississippi River. Scot McFarlane American Historical Association Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association