On a bright October day in 1811, a sidewheel steamer — the first that had ever been launched on the western waters — left the frontier town of Pittsburgh to risk the two-thousand mile journey through the wilderness, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans.

Nick Roosevelt and his young wife Lydia were eager for the adventure. But they could not know some of the perils that lay ahead. They felt reasonably well prepared for the plunge through the Falls of the Ohio. They hoped they could repel or outrace marauding Indians or river pirates if they had to face them. But they had no way of knowing that they were running head-on into the greatest earthquake that ever shook and terrified mid-America, a disturbance so violent and prolonged that in many places it altered the course of the Mississippi River.

Sterling North, General Editor of North Star Books, has been seeking out the details of this exciting and all-but-forgotten story for several years. From the musty archives of museums, from the yellowed pages of old letters, and from the crumbling newspapers of the era and other sources he has brought back to vivid life a gallant steamboat inventor, Nicholas Roosevelt, linked in lineage with two subsequent Presidents, and his beautiful bride, Lydia Latrobe, daughter of the architect whose genius reconstructed the capitol in Washington.

Roosevelt who built and piloted the first steamboat on the Mississippi, Shreve who cleared the channel, Mark Twain who immortalized the river, all live again on these lively pages.

From the dust jacket