Deep river : a memoir of a Missouri farm /

Saline County occupies a corridor position in central Missouri. The Missouri River borders the county on the north and the Santa Fe Trail began just to the east. County territory has long been an avenue of movement into or across the region for Native Americans, Spanish explorers, French fur traders, government-sponsored explorers, and Anglo settlers. Hamilton (Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City) grew up on a river bottomland farm where he and his family collected the experiences and stories presented in this wonderful volume. Illustrating that there are no uninteresting places or landscapes, Hamilton weaves together in compelling fashion recollections of personal experience, family-collected oral histories, and historic events. Tacking back and forth across time and space, the narrative presents Saline County as a complex landscape created by residents responding to geographic circumstance. For example, Hamilton's father, observing a 1973 road construction project, found a mastodon kill site dated through carbon-14 testing at 35,000 years old, a story that ties to several others in the volume and illustrates the connectedness of place and people through time. No index, short bibliography, one vague map. Primarily of interest for academic and public libraries in Missouri, this book should be considered by libraries with collections supporting the study of rural, small-town America in the humanities and social sciences. K. B. Raitz University of Kentucky